“New talent, required is “As of yesterday” and relieving a resource is “3 Months from date of information”, that’s the way to move forward.” The project manager announced to the talent acquisition team. The new project manager came from an environment, where deployable talent pool was available, JIT (Just In Time) was always practiced from the COE (Center of Excellence). Another project manager came up with a request for promotion for a resource out of turn. A software engineer said in his exit interview mentioned “opportunity of onsite work” and “Opportunity for Growth” as reasons for his resignation.
Captive units have their daily diet of such instances and many more such Talent acquisition and other Human Resource challenges. Captive units have definitely confronted and dealt with different kind of challenges than that of their service cousins. The captive units have not looked as fancied compared to the overall talent related brand spending, policy making freedom, resource allocations and earning potential to that of the service companies. The captive units definitely have stood the test of time for the cycle of talent identification, acquisition, engagement, management and retention. The some of the captive units have evolved innovative methods to reach new channels for talent identification, process changes and adoption for attraction and acquisition, innovative and strategic in their approach to engagement and management. These strategies and practices now require consistent and coherent strides as to be built as a system for the unit as it matures.
Availability of talent in India was definitely one of the main reasons for the visible growth shown in the IT/ITES industry. The way in which talent acquisition has evolved over the last 15-20 years in India has put further enormous challenges to deliver, the models have changed, and captive units have had to deal with some of these obstacles and yet compete with the service companies for talent.
Connecting Policy and Operations: Captive units have had to deal with a lot of internal selling; brain storming that has to do with policy changes and operational concerns for the local captive unit. Most policy making and changes happen at the parent HQ, many a local management have taken these changes with a pinch of salt at the time of the initial build up and have had the patience to seek appropriate changes when growth happened. Many captive units have hence preferred to engage the top management who has worked in the parent company for a while before taking over such responsibility.
Increasing Value of the center: The captive center may not have the direct revenue targets like the services models, but it is also an outcome of the broad economic parameters, a decision to reduce overall costs and still retain control. Investments have to be committed upfront, the administrators and few top executives who would be the first few local hires, start to set up the center. The increased value for the center is progressively by migration of more work from the parent to the captive center.
Talent attraction: The local talent acquisition teams have to look at limited channels through which they can attract talent. The campus or the University relationship opportunities may not be available, as the talent they seek could be experienced.
Bench: Captive units cannot provide to have bench, as the overall headcount may have been budgeted and fixed, thereby forcing an elaborate mechanism of evaluation, which may cause delay in project uptake. Bench Strength: unlike service companies, captive units keep the resource requirements optimized and will recruit based on vacancy or a specific project requirement. In services there is always a pool of deployable resources available, as they would call JIT (Just in Time) inventory of trained resources through the COE (Center of Excellence).
Growth possibilities: All engaged talent looks for growth opportunities, in a market with service companies competing for talent, it will be tough for the captive units to meet the growth expectations of every engaged resource. Service companies could provide possibilities of lateral movements to another unit/project/domain, unlike the captive units.
Onsite opportunities: Many a captive units cannot provide as many onsite opportunities to their employees as much as their service counter parts, as their nature of business is totally different. At best, locations of onsite are fixed mostly Head Quarters.
Size does matter: Resources are attracted by brand image, larger the company, the attraction of talent, improving productivity becomes that much easier. Hence the scale of overall operations becomes very important to all aspects of talent.
Overall, Captive units face tough challenges towards talent attraction, acquisition, engagement, management and retention. These challenges have their own flavor when compared to the issues of other units like service companies. The changed way to look at how a captive unit manages the challenge to build a system to manage the whole cycle of talent to benefit the corporate, the country and society.
