HR Distinction Spotlight: Reinventing talent attraction at Wipro

Many organisations strive to go through a transformational journey and guarantee global success. To overcome these challenges, businesses must undertake numerous changes over many years. This can heavily impact culture, talent, and strategic focus.

Through these monumental changes, HR plays a key role in maintaining and aligning a consistent experience for their workforce in times of uncertainty. This week, we look at Wipro’s talent attraction journey. They set out to reshape their hiring and onboarding systems.

Wipro had a team specifically designed to tackle talent challenges. This group was called The Global Strategic Hiring & Redeployment team (GSHR).

“Having created a transparent and defined process with room for flexibility, our organisation and business requirements are going through continuous iterations,” said Neha Misra, Manager, Inclusion & Diversity, Organization Capability, Wipro Limited.

Addressing Diversity and Inclusion was a primary objective for Wipro, in addition to enhancing their employer brand, and employee retention levels

The GSHR team was required to:

• Strategize and implement a process that would increase the overall diversity within the company’s leadership team.
• Re-engineer hiring and redeployment by enabling employees to apply for internal opportunities.
• Successfully empower new leaders from the onboarding phase, onwards.

To accomplish these objectives, Wipro focused on three fundamental principles:

• Improve the hiring and onboarding experience.
• Embrace digitalisation through automation, making processes more sustainable.
• Incorporate a ‘Continuous Learning’ experience, allowing the workforce to learn and improve with a ‘Try Fast, Fail Fast’ mentality.

Wipro made a conscious effort to ensure that pipelines for each role were gender-balanced, to continuously prioritise D&I through the hiring and onboarding experience.

To avoid missing out on quality candidates, the GSHR team would meet leadership candidates in person, discussing the strengths of applicants to create specific roles just for them.

“For our internal talent, we re-engineered our hiring approach, to create an Executive Headhunting Team focussed on internal employees,” said Neha.

“We could engage with the workforce, enabling and retaining top talent as well as creating fulfilling roles.”

The GSHR team also created an internal tool accessible to senior managers and C-suite level employees. The tool allowed employees to apply for opportunities advertised externally and granted a direct interview with the hiring manager.

There was also an anonymous survey created to ensure the hiring and onboarding process was continually improving.

“First impressions count! For leaders to make a direct impact we wanted to focus on successfully empowering and onboarding leaders into Wipro from day 1,” continued Neha.

It was vital for Wipro to instil a culture of Digital Innovation and Disruptions amongst the recruitment team. This created a positive environment for intrapreneurs to reinvent the recruitment process.

To further promote the initiative, Wipro ran a 24-hour #WorkDifferently recruitathon across the globe. This event focussed on all recruiters contacting difficult to find talent and discussing what it’s like to be a part of Wipro.

During the candidate application process, Wipro didn’t ask for CVs. Instead, they listened and discussed, which allowed them to avoid a cookie-cutter type process.

“This led to a 12% global increase of candidates in the interview process within the day. This recruitathon was such a success we decided to keep running them monthly, gamifying the experience by creating awards for recruiters,” said Neha.

The “Spirit of Wipro” continued during the induction day, with professional presentations covering the corporate overview, HR & benefits, the technical equipment set up, finance set up and buddy introduction.

“We continue to use external tools like Textio to De-Gendify our job descriptions and make them more attractive to a diverse audience. Over Q1 we increased our Global Rating from 15 to 65 out of 100.”

The results from the new processes created by the GSHR team were exceptional. Wipro’s internal hiring increased to 60% for the year. The positive response from hiring managers and the ‘Disruptive Mindset’ adopted by the organisation allowed employees to grow and helped Wipro in retaining the top talent.

Wipro also saw a significant increase in diversity. 35% of its global workforce is now female. The company’s time to hire drastically reduced over a year from 65 to 35 days. This additionally improved their hiring manager satisfaction scores.

Further results saw improvements to Wipro’s Glassdoor rating, increasing from 38% to 55%. Finally, they saw the company’s social media reach increase significantly.

Wipro’s Global Strategic and Redeployment Hiring team succeeded in attracting and onboarding talented professionals in the industry.

By successfully executing this strategy, the hiring and onboarding experience left employees satisfied with the process. This satisfaction could lead to higher retention and engagement levels for Wipro’s workforce as they continue to grow.