HUMAN RESOURCES AT CTS

Bhaskar Das, Head of Human Resources, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Europe and India, is an alumnus of XLRI, with over 10 years of experience in Human Resources. Bhaskar is a certified Lead Assessor for ISO 9000.

We have this programme for the last four years, much before it became a buzzword in the IT industry.  Over the last two years we have been constantly fine tuning this programme and we got excellent results because of this.  It provided 40% of the total number of people who joined us.  The total number of people who joined us last year was 1,500. The employee referral programme is therefore the single largest source of employees for CTS.  We obviously use head-hunters, consultants, advertisements and we have unsolicited walk-ins also.  And when I said fine tune, it is not about money alone.  The money has been more or less constant over the last 36 months.  But we have seen the results of this programme increasing in terms of percentage over the last three years.  So with money being constant, and results increasing, it means that something else is happening.  And one of the biggest things that is happening is communication.  Communication within the organisation across all levels. And remember, all this is without diluting any standardized process.  We are a CMM Level 5 organisation and my recruitment process is as good as any customer interaction or software development process.  We are also ISO 9000 certified.  This means basically that a referral doesn’t entitle a person for a clean or an easy walk-in to the organisation.  It means following exactly the same process that one would have to follow if he were to come from any other source.  So we maintain the process integrity and I maintain my cost base, which I have not increased over the past 36 months.  But I get increasingly larger and larger returns and that is why we are very proud of our employee referral system.

See, it is a very complex decision.  But there are a couple of important things, like the cost of the search.  So you are talking of a person with three or four years experience. What is my cost of search for this person?  There are about 60,000 to 80,000 fresh engineers coming out every year into the market and it is quite a big task to search and find out whom you want and who wants you.  So the cost of search is the first parameter that we are looking at.  Secondly, we are looking to leverage our internal training capability.  Having already invested in and built up an in-house training centre to train young science and engineering graduates into mature software professionals, gives me another reason to move and look at the model from another angle.  Lastly, our experience is that software (and by 'software' here I mean coding, programming, system analysis and design) is not a major 'rocket science' that has to be gained obviously at someone else’s cost. 

We have done a lot of research into what makes good software professionals from the technical side.  There is a set of data coming out which says that if these things are present, sooner or later, with the right kind of input, the context and the kind of work he does, he will become a software professional.  So why should I then take a long and devious route to figuring out where that one unique individual is (which involves the cost of search), when I am not using my current capability to train in- house.  And I have seen it work because clarity of thinking, data rationality ...if they are there, within six to twelve months I have a very good software professional in my organisation.  If you spend a couple of weeks in our organisation you will find out why this model works best for us.  Depending upon how the context changes, we change our system.  It need not be the only model and there could be other models which could do equally well for other organisations.  So someone who wants only people with three to four years of experience, I hope has a business reason behind that.  It is not to say that this is a better model over that or this is better over that.  In our business scenario this works and therefore it is good for us.

We have a very simple process, of a written test, which is on aptitude and one or two rounds of interview.  That’s all that there is.  I keep on telling people, "Life is very simple and if we can be focused everything gets done very easily".  At the fresher level, the whole thing is not about selection.  It is a rejection process.  There is a lot of difference between selecting someone and rejecting a lot of other people, so that by contrast you select a few people.

For example, there may be a 'near-Einstein' waiting to be picked up in an odd college in the suburbs of Chennai and there could be an 'absolutely okay, but nowhere near Einstein' waiting in the large universities and colleges in large numbers.  If I make a visit to one of these institutes, I will pick up maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty in one day.  But I am missing out on the 'Einstein'.  But that’s fine, it is a rejection process. 

So when we arrive at such kind of parameters, we understand what kind of aptitude test we need to do or what kind of interview we need to conduct.  At the college level, there are two predominant levels, which are also linked to each other.  One is the GMAT-SAT format, which is the US test for managerial level, which a lot of students prepare and take, while the other is the Indian Institute of Management’s – CAT test, (Common Admission Test).  Now in this target group that I am talking about, the people who are passing out of MBA’s and B. Tech’s after 16 years of education and whom we want to join CTS,  about 90% to 95% of them anyway sit for these two exams.  Therefore they prepare for these examinations.  Now, aptitude is a measure of your inherent ability, rather than your practised ability.  If you practice too much, you can obviously enhance it to some extent.  Now I want to go away from that and also I wanted to move away from the CAT or GMAT pattern, because some people who have gone through it may have an undue advantage.

We looked at the market and found out that the only other long-standing statistically validated test is the entrance test for XLRI, which has been there for the last 25 or 30 years in the same pattern.  We contacted the person who had set this unique pattern and we collaborated jointly with that person to come out with a series of tests every year, which change every year. And every year when it changes, we have eight to ten parallel forms going in the market. So it is not like the same test paper that is going around.  But, they are all statistically validated and they all measure the same.  So we looked at that and at the meaning of IQ from a software company’s viewpoint. What does it mean in terms of intelligence and what kind of intelligence does it take to be a good software programmer? We converted all these findings into a forty five minute to one hour test with about forty questions, which is easy to answer, easy to correct, easy to carry and easy to distribute, because we are talking about large volumes here.  Last summer, we tested around 22,000 students all over India.  This year the number would be roughly around for 50,000 in summer this year.

What goes into it, very simply in layman’s term is whether you can think clearly, can you manipulate equations and more than equations, any kind of function in the virtual space of your head?  To put it very simply if I say ‘A cat is a dog, a dog is a donkey and a donkey is a fish, what will a whale be?’  It is not as simple as this, but the idea is, what is the function when something becomes something else?  These are exactly the kind of skills you require while doing software programming.  There is no point in asking the typical generic kind of things which are already there in the market. 

The interview process has two parts - one is, how well you have learnt what you have learnt?  Be it Physics or Chemistry or Engineering, because we are talking of different platforms over here.  Then there is the HR part, which will look at what the person has done.  Because we are looking at freshers who have no job experience, as they are about twelve months away from their graduation, we see whether they have demonstrated any leadership ability.  It is all about demonstrative ability and what they have done.  Like ‘I was the editor of the college magazine, or the joint secretary of my college union’.  

There are parameters worked out from the technical point of view, from the educational perspective and from the person point of view.  We maintain very strict levels of processes, which means that every individual who hits the campuses is inculcated with what exactly to look for.  We have 60 odd people in India, who are certified to be Graduate Campus Recruiters; without which they will not be allowed to recruit.  And before you get a certification, it is important that you sit for two or three interview sessions and watch what’s happening.  The process is very robust, in the sense that there are question banks available in Electrical, Mechanical or Production…all kinds of subjects.  So even the questions that they ask are not according to the whims and fancies of an individual on a certain 'Monday morning'.  The questions have to be standardized because we are looking at 60 campuses.  The possibility of some of these questions getting repeated is also not very much, because we have huge repositories of question banks.

What we are looking for in a candidate is whether he has understood the fundamentals and how he can apply the fundamentals.  No matter how much you have studied, if you have not understood the principle, you will not understand the question.  The way we look at the interviewing process and at the question is so different that we can understand exactly whether a certain individual has understood the principles and whether he can apply it. 

The principles, the fundamentals and its application are what we look for in a candidate.  Clarity of thinking, transparency in dealings (honesty) and the ability to learn and learn continuously. It is a combination of ability, desire and attitude to learning. 

There's what we call ‘learning to learn'. I mean, in this fast-paced industry, change itself is changing.  Another aspect that we look for is, when you are learning a new method are you able to focus and learn?  It not only learning, but also stepping out of the process to find out how you learn, whether you learn well by doing or by seeing others do or by reading how to do.  These are all different ways of learning and it is important to know by which method we learn.  Then we know by which way we learn best.  From my experience across industries and cultures, by the age of eighteen this trait is either well established and one’s preferences are concretised.

Like all good things in life, this did not come from one source; be it the Communications department or from my CEO’s brainwave at midnight.  It comes from experiencing fun in actually what we are doing. 

You know this concept of soaking the rice.  To make your dosa or idly, you soak the rice before grinding it and then the batter is fermented after which only you get your dosa or idly.  Now what was happening over the last 36 or 48 months was that we were getting soaked up in the fun atmosphere and then we realized through our ability of ‘learning to learn’ that what was happening over here was that we were having fun.  Then we went into how it happened.  But it was not like - suddenly the posters came out ‘Celebrate Work’ and we were having fun.  That was just when we decided to say to the world that for us fun and work are not two separate things of the same continuum, but that they are part and parcel of each other.  That is how it happened.

It has added the value by helping us make the transition.  If this were not there, there would be no transition.  If I were a Y2K company still in 2001, we would have all gone home, because this flow of information is core to the business.  This flow of information across all levels has added value to the organisation and created openness in sharing. 

We say that every person should be trained for ten days in a year.  Our total revenue spent on training should not be less than 4% of the total turnover.  That is a huge amount of time and money.  If there are transitions and if the context in which you work, (the market, the environment) keep changing, what do you have to do?  You have to re-skill.  What does it mean to re- skill an organisation?  You have to re-skill individuals who are the final unit of analysis.  Then you re-skill the team, the project and the organisation. This is not something that is done to make the annual report look good or because it is good.  We do it because it is core to the business.  If we don’t train, we would be dead.  It is as simple as that.  I don’t think we do anyone a favour by training our people.

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