RPO & the India Advantage

The India Partnership

 This is not news to AMS customers.

According to Kaistha, roughly 70% of AMS RPO clients have either established GCCs in India or they are in the process of performing due diligence or establishing these centers right now. India recently began offering what Kaistha calls “end-to-end integrated service centers” that handle business tasks ranging from operations to HR.

“Companies in the U.S. and Europe are establishing innovation centers, including sandbox and digital innovation facilities, for this growing market,” she says. She adds that many, well known, financial giants credit India’s centers of excellence (COEs) as a critical part of their tech transformation.

AMS also helped a global pharma giant that operated its tech development center in India. This project requires incorporating IT recruiters and sourcers into the AMS team, while advising on skills availability and salary market insights. AMS also targeted specific talent pools for aspirational candidates to meet salary bandings. Together with AMS guidance, the client hired more than 260 IT and data analytics employees with a 45-day time to offer.

A major European bank that operates a multi-location GCC in India needed sourcing and admin for 6,000 hires across India, including 2,700 technology roles. In 10 weeks, AMS deployed a team of 100 TA experts in less than three months, managing 1,500 requisitions within weeks, optimizing processes and cleansing data to remove backlogs, while reducing agency reliance and improving compliance. This RPO initiative delivered 225 technology hires per month, 44 days time-to-offer, 50 hires per month in all roles, and an 82% offer-to-start ratio.

Skills, Education and Infrastructure: The Right Stuff

When finding talent in India, it comes down to attracting, interviewing and nurturing the right candidate with the right skills. Thanks to India’s young population and their knowledge of English, Mandarin, French and German among other languages, Indian firms have near bottomless offering of highly skilled labor. But there are challenges when it comes to outsourcing to India -- as well as other nations.

“The main issues to consider are leadership and alignment with other international teams, as well as the broad time zone differences to manage. Many of the high-performing Indian teams I meet work nights or other hours to align well with their US or European teammates,” adds Bersin. “It’s also important for teams around the world to get to know each other and meet face to face regularly.”

TA leaders looking to hire in India must determine and pinpoint the skills the open positions require currently and in the future. And any organizations looking to hire must budget for a realistic time frame. This is not a rush job, says Kaistha. “Sometimes clients expect that they can simply lift and shift people from one project or division to another,” she says.

Plus, the time-to-productivity must be monitored and addressed. “We find that if clients don't have the right outsourcing and RPO partner, uncertainty can begin to take root,” says Kaistha. She adds that HR and TA leaders are usually informed by the business divisions about the open roles and the selected skills and then told to “go find them.”

“At AMS we know how talent acquisition processes work,” says Kaistha. “TA searches need to be calibrated so we find sometimes that [filling these roles] is a big challenge.”

And outsourcing is not just for Fortune 500 companies. AMS recently partnered with a modestly-sized Japanese pharmaceutical client that operated in a niche segment. Although it is not a household company name, they were looking to hire around 400 new workers per annum in India. The clock was ticking. Like similarly-sized clients, the pharmaceutical company considered relying on agencies that typically charge less than RPO firms. AMS was able to hire new staff without relying on agencies in what Kaistha called a “commoditized market.”

“Sometimes clients say ‘we're just going to use agencies because it's so cheap,’ and they can very easily get into that trap if they cannot find the right TA partner,” she says.