Year 2010 was a year to initiate an enterprise wide change in Capgemini India’s recruiting process. “Sourcing” has been a decisive and driving component for a company which has hired more than 10,000 people in a year. This can also be signified by a change in our slogan which now says “People Matter, Results Count.”
Those of us who are part of Capgemini’s Sourcing team have been following SourceCon since its inception. I along with my colleague cracked SourceCon’s first ever contest way back in 2007. SourceCon and its leaders have provided us a great deal of guidance and learning through our way of sourcing. Last year, we promoted SourceCon internally to our management. This resulted in our recruitment leadership attending SourceCon 2010 in San Diego. They were supremely impressed by the authority and command various sourcing leaders showcased in that event. This also cemented our leadership’s confidence on our sourcing model to advance farther. After their visit, they chose two of our senior sourcing leads (Sachin Borde and myself) from our team in India as a pilot to attend SourceCon in Washington, D.C.
This initiative was with clear intention of:
- Understanding international sourcing standards and levels.
- Learning case studies of various corporations about social media and/or sourcing.
- Discovering new tools and technologies.
- Networking with the “best in the business” sourcers.
Before going in-depth – let’s have a brief look at our sourcing model.
Capgemini India’s Sourcing Model
Capgemini India is a 30,000+ head-count company and one of the leading IT consultancies in India. We have a team of over 50 sourcers in India serving global requirements including Europe, the US, and APAC. These sourcers are responsible for partnering with recruiters to fill various requirements from junior to C-level. Typically we close over 80% of our requirements internally – without going to agencies.
Social Media / Advanced Sourcing in India
Advance Sourcing concepts and Social media are still in start-up stage in India. Various companies have started using them; however most are still in pilot mode. We have aimed to advance our sourcing competency as “best in class” for India. As early adapters, we are presently looking to scale up our internal sourcing competency to create a world-class in-house recruiting model and adapt new age technologies. Attending SourceCon – a pioneer in sourcing revolution – was a natural choice for us.
SourceCon Washington DC – Our Take-Aways
The two days of SourceCon in Washington, D.C. was filled with some exciting speakers, great knowledge, and outside-of-the-box ideas and technology. This was the perfect ground for us where we can review and further build our sourcing engine. More importantly – what have we taken away from this last SourceCon conference that we will be practically implementing? Here’s run-down on what’s in store…
Social Media Strategy
For last two conferences, Social Media has been an integral part of SourceCon. I believe this media has changed the face of sourcing. After this conference, Capgemini India have build up an entire social media strategy specifically for Talent Acquisition purposes. This strategy consists of an entire road map of social media networks and compliance. While we have had footprints, this strategy has summed up everything under one roof. It has two vital drivers – to create our “Employment Brand” in the market and consecutively “Talent Attraction.” Where we used to only post jobs using automated software, now we have specific articles to showcase “Why Capgemini.”
Here are some of our recent achievements:
- Capgemini Careers Blog
- Launched in 2008 – 2009.
- 52k+ Hits – averaging over 60 hits every day.
- Capgemini Groups currently using the blog.
- Capgemini Careers LinkedIn Group
- Recently started with over 250 members.
Adapting Human Capital (Talent Mining) Intelligence
We have a proprietary ATS called Integrated Recruitment Workflow (IRW), which tracks movement from opening up a requisition to joining a candidate. We will soon be upgrading this system to capture human capital and competitive recruitment intelligence data, as presented by Glen Cathey in D.C. Presently we have a process called “Market Intelligence,” wherein we support recruitment system to provide intelligence on the availability of resources for specific skills. However, this is a manual repetitive process.
With IRW, we now intend to provide various intelligence reports automatically, such as:
- From which companies and/or educational backgrounds do we get most retained candidates?
- Which are the best target companies from which to hire for specific skills?
- What are the existing salary levels of these candidates?
- Which locations have the best available resources for specific skills and/or experience?
- What was the best sourcing channel used in the past for various skills?
- What are the hiring trends among various business units?
Cathey’s presentation regarding CRI and HCI has been extremely useful to support this initiative.
ATS + Social Media
I sincerely believe that the last presentation of the conference by Michael Notaro made us think a lot. Being a technology company, we had to strive to get best out of social media integrating with our internal ATS. His ideas around integrating Twitter and Google Docs into an ATS received great feedback internally and made it easy for us to push this case.
We will soon be enhancing functionality of posting and receiving responses to Twitter and Facebook through IRW. This shows how even some small changes can make big difference.
Sourcing Dashboard
The presentation made by Hewitt’s sourcing team (Chris Gould and Tim O’Connor) gave us great insight into how corporate recruitment teams can utilize their internal systems for getting measured results. We will soon be implementing a “Sourcing Dashboard” into IRW to measure our results with sources along with their effectiveness. This will serve as a “Scoreboard” to our sourcers for analyzing what to source and from where.
Sourcing Tools
I’ve been a great fan of Shally’s for very long time – he was one of my early mentors in sourcing. From his session, as well as Shannon Myers’s session, we have learnt some great tools and techniques for sourcing. This is always a gold mine for us. Technology drives sourcing and one has to be adaptive enough to implement. We have been and will continue to implement some cool tools like Jigsaw, ReferYes, TinEYE, and various other people finders and search tools.
However, the greatest achievements have been in perfecting our Google Custom Search Engine. I’ve recently developed a Google CSE called “MagicSourcer.” This has been designed to search Indian Social Networking websites to find candidates. Gary Conaway’s session helped me a good deal to fine-tune this initiative. Everyone on our sourcing team use this tool.
Sourcing Center of Excellence (CoE)
Last but certainly not the least, we decided to put forth dedicated efforts toward sourcing enrichment and enhancement activities. Our leadership will soon open a Sourcing Center of Excellence (CoE) concept internally. This CoE will be specifically designed to innovate and discover new sourcing techniques, spider the market for latest trends, implement new tools and technology internally, and enhance our internal sourcing competency. I will also be part of this initiative. The SourceCon conference helped us to inject the importance of sourcing into our leadership strategic team thought process, resulting in the installation of a dedicated Sourcing Lab for global recruitment efforts.
SourceCon has been an eye-opening experience for all of us. This is just the beginning of our sourcing excellence journey at Capgemini. I am more than hopeful that these initiatives will bring fantastic results and continue the success story that our sourcing team has for last many years.
Apart from this conference, we continuously follow Sourcing leaders like Glen Cathey, Shally Steckerl, Tim O’Connor, Shannon Myers, Gary Conaway, Maureen Sharib, Michael Notaro, and Irina Shamaeva for never ending learning. We thank the SourceCon team – especially Amybeth Hale – for providing such a great platform, and we wish to have bigger participation in the future.
“Sourcing will never DIE”…