(Image source: Top news.in)
Desi companies have been performing admirably in the last 20 years. This charge has been led by services firms that have ruled the waves in India and overseas. But sometime their branding seems to be way off mark often based on very short sighted goals.A case in point is HCL. The IT services behemoth has been one of India's best run companies. So when a couple of years ago the CEO took to blogging many heralded it as a coming of age for Indian brands. The CEO Vineet Nayyar, went on to state in his blog that for HCL, employees came first. This was a bold statement and very different from traditional management speak that puts customers first.
The later Ad campaigns showed an employee jet setting across the globe solving problems from Banking to Airline Industry. I personally thought that the campaign was very well done, and from an IMC perspective it saw the synchronization between the social media messaging and the advertising. The employee called Mr HCL redefined corporate branding from the Desi brands context.
(Source : You Tube)
But then last year the' employee first ' came back to haunt HCL as a group of more than 6000 engineering graduates started writing in about HCL not honoring the offers made at their engineering campuses. Not only did they start writing in but they also formed a group on Facebook to bring their grievance to the social world. The group call HCL Freshers 2011, brought together all these students across India.Soon the courts intervened and a judge in Noida asked HCL to come up with an action plan to honor these offers. HCl in an official statement now says that they will on board these campus hires in August.
Now I am not sure what the problem was with the offers, but there seems to be something definitely worng with the branding. here are three things that may not work for hCL going forward.
- Saying employees first is a very bold move, but in a typical services firm there are many employees. HCL will have more than 100,000 employees (I don't have the latest figure and I have not added the 6,000 fresh graduates in question :)). Now basing a branding strategy on keeping these 100,000 as top priority will create a challenge. This has got less to do with branding and more to do with human nature as any firm would find it difficult to keep so many employees happy all the time.
- The second problem I have is with the supply chain for the services firms. This is true especially for technology services firms that rely on a constant recruitment of technically sound campus recruits. Just like sometimes there is no warm hand off between sales and account management in case of customers, a similar situation erupts in case of a warm hand off between campus recruitment and business. This often leads to challenges like mis-alignment of competency and final placement. I don't have to look far for this, I had a similar challenge when I was hired as a campus lateral hire for one of the services firms.
- Finally timelines always play havoc with these bulk recruitment decisions. The decision to recruit would have been made almost 6 months before the offers become valid. In those 6 months given our current business climate, a lot can change. Leading to further heart burn for these students.
In conclusion, thought employees first is a bold move, it is fraught with danger. And I feel in retrospect HCL may have got its branding all wrong?
But I would like to hear your views on it. Do you think we have to just accept these delays in offers as part of business as usual? what about a corporate commitment and what of the families of these students? and finally does the brand suffer?
Please do leave your comments...
One of my friend got placed in deloitte through campus placements. After sometime there was something that went wrong without any fault of my friend. They refused to take shortlisted candidates and scrapped the whole process
ReplyDeleteHi Manish
DeleteI am not surprised and in the services sector I have heard such stories many times. It is often that the requirement changes in the time duration from recruitment to on boarding. And as the economic climate is getting more volatile such incidents are bound to recurr.
HCL chose employee first as a slogan to differentiate itself momentarily from other companies that focused on customers and/or their technological advances. To me it seemed more like an internal branding initiative aimed at stemming attrition, given HCL was not the most people friendly place to work in a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteI dont think HCL ever intended for the slogan to apply to customers or external stakeholder. After all, what does "employees first" translate to for external parties? Happy employees? Technically better employees? Empowered employees? In an industry that is heavily dominated by the time and material model of operations, happy/ technically better/ empowered employees dont make much of a difference because the project costs are more or less set and any changes, usually benefit the IT company and not the client. (It is only IT product companies that talk of customers' cost savings not IT services companies).
Perhaps HCL got too carried away by the phrase it coined to deliver on it.
As for freshers, the problem is universal across all major IT firms in India. Singling out HCL is not technically correct. Maybe those recruited-but-not- yet-onboarded- by other IT companies will follow suit emboldened by the facebook move of these HCL recrits.
Hi Arch
ReplyDeleteI agree with the initial part of the statement that HCL never intended the employee first campaign to go external, but it followed it up with the Mr HCL campaign.
But still my contention is that this was a risky proposition to take considering the time and material nature of the business. In the end, it is the brand suffers.