A friend who heads marketing for a large US IT hardware multinational told me the other day his firm was swamped with applications for a mid-level position it had advertised on the web.
While scanning the applications, he found, unusually, that the applicants included two Americans, one Australian and one New Zealander.
He asked HR to get back to them saying the job profile spanned the Asia-Pacific but was very much grounded in Bangalore. All four (none were of Indian origin) got back saying they were game.
Last week, I was talking to a partner at a Big Four consulting firm. Remarkably, he said, more and more partners from around the world wanted to come and work in India. More so in the last six months, he said.
"Once upon a time, people were 'seconded' to India; now they want to come here. Else, it was only Indians going overseas," he told me.
That more and more foreigners want to work in India is not new. So why is it an issue today? Because multi-cultural workplaces are exploding all over the place-the term denoting multi-national rather than just people from different parts of the country.
My sense is that gearing up to receive and exploit talent from the world over will be a big challenge and task for Indian companies, as many organisations have already realised or are in the process of doing so.
Indian organisations are not new to working with non-Indians. But, a director with an IT MNC said to me recently, "In India, the only multi-cultural exposure has been really bi-cultural. So you had German, Swiss and American companies from the west, and Korean, Japanese and now Chinese companies from the east setting up companies in India alone or
with minority joint venture partners."
According to him, in these cases, the management, because of the ownership pattern, hailed from the home country. So there was a managing director and maybe one more director who were either German or American.
Everyone else was local or, in this case, Indian. So while there were some cultural issues, the onus on assimilation lay between one individual or two and the rest of the organisation!
But in the last few years, in industries like IT, telecom, retail, hospitality, among others, increasingly, expatriates are coming in at middle and even junior level positions. This creates an interesting challenge and opportunity for Indian organisations and managers:
Challenge because Indian managers are yet not there when it comes to working in truly multi-cultural workplaces, here and overseas.
Opportunity because effectively addressing these issues will help not just companies achieve greater talent integration for the domestic marketplace but also help Indian managers better tackle the world. I recall Ratan Tata telling me in an interview four years ago that