Our industry is very dynamic and client expectations have increased tremendously. Today clients expect you to recommend business solutions across any industry or domain in a matter of days. The trend for outsourcing has increased as many companies have downsized capacity during the downturn and, in this new phase of growth, they do not want to build capacity internally but remain nimble by outsourcing the required capacity to third parties. As a consequence, the outsourcing business is booming. For us, that meant that we had to increase our footprint to 42 locations across 7 countries around the world to be closer to our clients and potential clients. Also, the type of people we need today are required to be more knowledgeable and mature than before, as clients require accurate solutions for their business needs.

In this context, as an organization, our HR priorities include being able to attract and retain people who can go after the complex business opportunities available as well as understand the cultural nuances. As we have grown globally, we also need to adapt to the new locations where we operate and integrate the local culture with the culture of our organization. Going forward, we also need to create a sustainable source of leaders who grow alongside the organization. From our perspective, hiring for mid and senior roles is always a more difficult as we often do not find the right culture fit. Therefore we aim to identify talent from within the company who has the potential to grow to leadership roles, and we invest heavily on their leadership development.

The overall organizational priority is to maintain our core culture and values as we grow. We want to preserve that culture that has made us successful in the first place when we were smaller. That culture of entrepreneurship where people give their 120% and everybody stretches their goals has always been our culture so, as we grow, the challenge is to retain it.
As CEO, my time gets distributed between clients, employees, shareholders and networking for business development. Around 45% of my time is invested in growth-oriented strategies, another 45% on delivery and operations where HR activities is the most important part of operations, 5% on communicating with our investors and the rest 5% in networking.
Of the 45% of my time that goes on internal operations most is spent in motivating people, driving culture and working with people in problem-solving. Though this is the reality, personally I would like to spend more time in the classroom and train people myself on OD, and change management.

One metric we track, which is also a part of the CEO’s scorecard, is the number of critical positions we can fill from within. We follow the scores and feedback closely in the employee satisfaction surveys to track if people are professionally and personally growing.