Latest tech code’s about luring back ex-employees

If you are a former employee of some top IT firm in India, expect your old boss to come calling.

Not so long ago, driven by the downturn, organisations had hit the panic button, cutting down on people, their travel costs and infrastructure costs, including the humble tissue paper in restrooms.

A year on, these same firms are faced with the worst talent crunch, mostly of experienced people, to manage their projects, liaise with clients, etc as demand rises. So much so, Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan recently said, it’s a ‘war for talent’ out there.
So what do these firms do?

Poaching employees from rival companies has been a long-practised solution. But it has its own problems.
A more novel approach, variously termed as ‘Green Channel’, ‘Homecoming’, etc, has the human resource heads of IT firms seeking to mend fences with former employees and entice them into rejoining.

“We launched this fast-track employee hiring programme, Green Channel, about three months ago. The aim is to hire former employees. That helps us because they will take less time to acclimatise in Infosys,” Mohandas Pai, executive board member and director - global human resource for Infosys Technologies, said.

The Infosys management drew flak from a section of its employees on iRACE, an employee career path programme it launched in June 2009. That resulted in a spike in employee attrition.

According to Pai, one of the drivers for the launch of Green Channel was to address demand for experienced people to manage operations.

Although he did not provide details of the extent the company went to in luring back former employees, Pai agreed that for those who rejoined, the offer made was very “attractive.”
  
Green Channel, slated to close in two months, has already got 125 ex-Infoscions returning to Infosys, he said.

Another IT firm, NYSE-listed Cognizant, has been running a programme to get its alumni back on its payrolls for a long time. “In our case, we capture details of ex-associates of Cognizant through the alumni page of the careers section on our corporate website and use this information to share organisational happenings and accomplishments with them and inform them about opportunities in Cognizant,” said a Cognizant spokesperson.

The company also depends on referral by employees to get back former employees. “We have a strong referral policy. It has been our policy to attract the alumni for some years now. But it has become easier for us as people are now willing looking to join back given our pace of growth,” said a Cognizant spokesperson.

In case of Cognizant, too, the focus of hiring is increasingly on experienced people. In calendar 2009, when Cognizant grew 16.4%, more than half of the firm’s total hiring was laterals. The firm has guided to achieve a growth rate of 36.6% this year when the proportion of lateral hires will be significantly high in its total recruitment target of 24,600 people, the spokesperson said.

Bangalore-based Mindtree Ltd has also been tracking alumni for a long time. “We have always had programmes targeting Mindtree alumni who might have left for reasons such as seeking to work on different technology, moving to an area where we were not present, etc,” said Krishnakumar Natarajan, MD and CEO, Mindtree.

On its part, MphasiS, a HP subsidiary, runs an ex-employee hiring programme called Homecoming. It is seeking the creative aspect of employees by a dedicated hiring account on Facebook that reads, ‘The Great MphasiS Treasure Hunt - Discover a new life after eight’.