India, Inc. looks westward for corporate talent

MUMBAI: Infosys is not the only Indian company making the journey westwards to pick up graduates off Ivy League college campuses. Traditional brick and mortar manufacturing companies are also knocking on the doors of these institutions to meet their hiring needs.

Companies like Mahindra & Mahindra and Reliance Industries are going all out to hire management trainees from the creme de la creme of foreign management institutes to work on their international strategy.

M&M, which started visiting these foreign campuses two years ago, has picked up eight trainees from top ranking foreign colleges like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Tufts, Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania.

The company, which has around 35-40 foreign nationals working for them in India, has been consciously looking at globalising its workforce. Interestingly, when it comes to remuneration M&M pays these overseas trainees the same salary as their Indian counterparts. These Ivy leaguers are evidently sold on the India story.

While a couple of them are employed with Tech Mahindra the others are working on international strategy for the automotive group, which has been taking its products to South Africa, Western Europe, Russia, Middle East and South East Asia.

RIL, on the other hand, has hired graduates from these campuses off and on in the past but is looking at making a more concentrated effort now. The company is now looking at the option of hiring more consistently from Ivy League colleges for jobs across the organisation.

Says Ronesh Puri, MD, Executive Access, “The manufacturing sector has seen a change in its mind-set in the last couple of years. They have been hiring from B-schools ranked between 15-20 in the past, but now they have raised the bar and are looking at better colleges in India as well as Ivy League colleges.”

Rajeev Dubey, president (HR & corporate services), M&M, himself a Yale graduate and the man behind these overseas recruitment’s explained the rationale behind this move: “We are very keen that our employees here get global exposure and that can be done in two ways, either by posting them overseas or by giving them an opportunity to work with global talent in India.

We pick the cream from these top American institutes and they help globalise our workforce and bring with them fresh, out-of-the-box thinking.” Mr Dubey also thinks that these overseas trainees will go on to become global ambassadors for M&M.

Besides its overseas trainee programme, M&M also takes in summer interns from Harvard, Yale and the Babson MBA Institute. M&M has a tie up with Yale University through the Mahindra Leitner Internship Program where one student comes every year for a summer internship in the Mahindra Group. Currently they have five interns on board.