Setting Up Shop

Meeting Missions: Local Knowledge, Tech Experience in Chennai

As a global retailer, our client is used to expanding into new markets. However, when needing to find top technology talent to establish its second global technology centre (GCC) in India – this time in Chennai – our client sought a proven, experienced talent acquisition partner with deep local market knowledge to hire the brightest minds across varied technology functions.

Due to its economic stability, favourable business environment, advanced digital capabilities and technically skilled workforce, several multinational companies opt to build GCCs in India. Despite the relatively large talent pool, often GCCs find it challenging to onboard talent with highly specialised skills, such as emerging technologies and software programming.

Our client chose Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) to be its recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner, recognising our demonstrated success in the region for their GCC expansion to Chennai. Initially, our primary goals were to ramp up hiring of top-notch tech talent, reduce time to fill and tap into technology for greater efficiency. In addition, AGS offered market analytics and talent insights to client leaders to help advance their workforce diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals.

Taking Action: Scaling at Speed

When the engagement’s March 2020 go-live coincided with the height of the global pandemic and related restrictions, AGS was able to help the client swiftly move all interview and operational activities to a virtual setup – recruiting more than 600 full-time resources in our first six months.

One key to our success was our ability to establish the client’s employer brand in region. There is significant competition for technology talent in India, and although GCCs provide IT services and functions, they compete for talent with big multinational technology or internet companies that have an established employer brand in this space. As an experienced RPO partner, AGS was able to best market the roles and opportunities to establish our client’s brand in region, and in two years, our total number of new hires had expanded to approximately 2,000 resources across a wide range of technology skills and job titles, including:

• Digital analytics and engineering
• Middleware support
• Cloud infrastructure
• Application support

In addition to rapid hiring for a variety of technology positions, AGS helped the client boost its gender diversity hiring with a diversity ratio of 26% throughout the course of the engagement.

Delivering Impact: Exceeding Speed and Quality Expectations

By establishing a robust hiring process – which included the coordination of hiring panels across India and the US – AGS ensured seamless decision-making when it came to hiring for the client’s global technology centre in Chennai. We consistently met and exceeded key metrics on both speed and quality through structured intervention to achieve an 85% hiring ratio and a decrease in time to onboard from the 60- to 90-day average for RPO programmes in India to just 40 days – more than 33% faster than the industry average. Overall, AGS helped the client expand its technology and transformation capabilities – quickly – by setting up a new GCC in Chennai through advising, sourcing and onboarding a wide range of skills sets and improving gender diverse hiring ratios. The new Chennai GCC is now fully staffed to deliver new technological solutions, which better serves our client’s customers and positively impacts their bottom line.