Sanjeev Kumar
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Japanese Information Technology major NTT Data, which has a global employee base of 1,90,000, including 40,000 in India, is planning to increase workforce by 10-15% this year, a top company executive said.
“For 2024, what we are looking at is roughly adding anywhere between 10 and 15% of our workforce to what we are today, and that I think [is a ] decent number, looking at how the industry is progressing at this stage,” Sanjeev Kumar, V-P of Global Talent Acquisition, NTT Data, said in an interview.
“This 10-15% will be a mixed batch of in-company executives taking on global roles, lateral hires, industry people coming into our fold as a result of acquisitions and campus programmes such as our Centres of Excellence,” he said, without quantifying any numbers.
“Additionally, we are also going to be hiring 15,000 global cybersecurity professionals till 2027,” he added.
He said the company had a different approach to hiring. “What we want to do is rather than hire talent, we believe in growing our talent internally. I think that’s the best way,” he added,
Stating that the company had a robust and dedicated employee referral programme, he said, “At NTT Data , we are pretty robust in matching around 40-50% hiring through employee referral, despite the fact that our monetary incentives are not very high.”
“When you look at industry-wide, typically in our industry, anywhere between 20 and 25% of overall hiring through referral is considered to be an excellent number,” he added.
Mr. Kumar said the company’s ‘Recruiter Academy’, which was incubated in India during the COVID period, had turned out to be a huge success and the model developed here had been deployed globally.
“We picked up MBA, HR graduates and trained them for about six months. That’s an investment we made into the recruitment philosophy processes,” Mr. Kumar said.
“And today, I can assure you most of these resources that we onboarded, and we are continuing to do that, have turned out to be a big surprise for us, because the learning journey has transformed in such a way that they are performing better than some of the original resources,” he added.
“And that has kind of given us the muscle to leverage our recruitment engine for much higher levels than we had even imagined when we started this initiative. And it has started giving returns much before we expected the returns to come in,” he further said.
“You will be also surprised to note that when we started this, this was only an India initiative that we did. And today, we are using this in North America, in Asia, Latin America, we are using this in Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA),” he emphasised.
