Contactless onboarding
The lockdown has spurred firms to onboard new hires virtually, report Sai Ishwar and Bibhu Ranjan Mishra
Arundhati Bhattacharya, former chairperson of State Bank of India, was scheduled to join Salesforce, a Us-based software major, on April 1. Yet, even though India and various parts of the US were in lockdown by that time, her onboarding process went off smoothly. “It was quite a surprise that they could do it, and they did it beautifully. The onboarding happened over videoconferencing,” says the former banker, who has joined Salesforce India as its chairman and CEO.
As soon as Bhattacharya completed the joining and induction process, she was introduced via video conferencing to key people at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco and India. And though two months have passed since then, she has not physically met a single soul either from Salesforce’s India or its global offices. “In normal times, I would have made several visits by now, at least to our offices in Singapore or San Francisco, and within our India locations,” she says.
Similarly, Suraj Moraje, group CEO of India’s largest private sector employer
Quess Corp, who took charge on April 1, did so remotely. The first townhall meeting he attended a couple of days after joining was done virtually over Microsoft Teams, while the first board meeting of the company that was held soon after, was also conducted remotely. “What I had to do was get a digital signature, so I could sign the documents of the company,” says Moraje.
Corporate India, whether they are tech companies or part of traditional sectors, have been actively hiring and onboarding new talent throughout the nationwide lockdown. The only difference from before is that instead of these employees coming to office for the onboarding formalities, now the entire process, including document verification, briefing joinees about the company’s basic ethics and policies and so on, is being done through applications like Zoom, Cisco’s Webex,
Verizon-backed Bluejeans or Microsoft Teams. And training, too, is taking place largely through cloud-enabled learning apps that can be accessed from any device or through the internet.
“This is a first in my 20 years’ experience in this industry,” says Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm, Xpheno.
Take Hindustan CocaCola Beverages (HCCB), which not only inducted new joinees remotely, but also conducted internships using virtual platforms. “We use Bluejeans and Microsoft Team for induction and internal meetings,” says Indrajeet Sengupta, chief human resources officer and executive director, HCCB. The beverages maker onboarded around 80 persons and conducted around 30 internships during the lockdown. Going forward, HCCB is planning to adopt augmented reality technology to familiarise new employees with market and factory
IT companies have led the pack when it came to using virtual and collaborative technologies for employee onboarding, induction and training during the lockdown
operations, Sengupta adds.
Needless to say, information technology (IT) companies have led the pack when it came to using virtual and collaborative technologies for employee onboarding, induction and training during this time. “We have not stopped any onboarding due to the lockdown and our plans (with respect to hiring) have not changed,” says Chaitanya Sreenivas, vice president and HR head, IBM India. “We have gone virtual right from sourcing the candidate, as our talent acquisition team is also working from home.”
Keeping the pandemic in mind, IBM has added new features such as filling up of statutory forms to make its hiring platform Kenexa completely virtual. The company’s use of online platforms for hiring and onboarding, which was 30 per cent earlier, has now gone up to 95 per cent.
“Virtual on-boardings are mostly done through internally developed systems, wherein the candidates’ documents are uploaded and the human resource team verifies the same,” says Sunil C, head of specialised staffing at recruitment and HR services firm, Teamlease. “The induction happens through various company platforms and the key performance indicator (KPI) or key result areas (KRA) setting also happens through HR systems.”
Tech Mahindra is another IT firm which is using an in-house application for lateral hiring. The app, Techm Dove, has features such as a virtual tour of the company’s facilities, GPS navigation, and learning and motivational videos. It also includes a feature with which employees can raise and view tickets when they find a specific bug in a software. This is aimed at helping new hires working remotely who may not be aware of the appropriate point of contact internally or at the clients’ end to solve issues.
Infosys, which has been inducting new employees throughout the lockdown period, is using its in-house platform, Launchpad, to facilitate virtual onboarding. Recruits are required to upload all relevant documents on this platform instead of having to meet multiple HR persons to complete the formalities.
Bengaluru-based Wipro, too, said its onboarding process has now become completely paperless. The IT services firm is using its in-house onboarding platform Embark to digitally facilitate the entire onboarding journey, right from the acceptance of offer letters to the documentation of joining forms.