THINK TALENT SERVICES: LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO HELP ORGANISATIONS MAKE THE BEST OF THEIR TALENT

Think Talent is one of the leading players in the talent management consulting space in the country. Founded in 2010, Think Talent today works with 200+ companies in India and abroad with 60+ employees based in multiple offices across India.

Over the last 10 years, Think Talent has established its credentials by successfully delivering projects for some of the largest and most reputed companies in the country including large conglomerates as well as leading companies in the BFSI, Pharma and IT/ITeS space. One key aspect which has helped Think Talent successfully work with these companies is the ability to work closely with client teams to co-create meaningful solutions. Another key success factor for the Organization has been its success in developing a comprehensive set of in-house digital platforms which allow it to design and deliver large-scale and complex solutions.

These capabilities allow Think Talent to provide comprehensive, integrated and scalable solutions. For example, it works with a leading IT company to deliver a learning program for first-time managers globally covering 1000s of managers every year across 40+ countries. Very few service providers in the talent management space would have the capabilities to deliver such a large scale and complex initiative, especially as a combination of digital and manually delivered methodologies.

Solutions Offered

Instead of offering a very broad range of services, Think Talent has focused on developing deep capabilities in talent management and the solutions it offers are in the area of assessments, learning programs, leadership & teams and career management.

"The paradigm shift in the industry has forced the traditional brands to look beyond the capital and other laurels and understand the value of talent to ensure a successful business. Talent has become a competitive differentiator prioritising investment on assessment programs and initiatives," shares Anjul Pratyush, COO at Think Talent Services. In this sense, the company has been able to leverage the opportunities presented by the changes in the market by being present with the right solution at the right time.

Disrupting Itself to Disrupt the Market

When the company was established in 2010, the initial focus was more towards providing traditional consulting and advisory services in the talent development space. However, the founders very quickly realised the need to go digital and initiated a shift to a model where these services could be delivered using a suite of in-house digital platforms. However, starting with a few pilot projects, the company has been able to successfully move to a situation where more than 80% of its revenue in the current financial year will come from digitally-enabled solutions.

Growth since Inception

Starting with 2 engineers hired on a pilot basis 8 years ago, the company today has more than 25 employees in the technology team, working on a suite of 17 platforms covering different aspects of talent management. These platforms have also allowed the company to radically transform the experience employees have of talent management processes. For example, employees would earlier write long responses to questions as part of the assessment centre process. With its virtual assessment centre offering, Think Talent is able to conduct large scale assessment centres where participants have an exciting experience in completing simulation-based exercises like In-basket and role play on their computer screens.

Focusing on Learning Agility through a Young team

However, this journey towards a digital-focused business model has not been easy. None of the co-founders had a tech background and the team had to learn the nuances of digital technology from scratch. Concepts like rapid prototyping, fail-fast and learning agility, which have become common terms today, have been a way of life for Think Talent teams for many years ago as the company experimented with technology and business models to identify the right approach for itself.

Speaking about this, Anjul Pratyush, COO, Think Talent shares "Our transformation has been a difficult journey. One key aspect of this journey has been our focus on developing youngsters to take on important responsibilities, learn quickly and take risks. We would not be where we are today without our young and fearless team."

This focus on learning agility and risk-taking has also been institutionalized through processes like Internship programs, where the company has a structured process to bring in Interns as part of structured internship programs in different teams and observe their fit over a period of time before hiring them. Almost 60% of the workforce at Think Talent has come into the Organization through this Internship route.

The Future: New Rules of Talent Management

So, where does the company go from here? The Management team at Think Talent strongly believes that we are at the cusp of a great transformation in how companies look at human resources and talent management as an area will gain increasing focus and attention of companies, small and large. "Democratizing of learning, enabling employees to manage their own careers and transforming employee experience of talent processes – these are all issues we have been trying to address while designing our solutions and platforms.

Rather than being academic concepts, these are now becoming mainstream requirements from corporate HR teams and we are uniquely positioned to deliver on these requirements with our digital solutions" shares Anjul Pratyush in articulating his outlook on the way forward for the company. The company is also investing heavily in areas like information security and privacy as organizations across the world increase their own focus on these issues.

"Having established ourselves as a key player in the market, leveraging global opportunity is the next step towards growth backed with the digital platforms" shares Anjul.