ARAB OPEN UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF BUSINESS STUDIES

B716 B )MBA(

MANAGEMENT: PERSPECTIVE AND PRACTICE

FALL 2020/2021 2nd SEMESTER

STUDENT NAME: DANA DAHADHA

ID : 2190393

TMA 01

TUTOR NAME: DR. Ahmad Masha'l

Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B

TALENT ACQUISITION GROUP AT HCL TECHNOLOGIES: IMPROVING

THE QUALITY OF HIRE THROUGH FOCUSED METRICS

HCL Technologies Ltd., India's fastest growing IT services company, had radically
improved its performance since its erstwhile CEO, Vineet Nayar, propagated and
practiced the “Employee First, Customers Second” radical strategy, which was
published as a book and subsequently as a business case. this philosophy helps to
grow the organization business by focusing its value creation at the intersection of its
employees and customers with taking into account the differnt ages of clients. A
culture of trust, transparency, building entrepreneurial spirit within employees was
built to keep the company’s development.( Key concepts from employees first,
customers second)
Although sales, customer and employee satisfaction had significantly increased
(revenues increased), HCL delayed among its competitors on overall profitability
With manpower costs accounting for a significant part of the operating cost of 70 %,
HCL responded to the changing competitive environment and redesigned its talent
management strategy with a reevaluation of the entire talent aquisition function. they
decided to standardization of recruitment process, for a globally configurable tool
built to get a unified decision making using iTap and PEP-C parameters. The Talent
Acquisition Group (TAG) of HCL is looking to become a true business partner to help
increasing the overall profitability. so as a part of the new strategy drawn by HCL
Tech the TAG was realigned (Dutta,2014)

Q1:
Stakeholders are group and individuals that are affect or affected by the organization
strategy some of them are influential and others are not. they can be internal or
external to the organization so any organization should acheive their goals through an
effective and effecient strategy. HCL technology follow the radical strategy of
Narayanan of employee first customer second which empower the oraganization's
employees and enable HCL to attract the best. The impact of this strategy on the
financial performance of the organization was significant.

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B
The Talent Acquisition Group was found to bealigned to the three main lines of
business, that is, Software (CSW), Infrastructure (Infra) and BPO(BServ) with a total
of 250 recruiters working end-to-end on the recruitment process. Each buisness line
was structured with teams focusing on campus recruitment, lateral hiring, and hiring
for different geographical regions, although its focus to acheive the recruitment
demand, its silo approach created problems for HCL Technologies at a macro level. as
every department was isolated from each other this made same candidates to be
interviewed by differrent departments which leads to wasting resources.
because of this a new organization structure had to be introduced, centralization and
coordination among various business centers and metrics of performance had to be
developed, tracked and improved through centralized systems, In order to overcome
the siloed approach of functioning of the recruiters, the end-to-end recruitment
process was shared by 10 specialist teams, which focused on sourcing , screening,
scheduling, salary negotiation and offer release, on boarding, contract hiring, campus
recruitment, background verification, POFU teams, etc. The centralization helped
improve the profitability, with utilization levels improving from 71% in 2012 to the
maximum possible levels and industry improve to 84%. Despite all of that there were
still drastic changes needed to increase profitability and improve efficiency of
resources.
The recruitment process maturity level improved substantially on the 15 parameters,
which defined the process capability level for the recruitment process Outsourcing
and process level innovation were enabled with correctly defined expectations. A
significant projected cost saving was expected to be accrued through efficiency
building, reducing turn-around-time, and reducing the bench time. . (Dutta,2014)

In response to the volume of recruitment increasing in overseas geographies, The

decision was therefore taken to engage a global solution provider which was aligned
to the recruitment process compliances overseas, but start with India implementation.
HCL signed up with Kenexa Solutions for a globally configurable tool which was
built on process standardization while providing control and flexibility to TAG to
achieve the recruiting goals; This new Human Resource Information System was
named iTAP and it provided multiple functionalities which were missing in the
erstwhile systems. (Dutta,2014)
TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B
iTAP helped enhance the company’s sourcing capability by providing an online
channel where all aspirants could log on and post their candidature. Each of the
Recruitment Shared Service team members had access rights relevant to their defined
specialization, geography, and Line of Business Alignment.
This would facilitate individual level performance metrics to be evaluated on a real-
time basis. iTAP also increased the quality of hire by providing better screening
ability. The process for conducting assessments was also optimized through the tool.
The tool provided a business analytics module , The analytics module helped TAG
track and report performance which were aligned to the new metrics of performance
instituted by Narayanan. Narayanan felt that it was important for TAG not only to
redefine the metrics of evaluation of TAG as a group, but also to measure the
performance of each of the individual recruiters . (Dutta,2014)
An innovation initiated through the ideapreneurship philosophy looked at
increasing the engagement levels with the job-offered candidates through the process
of gamification, during the long period following the release of the offer until the
candidate on-boarded. . (Dutta,2014)
The challenges of the game increased their self-esteem, cognitive inquisitiveness, and
individual motivation. More importantly, the analytics from the week-on-week
engagement of the candidates who were offered a job helped TAG to develop useful
insights on the probability of the candidate joining the company.
TAG was now able to predict early in the post-offer wait period, this platform
provided an opportunity to strengthen the employer brand, increase awareness and
familiarize prospective employees with the culture of ideapreneurship, and
immediatly reducing the overall renege level from 30% to 25%. It also enabled TAG
to initiate pre-emptive action to minimize the default on economic fulfilment.

To help TAG identify the areas they needed to focus to improve their performance
among the peer group and helped Narayanan set clear expectations and provide
tangible measures for the developmental progress the introduction of gamification
was not restricted to external potential employees only. TAG designed the
gamification approach to identify and measure the developmental needs of all its
members, including those who were part of the shared services, which lead to
improve the overall performance. Branded internally as the “Hunter Premier League”,
TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B
the objective of the ‘‘Gamification Leaderboard Model’’ was to move the overall
performance within all lines of business from “Good-to-Great”, increase recruiter
efficiency and refine their approach and refocus it on strategic recruiting skills to
maximize the business impact. (Dutta,2014)
Strategic metrics were weighted relative to operational metrics in order to help
recruiters prioritize strategic development along with process-based achievement.
Since, this was built as part of the iTAP, the resultant score board on the live
performance of recruiters provided each team member their daily score, the results of
PEP-C and iTAP rollout were becoming visible through the improvement in
performance of TAG. The centralization helped improve the profitability. All the
major IT firms in India use the same job portals, leverage social media sites, and
adopt the mass weekend interview event scenarios to attract and recruit talent. In this
scenario, HCL TAG needed to be innovative to create a powerful employer brand as
well as use innovative approaches to identify and engage with passive talent pools.
As the true quality of hire shows how much an employee benefits the organization,
This way let the organization know who is benefiting the company and who is
wasting money. The metrics of iTAP helped increase quality of hire and their
performance measurement because they were aligned to the strategic outcomes
desired by the company in which the Hiring lead time improved by 4%, Joining per
recruiter increased by 19%.. (Dutta,2014)
Even for one of the top job portals in the United States, HCL job postings recorded
an impressive 360,255 job impressions and nearly 10,000 job applications.
On employer brand metrics quantified by LinkedIn, HCL had a talent brand reach of
3,026,160 and talent brand engagement with 299,560 individuals; and its talent brand
index increased from 2% to 10% in 2013. The Facebook community of HCL
Technologies comprised over 520,000 members which is a very high numbers from
the scociety. . (Dutta,2014)
To reduce some of the weekend/fixed interview time burden for the technical panels;
TAG introduced the asynchronous video interviewing through Hirevue applications,
which integrated with iTAP. This allowed the technical panel to present a fixed set of
questions which appropriately assessed the desired skill, competences and behaviors
of the candidates. The candidates had the flexibility of recording their responses to
these questions, which the panels could view at their convenience. Additionally, the
TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B
availability of these responses allowed for subsequent rounds of interviewers to assess
what had already been covered. The asynchronous interview software also recorded
information about candidate behavior including time taken to respond to questions,
eye ball movement. (Dutta,2014)
Naraynan wanted to change the approach of the existing recruitment consultants from
resume sourcing partners to being active partners in engaging talent from social “hang
outs. so the objectives of HCL technology was acheived from Improving the quality
of hire using the Innovative methods of Talent Acquisition and the quick Decision
Making and Increase of overall profitability and Focusing on just in time hiring.

Q2:
Talent management can be defined as an integrated organizational process in HR
which is required for motivating, developing, attracting, retaining and engaging
employees.Talent management is the conscious and deliberate attempt to attract,
engage, develop and retain people with the aptitude and ability to meet current and
future organizational needs. . (Dutta,2014)
Attracting and retaining talent is not just the responsibility of the HR manager but also
each and every employee of the company. and this is what veneet did with the TAG
strategy due to his phylosophy of EFCS in transfoming the company through its
Transformation phases which were Mirror Mirror, Confronting the Truth, Using
Transparency to Build Trust, Inverting the Management Pyramid and Recasting the
Office of the CEO. HCL Tech experimented with various practices throughout the
“Employees First” journey because veneet believe in experimental practices to
acheive the goals with applying this effective strategy.
HCL technology follow the radical strategy of Narayanan of EFCS which empower
the oraganization's employees and enable HCL to attract the best.The impact of this
strategy on the financial performance of the organization was significant.(DUTTA ,
2014)
The TAG silo approach created problems for HCL Technologies at a macro level, It
was noticed that the decentralized function was not resulting in the quality recruitment
process. The recruitment head had highlighted the issues that were happening due to
lack of the standardization of the processes, systems and practices due to this a new
organization structure had to be introduced, metrics of performance had to be
TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B
developed, tracked and improved through centralized systems, In order to overcome
this siloed approach of functioning of the recruiters, the end-to-end recruitment
process was shared by 10 specialist teams, which focused on sourcing , screening,
scheduling, salary negotiation and offer release, on boarding, contract hiring, campus
recruitment, background verification, POFU teams, etc.
This single and centralized function was responsible for the talent acquisition in
regard to workforce optimization and increasing the profitability for the company.

The change management process PEP-C aimed to create the functional efficiency at
structural levels in order to define the roles and responsibilities of the various
individuals. The major objective of this change management was creating the best
available database for the prospective candidates, central payment office and
providing training to the pool of the interviewers imparting them skills to select the
best candidate (Dutta, etal.,2015). This would help in creating the standardization in
the process of recruitment and selection.In terms of generating applicants, it is critical
that an employer’s recruitment actions attract the attention of potential job applicants .
Research suggests that the following attributes are likely to generate attention: (a)
messages that are vivid in nature (e.g., include pictures) and include concrete
language (b) messages that convey unexpected information (c) messages that provide
personally relevant information and (d) messages that are conveyed in face-to-face
conversations(Breaugh and Starke, 2009) all of these were applied in TAG strategy in
jop application.
The process of recruitment had improved in terms of its maturity levels in maintaining
a centralized database for the quality candidates. There were 20 parameters that were
defining the talent acquisition function at HCL and these were: cost per joining,
channel mix, economic and demand fulfillment, etc (Dutta, etal.,2014). in which the
standardized approach resulted in saving average revenue.
It became necessary to reduce the renege and mitigating the risks so the gamification
process that applied actually helped in increasing the engagement process at HCL.
This approach has also maximized the hiring of the quality driven manpower that can
be utilized for the best quality services and processes. It has implemented the
standardized approach towards recruitment process.

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B
Due to timely and periodic follow up over the gamification process of HCL with the
candidates the probability of the joining of the candidate and probability of the renege
was almost made as 90% accurate (Dutta, etal.,2015). These processes actually
reduced the overall renege levels from 30% to 25% (Dutta, etal.,2015). This process
was for both external candidates and the internal employees. It was intended at
improving and bringing business effectiveness from good to great (Dutta, etal.,2015).
To get a better understanding of this, TAG used analytics from the POFU
gamification, It was important to design this game in such a way that it chose high
engagement levels from the potential hires. The organization plans would support
hiring in the future and ensure that people with the right talent, skills and
competencies are hired or recruited within the company. This would lead to hire each
position as per the required set of skills which are proven to result in the personnel
development with application of P-O (Person-Organization) which recruite based on
matching person skills and objectives with that of the organizational goals and
objectives. This enables the growth and success in the right direction and approach
(Brody,2010) due to right fitment of the candidates.
iTAP increased the quality of hire by providing better screening ability. The process
for conducting assessments was also optimized through the tool.
iTAP and PEP_C results were quite visible through the process improvements for
TAG. The process of centralization also helped in making sure that quality employee
base is obtained and achieved. There were various other innovative and new
approaches that were being followed at TAG. These were creation of the job
applications and job impressions that will help in creating a competent environment
for recruitment and selection at HCL. It was observed that gamification, i-TAP and
various other tools utilized helped in improving the productivity of the recruitment
and selection processes at HCL Technologies. These tools would really make hiring
more efficient. As an additional initiative to promote and reinforce the
“Ideapreneurship” philosophy at the campus recruitment level, TAG initiated the
“Make A Difference, Lead The Difference” or the MAD LTD engagement with
campus students TAG culture and strategy different from other companies. in the
figure below the process of recruitment that need to be followed by organizations.

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B

Figure 1(J.A. Breaugh and. strake,2009) is showing the organizational recruitment

process in which TAG company shows a success recruitment process due to the
application of most of these steps.(James A. Breaugh and Mary Starke, 2009)

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B

References

Dutta, D., Mishra, S. K. and Manimala, M. J. (2015). "Talent Acquisition Group at

HCL Technologies: Improving the Quality of Hire Through Focused Metrics"
[Management Case]. Harvard Business Publication.

Bhatia, K., & Mittal, S. (2013)." A Study on New Hire Analysis at HCL. Management
Prudence", 4(1), 71.

James A. Breaugh and Mary Starke.(2009). "Research on Employee Recruitment: So

Many Studies, So Many Remaining questions" , DOI: 10.1177/014920630002600303
2000; 26; 405 Journal of Management.

https://www.slideshare.net/AbhishekAgarwal353/talent-acquisition-group-at-hcl-
technologies

https://www.essay48.com/case/36370-TALENT-ACQUISITION-GROUP-AT-HCL-
TECHNOLOGIES-IMPROVING-THE-QUALITY-OF-HIRE-THROUGH-
FOCUSED-METRICS-Five-Cs-Of-Marketing

http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/human-resource-management-2/what-is-talent-
management/99749

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x0AHyG-ke0.

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021
Name: Dana zyad dahadha
ID: 2190393
Course code: B716B

TMA01
Tutor Name: Dr.Ahmad Mesha'l
Section: business administration
Semester: 2nd semester- 2020/2021