Consumer tech, consulting firms dominate LinkedIn’s annual ‘Top Companies for India’ list
Unconventional hiring methods, inclusive HR policies, and steady employee engagement programmes went a long way in attraction and retention of top talent in companies.
Homegrown internet companies and Indian arms of global consulting houses emerged as the most attractive career destinations for Indian professionals, according to LinkedIn’s annual Where India Wants to Work list.
The professional networking giant, which has 47 million Indian users on its platform, based its findings on four factors: the interest professionals take in a company, engagement with company’s employees, demands of the job, and employee retention.
Leading the list are Directi, Flipkart, and Paytm's parent One97 Communications. Others to make it to top ten are Amazon, Anheuser-Busch InBev, McKinsey & Company, Google-parent Alphabet, KPMG India, EY, and Oyo.
The biggest gainer has been McKinsey, which climbed 18 spots to #6. Ola, on the other hand, slipped 11 spots from #5 to #16 this year. More than 50 percent of the firms, including three in the top ten, are new entrants to the list, said LinkedIn.
Adith Charlie, India Editor, LinkedIn, said in a statement:
“The Top Companies list highlights the companies where professionals in India want to work now, from homegrown companies to global giants. Studying the job interest rates, engagement with the company pages on the platform as well as retention rates, we found several common threads that make these companies the most preferred among Indian professionals… Similar to last year we continue to see a trend of homegrown companies taking the top spots on the list.”
The 2018 Top Companies have actively undertaken “employee-first strategies” such as flexible work hours, parental leave policies, and time-off to engage in other activities that improve wellness at work.
Amazon, for instance, has a ‘Ramp Back’ programme that offers new parents eight weeks of flexibility and partial work hours to get acclimatised to their new schedules. Such policies and programmes are critical to the attraction and retention of top talent, according to LinkedIn.
Several firms are deploying unconventional hiring methods that go beyond looking at degrees and scorecards. Directi, for instance, gets potential recruits to develop an app or solve the Rubik’s cube. At Alphabet, interviewees could be greeted with esoteric questions like: ‘Estimate the number of tennis balls that can fit into a plane’. DBS Bank hired over 150 techies last year by conducting hackathons.
LinkedIn looked at companies over 500 employees to arrive at the findings. Others in the Top 25 include Daimler, Adobe, Expedia, Morgan Stanley, DBS Bank, Ola, General Electric, MakeMyTrip, PwC, Goldman Sachs, Shell, JPMorgan Chase, Unilever, Reliance Industries, and Deloitte India.