Winner: Best Recruitment Campaign
When it comes to a successful recruitment effort, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) believes the best place to start is before a student knows exactly what field to choose for a career.
“All kids who are there right now in Grade 8 or 9 start looking at making their careers in IT because no matter which industry you are working in, IT is important,” says Vivek Kawley, director of HR Canada at TCS, which has 385,809 employees worldwide and offers IT consulting and business solutions services in Canada.
TCS also offers a goIT program, which teaches coding and application development to middle and high school students. The program came to Canada via Toronto in 2014, and has since expanded to other cities. More than 13,000 students in Canada and the United States have been a part of goIT since its beginnings in the United States arm in 2009.
TCS began the program to “create that kind of interest in students about IT and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers, because STEM is one area where the job growth is continuing for year on year, and we see that in the future — the jobs will be there in this part of the technology area,” says Kawley.
Teaching children early and showing them that STEM is an option allows TCS to inspire students early on, he says.
“It’s an investment that will help us going forward because these students are not going to join TCS today — but we hope that after four or five years, they go to universities and take STEM as an education career and help Canada become a knowledge power,” he says.
The company also began an outreach program for Indigenous students in Grade 8 at the First Nations Junior and Senior School of Toronto. “For one full day, we have trained 50 students from First Nations about goIT,” says Kawley.
The company also engages in recruiting at university campuses across Canada.
“Every year, we hire close to 100 students from 13 different universities in Canada,” says Kawley.
The company undertakes two university campus hiring campaigns per year, in January and July. Once a potential candidate is identified, a series of different interviews from HR, IT and management are undertaken in order to discover if the candidate would fit into the TCS’ philosophy and become a successful team member.
“As an organization, we focus a lot (on) our participatory culture. We encourage employees to talk about different challenges, how to solve them in a team environment. It’s very important for us to have the right kind of person whose culture fits with TCS,” he says.
Student candidates are evaluated on key points such as time-management expertise, work-model flexibility and future-leadership competency, according to TCS.
“We speak to them about changes in technology, changes in careers. We also tell them about where they need to build their competencies so they can get a job and become employable immediately after their graduation,” says Kawley.
And if a candidate isn’t hired, the company offers “personalized constructive feedback” from an HR representative on how that person could improve for the future, according to TCS.
The first full day of a new employee’s career is spent on a deep dive into the organization’s culture and its history. Part of that culture includes an open-door policy between management and staff, says Kawley.
“What we achieve as an organization is purely based on the collective effort from my entire team of all employees; it’s not a success of one person, it’s a success of the team.”
TCS also offers a “Bring Your Buddy” program that provides an “unlimited” cash incentive to employees who refer workers to TCS, according to Kawley, and about 20 per cent of new hires are brought in this way.
TCS also runs an annual CodeVita program, which is a coding competition that promotes programming as a sport and includes a top prize of $10,000. A Canadian team entered the contest a few years ago and had the only woman in the entire competition. It “was a proud moment,” says Kawley.
TCS’ recruitment process metrics are reviewed weekly, allowing the company to keep a constant eye on how it is managing — especially in light of millennials entering the job market, he says.
“We are looking as an organization at how we can change ourselves: For example, today’s generation is very communication-friendly — they look at social media — so how do we leverage social media.”
Even though technology continues to change, the company’s focus on recruitment remains the same, says Kawley.
“The only thing which has changed is the kind of people we require based on technology change.”
“Phones and mobile technology have changed our world, how we operate,” he says. “So the focus right now — whether it’s TCS or others in the IT industry — is on social and mobile.”
