Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp. (Part 10)

By guest author Tony Scott

Hiring Global Talent

Tony: What about your external hiring process – you clearly can’t grow on a global scale only through internal growth while you are building this capability?

Vivek: In the meantime, when you hire people you hire the best. Today when we hire people, we don’t look at where the person is based or what gender or race he or she is. We take that person on board and start encouraging him or her to get into this global mindset. For example, we were looking to hire a senior sales person. My preference is that everything else being equal, I will take people who have international experience because it just adds to our skills and capabilities.

Tony: It also should help to change your culture by bringing in people with a more global mindset. Do you think others who are already in your organization can learn from the outside hires?

Vivek: You have to change your culture, and to effect change you sometimes have to bring in someone from the outside. If three people have the same credentials and the same competencies, you should take the person who can bring a different perspective.

So I think, little by little, you are encouraging several things. First, you establish a process that says to employees: “You need to start taking an active role in terms of positioning yourself for jobs which are not necessarily either India based, U.S. based, or Americas based ­­– so start moving.” Believe it or not, a lot of people are coming forward and saying, I’d like to apply for this position.

The second thing is that when I look at my people needs and I have an open slot for somebody for a delivery organization in India, I’ll try to find somebody who is here and fits the bill.   I will say to them: “Take a two-month or two-year assignment in India as training.” I won’t do this on expat basis, but I’ll fundamentally make that it clear that this is something which we do as a company.

Tony: I think that’s one of the critical things when you’re talking about institutionalizing a global mindset within your company. If you’re going to look at people, whether it’s in your own organization or outside of it, you need to look look for people and skill sets that can fill open roles in multiple locations. If you really want to create a global culture and a global capability of selling and delivering to your customers, you have to look at people who are not necessarily from that place.

The model for hiring has historically always been: “I have this job that needs to be done. The most efficient way to do that is to hire someone who has done exactly that before.”

Vivek: Sure.

Tony: Whether it’s inside or outside of my organization. So if you just continue to turn the crank, you are trying to fit a square peg into a well-defined square box. But it doesn’t make the box expand at all.

Vivek: The contrary, rather. As I said, it’s something we are trying to institutionalize, to make it a mandate for people to move up.

Sometimes a big change to a company’s culture comes to play when a company makes an international acquisition. For example, when we acquired a company in Brazil, they had a bunch of people in Brazil, but they also had a bunch of people who were working in Brazil but not necessarily based out of Brazil. So suddenly you find you have acquired talent which is Latin American, which is Brazilian, which speaks Portuguese and which is based out of Brazil, but you also have an extension of the base in Brazil which has a presence elsewhere.

All of those people now must be integrated into CSC. The first thing is recognizing that you have to have people with a global presence, global mindset, global experience, and setting up a process internally to make this happen. The second is assimilation when you acquire companies. Historically, CSC has been very good at doing this because a lot of customers who have come to us and large percentage of the new geographic locations which we have entered have come through acquisition. So when you acquire a facility, you acquire the people and, you hope, the culture to deal with integration.

This segment is part 10 in the series : Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp.
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