AI-ready workforce is scarce; there's a serious war for talent: Vivek Ranjan, CHRO, Zensar

India is poised to witness over 2 million AI jobs opening by 2027, but according to a Bain & Company study, the country may face a shortage of skilled professionals to fill those roles. The country, often regarded as a hub of tech talent, may need to upskill and reskill its nearly 1 million-strong talent pool in AI capabilities over the next two years to address the skill gap. In a chat with Vivek Ranjan, the Chief Human Resources Officer at Zensar Technologies, on the sidelines of the Great Place to Work event held recently in Mumbai, we discussed the state of AI-ready talent in the country, the challenges in retaining the available talent for organisations, the evolving hiring strategies in the IT industry, and the need to reduce dependency on external hirings. Edited excerpts

What is your assessment of the AI-ready talent in the country? How do you view the current talent supply? Is it adequate?

In my 26-year journey in the Indian IT industry, I've seen it grow from a mere $1 billion to a $300 billion industry today. This significant growth, a 300-fold increase, has always pivoted on overcoming transformative challenges. Currently, one significant challenge is the shift in the workforce in terms of AI capabilities.

For a company like ours – a mid-tier player with revenues of around $700 million, agile, and competing with much larger companies in the $15-$20 billion range – this shift is, in many ways, an opportunity. We can be nimble in adapting.

Now, coming directly to your question, yes, AI talent is indeed scarce. In terms of external supply, it's quite minimal, and there's a serious "war for talent" underway as everyone pivots to AI. This makes external hiring very difficult.

How are you addressing the challenge of scarce AI talent within Zensar?

What we are doing is building a strong upskilling and reskilling engine rather than solely relying on external hiring. For example, we have developed a model where all our employees gain a basic, what we call "L1," understanding of AI, whether or not they're working on AI projects. Then, we've moved to train a good proportion of employees to an "L2" or "practitioner level." These are individuals where we anticipate future AI projects. And finally, we have the "L3" or "expert level," which comprises roles such as prompt engineers, data architects, and AI ethics experts – those who are actually working on the projects right now. We've developed over 30 solutions to enable our customers on their AI journey.

Crucially, all our front-end salespeople and leaders also undergo extensive training in AI. This ensures they can speak the AI lingo, understand it, and effectively converse with customers about solving business problems using AI. It's a very structured and comprehensive way of building capability from within. And we're not just doing this for ourselves; we're also partnering with our customers to help build their AI Learning Academies.

That's a truly strategic approach. And it brings me to my next point. Those who move quickly in this space also need to ensure they retain this valuable talent. Your role, in this scenario, becomes crucial. You're investing a great deal in finding and training this talent. How do you ensure they stay with you?

It goes back to the point I made about making things happen rather than staying in a comfort zone. This is something we learned significantly from our experience post-COVID-19, during the "great resignation" era. We realised that some of our existing retention formulas, even with our strong people-centric culture, weren't working. Our attrition in 2021-22 was on the higher side.

That's when we had a significant realisation that we needed to shift based on the changing ecosystem. We conducted a thorough analysis, including the creation of a fishbone diagram, to understand the root causes of why people were leaving and why they were staying with us.

Two key things emerged. People stayed due to a strong sense of belonging and connection to the organisation, which was a key strength of ours. However, people were leaving because we weren't growing at a sufficient rate compared to the industry, and our training and development model was still traditional and transactional.

We disproportionately invested in learning to make our employees future-ready. This directly addressed the gap we identified. Over the last three to four years, our learning initiatives have been recognised as best-in-class.

So, building on our strength of purposeful, passionate, and impactful people and ensuring they are future-ready has been instrumental in retaining our talent. It might sound simplistic, but these two foundational elements led us from being among the highest in attrition to being the best in the industry in terms of retention.

With AI taking centre stage, do you see any particular impact on entry-level job seekers, or is the effect more pronounced in mid-level job roles? Are you also seeing new roles emerging due to AI? What's your assessment there?

Our demand for, and building up of, capability is directly dependent on what our customers need. Over the last year or two, we've seen that customers are increasingly seeking expertise and experienced professionals. So, the demand for freshers has reduced slightly across the industry; you must be hearing that everywhere - that we're not hiring as many freshers as we used to.

However, in a company like ours, which is in a building phase, we're also very responsible in terms of creating talent for the industry and investing in fresh talent. We haven't stopped hiring freshers. We still hire a certain proportion, although not necessarily the same numbers as in the past. However, we believe it is essential to continue investing in fresh talent.

What we are doing differently is how we upskill and reskill our team members. The traditional model of onboarding freshers, training them for six months, and then deploying them is no longer effective. We need to be mindful of our investment in this pool, and customers are seeking specific expertise.

Can you tell us about the new approach you're taking to hire fresh talent?

So, we've taken two key initiatives. One, we've started what we call "left-shift training." This means that for six months before a person joins us, they undergo rigorous training, making them more or less ready upon joining. Customer-specific training is then provided afterwards.

Second, we're partnering with select institutes to develop a curriculum directly aligned with what customers are looking for. This offers two advantages: we're building capability for the industry, and we're able to hire the best talent from those institutes. This is just one example of how we're changing the game in terms of hiring freshers; it's no longer traditional. We're still hiring good numbers, though not the same volume as before due to the specific client demands.

Could you tell us about your hiring strategy? How many people are you looking to hire in the next few months?

In a company like ours, which is looking to grow rapidly, the numbers are a direct result of business growth. So, if I say we're hiring 300-400 people every month today, tomorrow it could be 500-600. It's all a factor of demand.

However, we do have a very structured workforce planning method where we plan three to six months in advance for the capabilities we need. We have clearly defined strategic growth areas identified through specific competencies and skills. We proactively hire for those skills because we anticipate a similar business model is on the horizon. Sometimes, we also do reactive hiring when sudden demand arises that we haven't been able to source proactively. Then we do just-in-time hiring, in an expedited manner.

Therefore, it's challenging to assign a specific number, but for our type of company, the range could be between 300 and 500 hires per month. And the capability we're building isn't just through hiring; we're also acquiring companies to build complementary skills. For example, over the last five years, we've acquired two to three companies that bring entirely different capabilities compared to what Zensar's legacy would have offered.

Everyone is looking to integrate AI into their operations and systems to improve efficiencies, but not everyone can leverage AI to its full potential. Do you see any potential gaps or challenges that might be responsible for this?

Everyone is on their own journey, everyone is learning, so it's not fair to comment on who's doing what. But there are a few things, a few "rights" that we have to do, which I believe very strongly.

Firstly, irrespective of whether there's an immediate project need or not, we should invest in our people and make everybody AI-ready because nobody knows what will happen in three months. We prefer to be proactive rather than reactive, ensuring we develop capabilities and prepare our people for the future.

Secondly, and this is a very important responsibility for us as leaders, is to ensure we address the level of anxiety and uncertainty in people's minds. People are unsure whether they'll lose their jobs. So, there's a responsibility to provide comfort, telling our people, Look, it's about you moving up the value chain, rather than us attempting to take your jobs away. The narrative we use as leaders has to be very careful and responsible.

To answer your question, companies should approach this very responsibly and not just follow one track. They must authentically build people's capability and move them up the value chain. If companies aren't doing that and are only thinking about a 20 per cent productivity enhancement without addressing the resource aspect, then they're making people anxious and uncertain.

Thirdly, leadership training is crucial. It's not only technology folks who should be trained in AI. Every leader, whether functional (such as HR) or business, should be trained to understand what it means to be AI-first and how to drive the organisation in this new era of AI culturally.

Note: The views expressed in this interview are personal and does not reflect the position of the company.