EXCLUSIVE: Capgemini India HR head explains why the French IT major is on a hiring spree in India and around the world

• Capgemini does not see lateral hiring slowing down even with its recent dip in attrition, according to the company’s India Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) Pallavi Tyagi.
• In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, she explains that while attrition is low, the company has aggressive plans to expand in the coming months.
• At the end of September, Capgemini’s bookings were 17.4% higher than last year at around $4.6 billion.

Capgemini may be a French company but more than half of their workforce is located in India — and the Paris-based company has no plans of slowing down. Even as attrition levels drop, Capgemini India Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) Pallavi Tyagi believes that lateral hiring will continue to increase.

“If the business plans and expansion happen as we’re expecting then to happen, then hiring is not going to slow down,” she told Business Insider in an exclusive interview.

In the third quarter, ending September 30, Capgemini saw a 17.4% yearly increase in bookings amounting to €3.9 billion (approximately $4.6 billion). The company’s new deals include building digital twins for a network of European factores and upgrading the industrial network that connects Mexico to China.

“While it’s good not to have high attrition, at the same time, if there is a need for a certain demand that we need to fill, we’re hiring for those posts,” said Tyagi.

Source: Company filings

Indian tech companies have also seen a drop in attrition. While they had pressed pause on lateral hiring during the first six months of the pandemic, the coffers have opened up again. Nonetheless, as many plan to double down on freshers, lateral hiring will still be dealt with caution.

“A large amount of lateral hiring happens because of attrition replacement. If I’m losing 20 people, I have to hire 20 people. To that extent, lateral hiring will come down,” HCL Tech CHRO Apparao VV told Business Insider earlier this month.

Skilling new lateral hires
Capgemini has already added over 45,000 employees to its ranks globally this year. For India, the overall hiring target has pegged at 24,000 for 2020 with a similar outlook for next year as well.

However, lateral hiring is different from on boarding freshers in the sense that it is generally role specific. Companies hire to address an expert for a specific need that already exists within the company.

“There may be a certain want of a skill, which is missing, which we say we can definitely upskill within the organisation and we hire laterals accordingly,” explained Tyagi.

The big shift that Capgemini, and its peer companies, have seen is taking whatever training and skilling is required online. To address that requirement, it introduced the AI driven ‘Next’ platform for personalised microlearning. The company pegs the digital learning platform as a one-stop shop for employees to keep up with whatever they may need . “The uptake in terms of learning output has increased,” said Tyagi.

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