How Infosys Is Building Its Talent Pipeline in India

Students from around the world are brought to Infosys’ Bangalore, India, campus in an effort to increase the company’s name recognition, improve its brand attraction and fill its talent pipeline.

Image courtesy of Flickr user theqspeaks.

Attracting talent sometimes means marketing the corporation to the people who might one day take a job there.

For Infosys, a global technology services company headquartered in Bangalore, India, that has meant taking “significant steps to increase its name recognition, improve its brand attraction and fill its talent pipeline by combining global branding activities with efforts in local communities,” according to the authors of “Six Principles of Effective Global Talent Management,” in the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Among Infosys’ steps, according to the article:

• A “Catch Them Young” program in India that exposes high school students to information technology during school breaks. Students are trained for a month and then invited to work for Infosys on a two-month project.
• Computer awareness programs in rural areas in local languages, to help children become more comfortable with high-tech equipment. “Although not initially directed at recruitment and branding,” says the article, “the program has been an effective strategy for enlarging the pool of IT-literate and Infosys-devoted students in India, which may eventually make it easier to find talented software engineers.”
• A global internship program called InStep, which invites students from top universities internationally to the company’s Bangalore campus. The three month stay “is part of an ongoing effort to make the company more attractive to potential candidates outside of India and to tap into the worldwide talent pool,” says the article.

At its website, Infosys provides information about its “Social Contract” efforts, which includes a variety of programs that encourage technology education.

Among them: financial support by the Infosys USA Foundation for science and math literacy efforts at the New York Academy of Sciences; mentoring of over 2,500 teachers in India through its Project Genesis program; the Campus Connect program, which encourages collaboration between industry and academia at campusconnect.infosys.com; and the Infosys Science Foundation, which “honors outstanding contributions of Indian researchers to pure and applied sciences with the annual Infosys Prize.”