The Issue: A Blueprint for Attracting Talent

How did the global consulting company respond to the challenge of hiring tens of thousands of workers in India in just six years?

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Accenture hasn't always been a global outsourcing giant. In 2001, the strategic consulting and high-tech services company had only a few hundred employees in India, while its India-based competitors had thousands. These outsourcing firms had been in the market for years, had close relationships with local recruiting firms and universities, and were well-known names to graduating students in India's exploding economy.

Accenture (ACN) needed to grow—and fast. "Clients were demanding that we have more of a presence in developing countries," says Jill Smart, now Accenture's chief human resources officer. "We needed to remain competitive." To do that, the company faced a huge challenge: Grow from a few hundred to tens of thousands of employees in India in just six years.

Hiring that many employees at one time doesn't just mean hiring engineers for client jobs. To start, the company needed a corporate infrastructure in India—enough HR, legal, and other corporate employees to go about hiring massive numbers of employees from software engineers to chartered accountants for client work. The problem? "These were in themselves hot skills, and it's very hard to get a lot of experienced HR professionals [in India]," Smart says.

Pooling HR Resources

To help solve the problem, Accenture created a partnership with XLRI, an MBA program in the city of Jamshedpur, to help fill the pipeline with potential HR managers. The two-year program, which Accenture says is the first of its kind, trains students for a career in human resources, with a focus on the info-tech industry.

Once it began building that infrastructure, Accenture could begin recruiting. The company had long relied on executives in the consulting and services business, not just those in HR, to do much of the recruiting and interviewing. But on this scale, says Smart, "we just didn't have enough executives to actually do that." To help free them up from some of the administrative functions of hiring—résumé screening, background checking—Accenture created a "shared services" HR group that would pool resources and perform these more basic functions across all the businesses.

Each Emerging Market Is Different

Other mass recruiting efforts were perhaps harder. While its competitors had established brands, Accenture's wasn't well known to many graduates in India, and the company had to launch a big marketing push to remedy that. In addition to traditional campaigns, it focused on communicating to incoming employees the benefits of working at Accenture—its fleet of vans that help workers commute, extensive free training in technical skills. "Word travels very fast," says Smart. "One of our best marketing campaigns was to create a great work experience for people we did hire."

Today, Accenture has 37,000 employees in India and continues to grow. While Smart says one of the biggest lessons was that each emerging market is different—what works in India might not when scaling up in, say, the Philippines. The company is using what it learned by building an "employer brand," centralizing HR work, and priming the pump with HR managers in other countries.

"We have to be flexible to the approach we take," says Smart. "You can't have everything standardized. The pool of candidates each has priorities that may not be the same as people in other countries."

McGregor is BusinessWeek's management editor.