Infy provides helping hand to 'failed employees'

India's second-largest IT services provider Infosys Technologies has hired recruitment services provider MaFoi to help its employees who fail to pass the final test to gain employment elsewhere.

All new recruits undergo a 16-week training at its Mysore global training centre before being asked to work on projects. If they fail to qualify, they are asked to leave. Four to 5 per cent of such employees fail to meet the minimum standards.

However, to ease the pain of losing one's job, Infosys is also understood to have hired an agency to provide career counselling to the exiting staff. All these costs are borne by Infosys.

"Our counsellors (those from the agency) are telling them (employees who fail to pass the final test) that just because they could not make it to Infosys does not mean that this is the end of the world. They are telling them not to be broken-hearted considering they are too young, and there are scores of other companies who are waiting eagerly to have them in their team. We are making sure to provide them with outplacements on our costs," explains Nandita Gurjar, VP & Group HR head, Infosys.

She adds that the employees who are being asked to leave after they fail to qualify the test are also quite bright when compared with the talent available to the industry. They are being asked to quit because they are unable to meet some specific standards which are unique to Infosys.

"We set a very high standard for training, and those are being trained by us are also equally competent. We see that almost 80 per cent of such employees are getting outplacement outside of Infosys," Gurjar adds.

Infosys is among the few Indian and global firms that spends huge money in employees' training. The company's Director, HRD, Education & Research, T V Mohandas Pai, says the company spends close to Rs 750 crore for employees training. The company claims to spend around Rs 2.5 lakh to provide training for the 16-week duration.

Infosys claims its global training centre in Mysore to be the largest complex in the world. The centre is capable of providing training 13,500 people in a single sitting.

Outplacement services are widely-adopted across developed economies such as the US in easing employees out of a company by providing paid assistance in finding them new jobs. "I think, in the current environment of uncertainty, companies that will be forced to reduce staff would increasingly employ outplacement firms to help their employees find other jobs and cope with the stress by easing their transition to the next workplace. By establishing a positive redeployment or outplacement culture, any negative or conflicting communications would be mitigated, protecting company's brand identity and boosting up commitment of retained employees," says Sabyasachi Satpathy, co-founder of Mindplex Consulting.

In the third quarter of 2008-09, Infosys reported an involuntary attrition of 1.5 per cent based on which the company said about 1,800 people left the firm during this period.

The company said the involuntary attrition primarily includes trainees who could not qualify the final test after the training.