HR Management And HR Programs For Offshore IT Service Operations

Gaining Familiarity

Discuss about the HR Management and HR Programs.

Accenture is a global management consulting, servicing and outsourcing technology service provider, offering services to the world’s leading corporations. During 2007, the company was considering a pioneering push to enhance its management consulting work in India. This assignment will discuss the situation of the case study when the Accenture first moved to scale up its offshore IT service operations in India.

Gaining Familiarity

Accenture wanted to take hold of the IT talent of India. However, there was a gap of required skills of IT graduates and the exposure of IT services in India. There was gaining popularity for IT talent of India because those people could be capable of offering services at comparatively low wage costs. Despite the company, till then, was known in India for its high-performance management consulting services but not for providing services of IT. There were huge requirements of IT professionals for various projects in India and the company has started gaining popularity by adopting innovative practices in hiring. Under the international engagement programs, Accenture was responsible for both the relationships of client and the delivery services.

Recognizing symptoms

During initial offshore IT service operations in India, Accenture identified that there were huge competitions for India’s intellectual, technical and managerial talent. This had intensified with the rapid growth of off shoring services of the organization. Thus, the company was affected due to the scarcity of the specialized labor in India. However, the company was identified that India was the place of fully educated English specking technical workforce. Secondly, technological advancements made it practical to communicate quickly and inexpensively and lastly, a huge programmer is conversant in older languages of software. Thus the company recognized the challenge to attract the right candidates though the projected shortfall was likely to accelerated competition for IT talents of India.

Identification goals

Since 2001, Accenture began to explore their IT and the business process outsourcing services for the goal of servicing global clients from India. Since then, the company was being able to hire people within India for its offshore IT and outsourcing services. The organization further identified the requirement of the execution of the client’s work from the multiple locations for leveraging a combination of domestic and global resources to deliver services to clients around the world. To fulfill this requirement, the organization, has created the global delivery network. By this flexible and scalable network, Accenture would like to deliver a global technical skills and services in low costs economies to its clients in high-cost economies at the rising market’s wage rates.

Recognizing Symptoms

Situation analysis

After the implementation of Global Delivery Centers, Accenture was enthusiastically served global clients rather than domestic clients. By the application of this network, the company has started focusing solely on the system of delivery. The best part was that the client-facing professionals located in the US and Europe now would get the further scope to develop their businesses, manage projects and establish long lasting relationships with the customers. Since 2001, Accenture began their recruiting with the successful application of GDN. Initially, there were sixty IT professionals hired to its first IT service center of the company in Mumbai. There were five HR processes were followed including “sourcing”, staffing”, scheduling” and “performance and reward management” and “engagement of employee”. At the initial stage, the company was mainly focused on recruitment and building the brand in the Indian marketplace because the company was far behind in the recruitment services despite the achieved brand recognition in the management consulting market. In 2002, the company faced the challenge when there was a requirement of 500 new Indian IT professionals within the duration of five weeks. This was done by initiating by rapid industrialize recruiting process with very little lead-time. The company was successfully accomplished such challenge with the help of a strong global network access. During the process, the company has designed a new recruitment model to excel the single set of the source through which HR professionals gathered hiring requirements from several in-house businesses. The interested candidates could then get an opportunity to show their interest through the single source like on-line job portal site. However, there was a constraint identified later by the organization. The large number of the people could not be possible to hire by this new recruitment model of Accenture. Though the organization was still conceived the new model to address the specialized workforce with diverse capabilities to deliver the intended results, a new innovative idea was delivered through the execution of this recruitment process. The entire process segregated into four strategic components: sourcing of the candidates, manage such candidates, on-boarding services and execution of capabilities. By this process, an in-depth scaling of candidates had taken care of and hiring managers of the organization kept in constant touch through the screening process with each candidates. The unique part of this new model was that the company even gave successful senior hires gifts along with personalized card to welcome them. This effort indeed made favorable impacts over the thought-process of the chosen candidates. It hopes a long lasting relationship with employees as well.

Identification Goals

Based on the case study scenario, the new recruitment model of the company broke down the entire process into four components. Thus it could be anticipated that the company would like to see more detailed approach while recruiting a single candidate. For instance, the human resource professionals would like to screen or shortlist candidates based on the resumes submitted. However, the initial responsibility of the sourcing team was to understand the requirements of the company including the requirement of the specific skill sets, the total number of vacancies and the delivery date of those resources. The inherent responsibility of the sourcing team was to generate the appropriate candidate resumes to meet the demand. By the investigating this process, this can be evaluated that the process was apt for conducting the initial screening and validation of sourced resumes. Here the organization made separation from the candidate sourcing from the evaluation process. By this approach, the overall integrity level was improved.   However, there was a risk associated because screening team would shortlist candidates based on their understandability about the candidate’s capabilities. Secondly, the sourcing procedure scanned resumes based on three dimensions: a skill-set profile, the responsibility level of the hire and the diverse work locations. However, the entire process was complex and time consuming. By following this process, recruiters searched several sources like employee referrals, internet, job fair, staffing agencies, headhunters and print media as well. Thus, applying strategies for the selection of suitable numbers of candidates as per the demand of the position is indeed a challenging part. This process would be difficult to maintain during the time of urgent requirements of the company.

On the other hand, Accenture’s value proposition as an employer has been tested by the components of candidate management. In this section, sourcing professional applied the best possible channel based on their specialized knowledge. The best part was that the source management people would not be influenced by any extraneous factor. It means that no personal influence or referral would be accepted without the following evaluation process. Here the line manager could show their best capabilities by only handling the evaluation competencies.

Furthermore, the function of on-boarding ensured a smooth transition for the selected candidates from the time of offer till their joining. In this context, this can be said that an interim period of the selection of the candidates had been addressed more promptly. Lastly, the approach of using technologies to evaluate recruitment process performance was being assessed by using multiple matrices including fulfillment of demand, the quality of the person hired, associated costs per person hired, delivery cycle time and score received in the candidates survey and many others. However, there are many HR specialists evaluates that score received from the candidates survey process should not be incorporated because unsuccessful participated candidates generally will give the negative comment about the capabilities of the  concerned recruitment person.

Strengths:

• In-depth sourcing procedure would help to shortlist the right candidates
• Understandability of source managers would be tested during the process
• Process integrity has been improved while separating the candidate sourcing from evaluation
• The function of on-board processing ensure smooth transitions for the candidates

Weaknesses:

• The entire recruitment process is time consuming so fast demand of human capitals would difficult to accomplished
• Successful execution would be challenging because of several recruitment people were involved in this process and different parameters would have been tested.

Opportunities

• High chance of selection of the right candidates as per the company demand
• During the selection process, the recruiters would check relevant skills, experience and capabilities of candidates and match it with the demand of the organization.
• Accelerated organizational performance can be achieved by adopting right candidates at the right positions

Threats:

• There was a high chance of candidates might get frustrated due to following long screening process
• It is difficult to fulfill the organizational demand during urgency.
• Huge money needs to be invested for developing and modifying recruitment process during frequent intervals.

• Accenture should improve the level of coordination where scale of hiring and fast delivery system needs to be more constructive. The process coordination needs to be aligned with the projects demands of the organization. The on-board job functions should be ensured more smooth transition during the processing phase of the right candidates.
• The entire recruitment process should have been completed within 2 weeks so that the company can use recruited human capital on an urgent basis. In the IT sector, the particular skill-sets of candidates are required for a specific project and the recruitment team must fill-up that position at the right time.
• The candidate verification process can be outsourced to other organizations to make it fast and perfect.

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