Reaching out to talent, the Genpact way

75000 employees. 74 offices in 25 countries. $2.57 bn in revenues. Listed on the NYSE for a decade. And this is what a candidate said when one of our recruiters called her to fix an interview about a year back.

“Genpact who?”

To be fair, the candidate was based in one of the newer geographies for us and was from a different industry. Yet, this incident wasn’t isolated. We faced varying levels of awareness when speaking with candidates outside of India. In India, the challenge was of a different kind – legacy. For too long, we’d been associated with the term ‘BPO’ and were now having trouble convincing doctors, actuaries, chartered accountants, and techies that they would be doing meaningful work here. 

It is no secret that companies with a strong employer brand have higher revenue growth, lower cost per hire and see an increase in quantity and quality of hire. And yet, few companies make a material investment in marketing to candidates. At a recent recruitment conference, it appeared that less than 10 percent of the companies present had a dedicated employer branding person and even fewer had a dedicated team. This, despite statistics showing that 75 percent of job seekers today consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job. Of course, one could argue that companies like Google, Facebook, and other large B2C organizations have been doing this really well for a long time, but let’s face it, when employee perks include being able to bring your dog to work and get free massages on campus, you don’t need to worry about employer branding. For the rest who don’t have bankers and barbers in office, we need to work harder at winning over candidates. 

At Genpact, we took a conscious decision of setting up a talent marketing function that would partner with the executive hiring function to bolster recruitment efforts. Here are  the4 steps we took (christened the RACE model) to develop and kick off our flagship campaign, Bring Back Curious, which aims at establishing our employer brand as a vibrant and curious workplace.  

Research (yourself and your target audience): Unless we know why talent is attracted to us and stays with us, we won’t know what to tell people. As we spoke to people inside and outside the company, this is what we learnt: Employees quoted ‘learning opportunities’, ‘empowering culture’ and ‘cross functional exposure’ as the top reasons for working with Genpact; external talent revealed the need of ownership and exposure to different kinds of work; while our leaders stated that they looked for intellectual agility and curiosity in the talent they hire. 

Articulate (and read between the lines): We found an inherent connection between what the groups were saying – When people with endless curiosity are exposed to a culture that encourages questions, it leads to learning, empowerment, and growth. And that’s how we arrived at the concept of: “Bring Back Curious”, the idea being that most people start out curious as children but as life happens, they often lose that sense of wonder. However, our culture encourages people to bring that curiosity back.

Create (and be bold!): Joan Gantz Cooney, a television producer in the late 1960s wanted to use television to spread literacy in toddlers. She envisioned a one hour show that would air five times a week. Skeptics scoffed at the idea of television doing anything other than entertain. And yet, her show Sesame Street undoubtedly has been one of the most acclaimed educational TV shows till date. Before our campaign was launched, many took a double take at the phrasing of “Bring Back Curious”. Wouldn’t “bring curiosity back” make more grammatical sense? However, some of the most iconic marketing slogans have played with the rules of grammar, including Apple’s ‘Think Different’, Adidas’ ‘Impossible is Nothing’, and California Milk Processor Board’s ‘Got Milk’. The point is to cut through the clutter.

Execute (where the talent is): Any marketer worth his/her CTR will tell you that social and digital is where you get the bang for a buck. We took the campaign across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as made updates to our careers website, job descriptions, recruitment collateral and other touch points. The campaign focuses on bringing to life the stories of actual employees and how they bring back curious every day. Once launched, we experienced an increase of 22 percent engagement in our social channels. Our engagement rate went through the roof which led to our Talent Brand Index sharply rising over a short time. The number of applications increased significantly which led to a consistent rise in our direct hiring rate. 

The previous year, we started off with a campaign focused on increasing gender diversity at the mid to senior levels (first in India and then to the US and UK). Christened Career 2.0, the campaign aims to bring women who have taken a sabbatical, back to the workforce. This stemmed from global research that many women tend to drop out of the workforce due to multiple reasons and when they want to get back, they either worry about outdated skills, or don’t know how to get started. Career 2.0 gave hope to these women and helped them gain the confidence they needed by assuring them that their time away would not be held against them and that they would come back to full time roles at their market value. 

We received an overwhelming response both in terms of quantitative and qualitative feedback. Hashtags flew thick and fast, mentions flooded social media accounts and the buzz grew manifold. News about the program went viral in a matter of days, and we got prominently featured in national dailies and news channels. But the most rewarding aspect was the personal connect from the women who applauded our efforts to give them what they deserved.  We suddenly went from “who are you” to “thank you for an opportunity like this.”

Since then, we have done webchats and events through partners like Sheroes, JobsforHer and Gurgaon Moms. Our story has been blogged about and converted to a case study by LinkedIn. Overall, Career 2.0 has given us close to 80 talented and dynamic women employees who are extremely passionate about their careers and want to strike a balance between work and family. This has helped increase our confidence in our ability to communicate directly and reinforced our faith in the power of employer branding on social media tremendously.

As we look back at the last 2 years, it’s clear that the investment in employer branding and partnership between the recruitment and talent marketing teams has paid off. We have successfully shifted more than 50 percent of our hiring to smarter sources and created and leveraged new channels that have proven to be both quick and cost effective. 

Our recruiters today are viewed as business partners. Where earlier we were relying solely on search partners, today we have a strong social media sourcing strategy with proven results. Instead of waiting for the right candidate to reach us, we reach out to talent through mediums we know they frequent, and help them understand the value proposition ourselves. It’s a freer world where it’s easier for us now to connect and understand the candidates ourselves and talent landscape in a far less formal setup.   

Our sourcing strategy has completely changed with our learnings, hits and misses. We are at a point now where we are debating and looking at more mediums and ways on social media to conquer… “What’s next” is the buzzword these days in our teams.