‘Finding product development professionals is a major challenge in India’

Sanjay Singh, CEO and co-founder, hCentive (provides cloud-based healthcare technology solutions)

What are the different talent management strategies you implement while handling your workforce in India and US?
There are certain HR practices that are universal and there are certain practices that are unique to specific geographies.
The practices that are universal are:
a) There is a culture that we have tried to inculcate within the company whether it is US or India. This includes the culture of openness. By default, we would openly share any and all information with our employees in India and US. To make it happen, similar practices are implemented in US and India. The culture of customer centricity and being goal oriented also runs across the company irrespective of the geographical location.
b) We have set a common bar for all the recruits joining our company. Being a product development company, we require a certain level of skill set. To attain that, we have similar screening processes for people joining our company in India as well as US. All our prospective employees have to clear a universal IQ test before being interviewed. The pattern of this test might be slighting different in both the countries.
Things that are unique are
The employee benefit schemes are highly geography specific. In an Indian context, we provide flexible work timings and work from home options. To aid this, we provide data cards to all out employees in India so that they can access the internet and work from home. We are also contemplating on providing cab facilities to our employees in our Noida office for metro connectivity. These practices are highly specific to locations and are not implemented in the US.
What are the various HR related challenges you face here in India?
a) We are a product company and we would like to have people who know their domain and can start contributing from day one. Not having people with deep domain expertise is a big challenge.
b) We also require people who are skilled in product development. This seems to be a major challenge here in India. For example; we would like to hire a number of product managers into our workforce. The skills that we look for in them are domain knowledge coupled with the ability to develop new products. Finding people with both the skills is a big challenge and we end up compromising one way or the other.
What are the specific skills sets and courses you look for/prefer while sourcing talent here in India?
1. Products managers: We source people with strong technical background (BE and BTech from IITs and NITs) and MBA from reputed business schools.
2. Senior product architects
3. Good business analysts: People who understand business and translate into technical requirements. They will always be in demand. Successful business analysts must be highly detail oriented, good analytical skills and excellent communication skills.
4. Really good UI designers: I am not talking about people who can just write HTML. There is a whole industry in US for these people who deal with human computer interaction. They are extremely skilled. We don’t find such skill sets in India and if we did, we would hire them in loads.
What are your organisation’s workforce expansion plans for India?
All our product development happens out of India. We are close to 300+ people in Noida. The workforce growth has been almost around 200% year upon year. In 2009, when we started off we were just three of us. Now we are around 300. This is a very significant growth and we don’t see it stemming anytime soon. We are planning to increase our workforce by about 500 people in the next couple of years. We would be doubling our workforce every year for now.