Mahindra Satyam, a leading global consulting and IT services provider, today announced that it is stepping up efforts to attract talent across Asia Pacific and India, two of its fastest growing markets. The outreach initiatives, launched as an essential part of its regional business strategy, are targeted towards potential employees both within and outside the industry.
One of the initiatives, ‘Starting Over’, a lateral recruiting initiative that taps into a highly talented pool of mid-career women seeking to restart their careers at Mahindra Satyam after having taken a break for personal reasons. The selection procedure for this initiative is as per the corporate norms and candidates will be evaluated based on their potential and not just their previous experience. Various training programmes are also provided for them to re-orient them to corporate processes.
“Women make a significant part of the tech workforce today and ‘Starting Over’ is novel way of honing that talent base effectively. ‘Starting Over’ nurtures talent right from the initial application stage and ensures opportunities to all candidates by offering three employment avenues: internship, part or full time. In this way we ensure that all candidates are optimally employed,” said Suresh Samudrala, Head HR, Asia Pacific, Mahindra Satyam.
“My experience from the beginning with the ‘Starting Over’ team has been good. They have been helpful in boosting our confidence by holding seminars and conducting workshops. I am happy to be part of this organisation. Mahindra Satyam is the first company that I have come across to have started something like Starting Over for women like us - who want to restart their careers,” said Madhavi Lakkaraju, who has been re-employed by the company as a part of the starting over initiative.
Another talent development goal that the Indian IT major has focussed on and achieved is more than 55% localisation of its employee base in every country outside India that the company operates in.
Towards this objective, in a first for the company’s Singapore-based regional headquarters, Mahindra Satyam has tied up with the island country’s premier university, National University of Singapore (NUS), and other prominent universities to recruit soon-to-be engineering graduates. All recruits, almost all of whom are Singaporean citizens and PRs, will be trained for three months at the company’s Hyderabad (India) and Cyberjaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ) global delivery campuses, post which, they are expected to be deployed as full-time project staff on “live” implementations across Asia Pacific.
“The response from NUS has been overwhelming and we are very impressed with the caliber of applicants. We have successfully implemented this in many other countries including neighboring Malaysia and it has worked very well”, added Samudrala, “Talent retention is almost as challenging as talent acquisition in our industry and if we don’t think out-of the box, our growth will be seriously impeded."
In order to grow existing talent, Mahindra Satyam regularly conducts extensive people development programmes, both at leadership and delivery staff levels. Among these, a pioneering initiative has been the ‘Shadow Board’, which is a quasi board of mid-manager level employees, all of whom under 35 years of age. They advise the senior leadership on new industry trends, new technologies and evolving corporate practices.