The Digital Pull
Dhiraj Sharda had been planning to return to India after having spent 14 years in the US working for Yahoo, AT&T and Visa, among others. He had some offers from big start-ups in India, but none that were as promising as the opportunity to drive Airtel’s payments bank business as the Chief Digital Officer.
“We could have easily sourced people from other big banks. But Dhiraj has already worked in the digital space. When he conducts meeting, it’s a different language that he speaks,” says Srikanth Balachandran, Global Chief Human Resources Officer, Airtel.
Sharda is one of the hundreds of people who have joined Airtel in recent times to help the company transform from being a pure-play telecom operator into a digital enterprise.
The launch of a slew of services around its highspeed 4G network including movies, music, games and e-wallet – not typical telecom services – entails hiring people who understand the digital ecosystem. This means it has to compete with the likes of Amazon and Flipkart to attract the best talent. People with these skill sets typically prefer working with start-ups or digital-focused firms, and not a telecom operator.
Till recently, Airtel was not even equipped to scout for such talent. In fact, its HR department struggled to write even a simple job descriptor (for these new skills). The first thing that Airtel did was to refresh its own HR workforce. “We have hired HR people from start-ups, IT, and the content industry to inject new skills required in our path to become digital,” says Balachandran.
Till last year, Airtel had to fight off high attrition rates – around 20 per cent. Its workforce was leaving in hordes to join new comer Reliance Jio, and e-commerce players. Its attrition rate has fallen below 10 per cent now, thanks partly to the slowdown in the e-commerce sector.
Airtel’s internal succession rate is around 80 per cent – indicating a high career growth within the organisation – and that has helped attract talent. For some, just the prospect of working for the largest telecom player is appealing enough, Balachandran adds. ~