Satyam to recruit again, even seniors

For the first time in almost six months after it was acquired by Tech Mahindra, Satyam Computer Services (now rebranded as Mahindra Satyam) will hire 130 people from outside the company.

In June this year, Satyam had initiated a ‘virtual pool programme’ (VPP) for close to 10,000 surplus employees, that allowed ‘excess’ talent pool in India to be retained, albeit at a reduced pay for a defined period of four to six months. Some of these employees were later “called back to work” with full wages.

“We got an approval for external hiring on October 4. These are speciality skills, which are not there in the virtual pool and are not trainable internally. These junior- and middle-level hirings will largely be from India. Besides, we will be hiring one or two senior level people from the market for select areas,” the company’s chief people and marketing officer, Hari Thalapalli, told Business Standard.

He, however, did not disclose the roles to be assigned to these seniors it plans to hire. The company currently has around 34,000 staffers globally, and is working towards shaking off the bad image its disgraced founder, Ramalinga Raju, had left it with.

Thalapalli said the company, in mid-September, had conducted a first-ever customer forum in Europe, wherein 50 of its key customers participated. “We have done whatever is required to regain our customer confidence and now there are no more customer losses happening. Besides, the five-year SAP contract with global pharmaceutical major GlaxoSmithKline and the recent three-year extension of contract by General Electric, we recently got three to four more customers whom we had lost earlier. All these are $30-40 million per year contracts in the manufacturing space, which were extended for three more years,” he said.

Mahindra Satyam lost 200-250 client companies after the confession by founder Ramalinga Raju that he had cooked the company’s books for several years. Today, the company has 400 customers globally.

“We have so far won 30 new logos, most of them single-digit million dollar contracts, and 15 new orders in Oracle implementation in 15 weeks. There is a complete strategy that has been laid out to regain lost contracts and we are working towards it,” Thalapalli said.

On the cultural side and people-related issues, he said the company had recently initiated employee connect programmes, including one in which the chief executive officer, C P Gurnani, walks across different floors and talks to people and listens to their issues.

“We recently did something called ‘Shadow Board’, typically for associates (staffers) who have 2-6 years of work experience. We have selected 8-10 people who act as board members, who will identify problems and bring forth unconventional ways of resolving the problems – including how to procure new business and rebuild brand. Clearly, now there is a greater amount of connect between the leadership and associates than earlier,” he added.