Q: What are your views on the IT consulting and Staff Augmentation services in India?
A: With the ever-increasing need for companies to be competitive in this dynamic marketplace, pressure on both large and small companies’ IT staff has increased dramatically. The demand for specialized consultants for particular projects has created the need for software consulting companies to provide staff augmentation services. With IT jobs growing at a rate of 17% per year, the need for IT professionals is expected to grow by over 60,000 positions by the year 2009. It seems that the void of available IT professionals will not go away any time soon.

In India, Staff Augmentation Services model is picking up very fast. We have been growing 20% year after year. Since market is getting competitive day by day, we have to redefine the staffing services model to tailor it for the unique Indian context.

 

New Concepts, which have been practiced by Artech, include Onsite Professional Support, Direct Recruitment Services, Multichannel Sourcing Strategy, Employee Referral Programs, Employee Assessment Techniques and Measuring Employee Engagement Indexes.

 

In addition we have to also listen to the aspirational goals of our consultants for more proactive engagement.

 

Q: What lies behind Artech’s ability to sustain?
A: Our biggest strength lies in our ability to resource and retain top candidates for multiple requirements. We focus on Recruitment, Retention and Relationships. We are extremely conscious of our clients’ needs. Our business developers are always open to extend different kinds of associations with IT and non-IT companies and customers directly. It makes value sense to each party and finally generates satisfied customers. Our service offerings are woven around our concepts and beliefs of understanding client requirements in order to provide cost-effective solutions tailored to meet defined requirements within stringent deadlines.

 

We have an average of 60 joinees per month. Artech has created a variable cost structure for the recruitment function, and also reduced Operational cost of Talent Acquisition.

 

Q: Your multilingual product, Akshar Naveen has been extremely successful in Hindi language. Which other languages are you targeting now?
A: Akshar Naveen has been designed specifically to meet the challenges of multi lingual threats and address the needs of the different groups. With the ever-increasing reach of Internet, it was absolutely essential to build content relevant to local population. The company, in a vision to bridge the gap between technology and language, has developed this multilingual marvel.

 

Akshar is a practical fusion of modern computing with Indian languages. Or we can say, it is a multilingual Word Processor, which is available in Windows as well as Linux. If we talk in detail about the product, when we developed Akshar Naveen 1.0, it was available in Hindi, Bangla, Gujarat and Punjabi. Later we introduced Akshar 2.0 and added Oriya as well. The independent office suite of Akshar contains Text Editor, Spreadsheet, Presentation Maker, database, Html Editor and PDF Converter.

Akshar client list consists of numerous Govt. departments, public sectors and banks. It has done phenomenally well in Northern part of India .We are now focusing at Gujrat, Orissa, and Punjab for a wide marketing network and also broadening our reach through a network of dealers all over India.

 

Q: Can you throw some light on your latest multilingual applications?
A: Artech’s multilingual applications have been catering to the IT industry for over a decade. We are the pioneers in developing the applications of multilingual products. We have developed a multilingual web based payroll. It is very helpful for companies where you have to process payroll for a large number of employees. It also provides an interface for the employees where they can see their salary details, leave details etc. They can also download a copy of their salary slip. This helps in reducing the burden of the finance department to a great extent.

 

Since it is bi-lingual, all Government and PSUs can have certain statutory reports in Hindi as well as in English. We have also implemented applications like gate pass, attendance and diary management systems, which are with multilingual support.
We have done multilingual enablement of Portals, e-mails and Search engines. Moreover, we also have utilities to provide multilingual capabilities for third party application.

 

We have also developed certain localized services where any language interface can be converted to Devnagiri at an executable level.

 

Q: You recently won an award in Recruitment Process Outsourcing. Tell us something about that.
A: Yes, Artech India won the AMITY LEADERSHIP AWARD for excellence in RPO, recently. We won this in close competition with several best companies in the industry. Our success lies with the mature model for servicing clients of Artech US.

Our service in RPO division helps the industry to remove the operational recruitment activity burden. We reduce overall recruitment cost by utilizing best practices and replacing a fixed cost base with a variable charging structure. We improve quality of service delivery by regular efficiency analysis and implementing improved methods.

Basically, Artech focuses on gaining a good understanding of its clients’ functional environment, business goals and utilizes specialized candidate skill set and profile testing to ensure best matched resources for its clients’ needs.

 

I would like to dedicate this award to the never die spirits of my team.

 

Q: How is RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) different from a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)?
A: I would say Recruitment Process Outsourcing is taking Business Process Outsourcing one-step further to the Human Resource Processing. Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a solution that involves outsourcing a part or the entire process to an external service provider who provides the necessary skills, tools, technologies and activities to serve as their clients’ virtual “recruiting department”.

Organizations consider RPO not necessarily to cut costs, but rather to make their recruitment costs more variable and more closely aligned to organizational business cycle dynamics.