Case Study on Infosys
ASIAN CASE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOL. 12, ISSUE 2, 249–273 (2008)
ACRJ
This case was prepared by Professors Ram Subramanian, Ram Misra, and C. Jayachandran of Montclair State University and Professor Tripti Singh of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative or business situation. Please address all correspondence to Prof. Ram Subramanian, School of Business, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. E-mail: Subramanianr@mail. montclair.edu.
Infosys Technologies Limited: The Global Talent Program
T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director and Member of the Board for Infosys Technologies Limited (Infosys), the Bangalore, Indiabased information technology company, eased his six-foot three-inch frame into his office chair and pulled up the latest US recruitment report. It was Monday, October 15, 2007. He had just returned from a meeting with Kris Gopalakrishnan, the company’s CEO, where the two had discussed at length the company’s overseas recruitment efforts. For a company that obtained 98% of its revenues from abroad and operated 17 development centers in five countries, a mere 3% of its nearly 70,000 strong workforce was non-Indian. Gopalakrishnan had challenged Pai to increase the number of non-Indian staff by 30% each year or around 1,000 annually. To increase its foreign workforce, Infosys had started an ambitious overseas recruitment effort called the Global Talent Program (GTP). In 2006, a batch of 126 recruits from US universities had been trained at the company’s training center in Mysore, India prior to being deployed in various US offices. Similar batches from the US had joined in February and July of 2007, while the first batch from the UK joined in September 2007. As Pai perused the recruitment report, he recalled his words from the interview he had given to an Indian business magazine:
“For a company to be called truly global, what
ACRJ
This case was prepared by Professors Ram Subramanian, Ram Misra, and C. Jayachandran of Montclair State University and Professor Tripti Singh of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative or business situation. Please address all correspondence to Prof. Ram Subramanian, School of Business, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. E-mail: Subramanianr@mail. montclair.edu.
Infosys Technologies Limited: The Global Talent Program
T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director and Member of the Board for Infosys Technologies Limited (Infosys), the Bangalore, Indiabased information technology company, eased his six-foot three-inch frame into his office chair and pulled up the latest US recruitment report. It was Monday, October 15, 2007. He had just returned from a meeting with Kris Gopalakrishnan, the company’s CEO, where the two had discussed at length the company’s overseas recruitment efforts. For a company that obtained 98% of its revenues from abroad and operated 17 development centers in five countries, a mere 3% of its nearly 70,000 strong workforce was non-Indian. Gopalakrishnan had challenged Pai to increase the number of non-Indian staff by 30% each year or around 1,000 annually. To increase its foreign workforce, Infosys had started an ambitious overseas recruitment effort called the Global Talent Program (GTP). In 2006, a batch of 126 recruits from US universities had been trained at the company’s training center in Mysore, India prior to being deployed in various US offices. Similar batches from the US had joined in February and July of 2007, while the first batch from the UK joined in September 2007. As Pai perused the recruitment report, he recalled his words from the interview he had given to an Indian business magazine:
“For a company to be called truly global, what