Strategic Talent Acquisition Framework for Small and Medium Enterprises in India

Details

Supervisors

Blome, Constantin

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Global firms are struggling to find talent and these challenges are driven by four major factors: globalization, demographics, demand and supply of workers with competencies (Manning et al., 2008; Schuler et al., 2011). Companies increasingly go where the talent is (Manning et al., 2008), which results in growing opportunities to offshore high skilled jobs, recruiting science and engineering talent and working with service partners in strategic locations, often knows as “clusters”. While outsourcing is becoming a more common trend, companies often turn to third-party service providers. According to Manning et al. (2008), more and more small service providers from different locations around the world will play a role in the product development and engineering sector. This Master Thesis is completed with the collaboration of Eurosia S.A., a young and growing service company based at the Technopark of Trivandrum, a technology cluster in the state of Kerala, India. The goal is to shed light on the talent acquisition process of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) based in India. Qualitative interviews have been conducted with SMEs based at the Technopark in order to highlight the prominent features of their talent acquisition process. The results of this study indicate that most companies that participated in this study are between the developing stage and the stable stage for their talent acquisition. They usually have a clear talent acquisition strategy and know the kind of talent they are searching for. The skills and the attitude are both very important criteria to consider while looking for candidates. Regarding employment branding, it is basic and usually limited to a company website and a LinkedIn company page. They use a variety of different talent sourcing channels. The workforce planning is inconsistent, as the companies are vacancy-focused. In terms of metrics, they have a few (sometimes no) performance metrics in place.