New trends in HR !

Infosys may have over a lakh of employees on its rolls, but it has an equal number of ex-employees as well and the IT major is not merely looking at them to rehire but also tap them for knowledge, people, career and events.

About 96,650 people have been Infoscians in the last 30 years and are now working in other companies in the sector or have chosen to become entrepreneurs, the company said at its FYQ3 results recently.

Alumni network

Realising that a one lakh-strong ex-employee pool was not to be overlooked, Infosys launched the green channel last year where alumni were given the option of returning to the alma mater. About 2,500 applications were received through this channel and about 500 offers have been made.

The company also launched an alumni network on January 1 this year and has received about 13,000 applications so far for registration. “This is not exactly directed at recruitment, but could lead to referrals where ex-Infoscians could refer some of their friends for jobs at the company,” says Ms Nandita Gurjar, Senior Vice-President and Group Head, HR, Infosys Technologies.

The company has reduced its dependence on recruitment vendors by almost 15 per cent this year, as 61 per cent of the 5,500 laterals recruited were through referrals. For an industry that has seen and accepted employees changing jobs as frequently as twice a year, Infosys is now coming down heavily on frequent job-hopping. “We will not hire anyone who has switched jobs more than twice in five years,” says Mr Mohandas Pai, Head, HR, Infosys Technologies.

Campus hiring

The IT major is in the process of visiting 240-plus engineering campuses and 50 business schools this year and will hire close to 26,000 freshers. About one lakh of the current talent pool are engineers, a ratio which the company is planning to change. By 2014, about 60 per cent of the employees would be engineers, 20 per cent business management graduates and the rest from other streams, Mr Pai has already indicated.

Our View

Many IT companies are following the trend of welcoming their ex colleagues. The point here is why are companies let go their best talent ? Large corporations tend to ignore the career aspirations and are not in a position to assess the capabilities and retain those who have great potential to grow vertically and take up additional responsibilities.

Sowmya

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HR Policy - Reflections on Infosys

For over a decade, Infosys has been seen by many as the epitome of employee friendliness. That reputation has now taken a big knock. Several measures taken over the past few months - partly an attempt to correct what the company saw as excesses of previous years - has had many employees seething with anger.

That's reflected in hundreds of comments made in response to articles about Infosys on the internet in recent weeks, and in conversations TOI had with employees. Even the official internal blog is said to have been used to convey the discontent.

The biggest grouse relates to an HR initiative called iRace - Infosys Role and Career Enhancement - that was rolled out last year. The initiative was designed by consulting firm Mercer with the idea of mapping positions with experience and skill levels.

Previously, positions and promotions were often given arbitrarily, based on an employee's bargaining strength, which often was substantial considering jobs were aplenty. Many were given managerial responsibilities within three to four years, often leading to clients complaining about their lack of technology skills.

While iRace's objective appeared laudable, it suffered in its implementation, the worst of which was to make it applicable with retrospective effect. Many employees were demoted on the ground that they did not meet iRace's experience standards. So, senior project managers went down to project managers, project managers to technical leads, some even went down two levels.

"Designations are so important for everybody. And if the management found somebody good enough for a certain position earlier, how can they now say that he is not? What makes it worse is that, all those affected were at lower levels. Nobody in the senior delivery manager and higher positions were affected," said an employee.

Nandita Gurjar, global head for HR in Infosys, said about 5% of Infy's employees would have been impacted by designation corrections and demotions. Infy has a little more than 1 lakh employees, so that would mean about 5,000 being impacted.

She also added that salaries had been protected and that 95% of the company's employees had taken the iRace "career architecture" well. But some employees insist that's not the case

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