Kenexa coming to Bangalore soon

Kenexa, a US-based player in human capital management solutions, will soon set up a Bangalore-office for sales and marketing activities in the country. The company plans on offerings its solutions to the BPO/ITeS industry and government agencies in the country to cut their attrition rate.

"India needs solutions like ours. As companies move along their growth path it becomes a humongous task to constantly monitor their hiring needs and the level of employee involvement. And that is where our expertise will help," says Tarun Singh, director of Kenexa.

The company covers three specific areas within human resources (HR) "" hiring, career tracking for individual employees and measurement of employee engagements or their sense of belonging in the organisation.

Their products include the Kenexa Recruiter, an application tracking system (ATS), the Career Tracker, which involves a corporate purchase with facility for individual logins and the Survey Centre which helps monitor employee engagement.

Kenexa measures several elements of employee satisfaction and gives the company recommendations. If the company acts on those recommendations, "we guarantee higher retention", says Singh. Kenexa also offers online testing under the brand name ProveIt.

"Close to 20 per cent of our revenues come from pure licence sales, most of it being contributed by Recruiter. Around 35 per cent comes from hiring solutions and another 35 per cent comes from our employee engagement activities, which includes product sales as well as the services connected with it. Last year, we closed our fiscal with a turnover of $60 million," says Singh.

Kenexa has been in Hyderabad for almost a year now, where they have a development centre and BPO operations. "Most of the work done in the BPO involves recruiting from India for our US clients. The development centre works on modifications and further addition to our product portfolio," says Singh.

He boasts that the BPO operations, with 50 people, has had 0 per cent attrition. While acceding that the 60-strong development centre does have some attrition, he quickly adds that he is looking to set it right soon.

Replying to a query on their late entry into the Indian market, Singh told Business Standard, "We were waiting for the Indian market to mature. Even three years ago it would have been difficult for anybody in India to accept our solutions. Now the ideas in the market space have broadened and everybody is beginning to feel the pain of hiring and retention. Moreover, we are fortunate not to have competition on this front in India yet," says Singh.

So far the company has invested $5 million in India and hopes to close the year with revenues of Rs 2 crore.

Kenexa, formed in 1987, employs 400 people globally and counts 100 of Fortune 500 companies and half of the Dow 30 among its clients. The company, which restricted its activities largely to the US and Europe since inception, started testing new ground in the APAC region including Taiwan, Thailand and bits of Middle East, only over the last two years.

"I want the APAC region to become the biggest contributor to our total revenues by 2009," says Singh.