Infosys Technologies Limited: The Global Talent Program

Infosys Technologies Limited, the Bangalore-based information technology company, embarked on a global recruitment program in 2006. The first batch of recruits from U.S. universities were brought to the company's Mysore training facility in India and put through a rigorous 16-week training program. By November 2007, the third U.S. batch was on campus for training along with the first batch from the U.K. Each of these batches had around 125 recruits. The company's CEO had charged Infosys' Head of Administration and Human Resources Development, Mohandas Pai, to step up the recruiting to around 1,000 overseas recruits a year from countries such as the US, UK, continental Europe, and China as a way to globalize the workforce. Pai was concerned that this ambitious recruitment program would strain the company's training function. His concern stemmed from the fact that the trainers had to deal with cultural differences and varied learning styles of overseas recruits. The trainers had done a commendable job of making adjustments while training was ongoing, but Pai wondered if the same adjustments could be made when the scale of recruits increased dramatically. This case is useful for examining the issues of training capacity and cross-cultural training.