Digital onboarding is catching up as freshers get to innovate

The shift has been rather sudden for organisations and the process is still being streamlined. Not surprisingly, permanent employees are being given preference in this process.

As part of its commitment to keep ‘lights on’ to ensure India stays connected during the covid-19 lockdown, telecom operator Bharti Airtel has innovated to honour its B-School summer placement offers for this year. According to analysts, telecom sector has been leading in honoring job offers during the lockdown as the industry has been on a need-based hiring mandate for some time.

This week, over 50 summer interns from India’s top B-schools were digitally on-boarded to Airtel’s Young Leader Summer Internship Program 2020. These B-Schools include IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, FMS Delhi, MDI Gurgaon, IIFT Delhi, NITIE Mumbai, JBIMS Mumbai and XLRI Jamshedpur. Last week, Reliance Jio also announced that 84 summer interns have been on-boarded for a virtual internship.

The company has redesigned its Young Leaders Summer Internship Program to make it completely virtual. Right from induction to mentorship to final reviews, the entire program will run virtually. Projects have been designed keeping in mind the remote nature of working and all interns have been provided a learning journey as per their internship streams.

IT consulting company Capgemini which has half its global employee base in India noted that it has been onboarding employees digitally since the lockdown was implemented. “We are onboarding employees who have joined during the lockdown period across grades and using digital means of onboarding which also includes completing their joining formalities online. We also assign buddies to new hires to help assimilate while working virtually. We have on-boarded nearly 350 employees since last week digitally,” the company said in a statement in response to queries on hiring.

Capgemini hired more than 6,000 employees in Q1 (January-March), including 4,000 laterals and almost 2,000 freshers. In Q2, they have rolled out offers to more than 4,000 lateral hires and will be onboarding them. Through their fresher platform Millenial Garage, the company seeks to develop solutions on technologies like analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence among others.

Millennial Garage has introduced solutions built on “what-if” scenario to simulate various conductions and explore the impact of the covid-19 situation on businesses and enable better decision-making. Currently 75% of the workforce in Millennial Garage are freshers who have joined in Q1 and are working collaboratively with experts.

Sunil C, head of Specialized Staffing, TeamLease Digital, an HR solutions company noted that most organisations, even in the IT sector were not fully prepared for all digital onboarding of employees during the lockdown. However, they are catching up rapidly by putting document management systems, application tracking systems and operation management systems in place. “At present around 30% IT companies are e-boarding permanent employees whereas most have deferred contract hiring by at least a month. With freshers/interns it is easier to onboard because there is little prior skill- preferance matching required,” he noted.

―Livemint