Mohabbat, jung aur hiring mein sab jaayaz hai!

Some hiring processes may look like poultry farming, while others appear sophisticated and a closed-door affair. Spray and pray is still in the offing at all kinds of firms, irrespective of whether they won McKinsey and Co. award for AI innovations and consulting leadership. Penguins hire penguins, and friends and ex-colleagues hire each other. Mohabbat, jung aur hiring mein sab jaayaz hai!

However you hire, your hiring governance must always remain a Caesar's wife! A case of Tiger Analytics in perspective...

Tiger Analytics wins MINSKY Award for Excellence in AI Strategy Consulting in 2023!

In the last 1 yr, Tiger's hiring in the consulting space (assuming, primarily AI consulting) has seen an upswing of 34%. HR is flat at 27%.

Source: LinkedIn

Hiring for leadership roles vs. hiring for general staff in tech has different styles, games, and governance. Let's explore.

5th Dec I looked at a job by Tiger promoted on LinkedIn by their Director of Talent Acquisition. See pic below. This job is 4 weeks old and has gathered 214 applicants... Looks like they didn't get any quality candidates. This is very common. No wonder the TA leader is promoting the job again....

I checked the JD through the link given in the post.

BUT, I noticed that one of their senior tech leaders had promoted the same job by the same senior manager of talent acquisition with almost the same content in the post 3 months back. See that 3-month-old post below?

Now, please notice the 4 tech leaders tagged in Ashokan's post: Radhakrishan, Shankar, Bharathan, and Rohith.

I checked their LinkedIn profiles and found something interesting. They all have worked together at LTI MindTree, PwC, Cognizant, etc. They all have joined Tiger in the last year or around that time, and some in the last 4 months. Apparently, they were known to each other.

So, can you guess: Was it employee referral for all these hires?

Now, since this job/s is again being promoted, if you are a recruiter, what would you do?

Obviously ask for a referral from these folks or ask them to promote these jobs on LinkedIn.

Aldo, interestingly, all these 4 tech leaders have experiences with tech/analytics services firms.

So, the next focus for the recruiter shall be services firms, including Accenture, EXL, other analytics firms like Fractal, ZS, Axtria, etc., and not to forget the typical Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant, etc.

People hire talent, but conveniently and maybe safely, the talent that they have known very well. Is there anything wrong here that discriminates against open market talent? Not sure. That's something that hiring governance shall focus on and fix. But wonder, who is responsible for that hiring governance?

Tiger has grown really well in the past 2 years, as LinkedIn data shows—see pic below. From ~3K in Dec 2022 to 5145 in Dec 2024. Since they hired at this pace, more than 53 percent of staff have joined in the last 24 months, and so the median tenure is 2.2 years.

What is also interesting is the slowdown that hiring saw in April 2023, with 150 joiners in April 2023 falling consistently for 5 months (Apr-Aug 2023). Aug joining rate of 49 was the lowest that it saw in the last 24 months. So, the overhiring of 2021 and 2022 weighed down heavily, coupled with a slowdown in market demand, leading to the fall in hiring. Tiger was not alone to see this trend. The last 2 quarters of this calendar year have seen again a significant growth in hiring at Tiger, and only Dec 2024 numbers would tell how the year ends. Tiger follows the Jan-Dec appraisal cycle, so attrition may also have been lower in the last few months, and the real attrition may hit post-Jan (including 2 months of notice, so effectively from March and April, the real picture will be out for hiring against attrition (backfills)).

Let's work on the math of hiring numbers: 24 months, 2400 people onboarded. Which is an average of 100 per month. Which means an average of 150 offers every month. Maybe fewer offers, as industrywide attrition was very low in the last year, added to massive layoffs.

Any idea what the offer to conversion ratio for Tiger may have been in 2024?

From personal research and sources I spoke with at Tiger, annual appraisal was not very handsome for many. Maybe in the range of 10%, and it was the same for their close competitors. Those who seek a 25% or 30% raise have to quit, and this quitting may be the highest in the Jan-March time of 2025, as market analysts and tech hiring pundits predict.

Wishing phenomenal growth to Tiger and all its competitors in the analytics and AI/ML space and leading the world with their tech innovations and consulting, all for a great future for all of us.