In today’s hiring landscape, the process itself has become a powerful reflection of an organisation’s culture and intent. In a candid conversation with Varun Gautam, Senior Corporate Vice President and Head of Talent Supply Chain at Persistent Systems, one theme stood out evidently: professionals today are evaluating organisations as much as organisations are evaluating them. From deeper questions on purpose and impact to rising curiosity around AI-led hiring, continuous learning, and cross-domain careers, he shared how expectations are evolving rapidly. The discussion offered sharp insights into why speed, transparency, and trust are now central to building long-term credibility in a dynamic world of work.
In today’s hiring market, candidates often form their strongest impressions during the hiring process itself. How much do speed, clarity of role, and communication now influence whether professionals see an organisation as a serious long-term career option?
In today’s hiring market, the talent brand of an organisation really matters. It is extremely important. There are many public platforms today where employers are rated and evaluated. For instance, there are AmbitionBox, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn, among others. These platforms play a critical role because they are where organisations demonstrate and establish their talent brand. That is where you reflect your culture and the kind of work you do through your employees and employee advocacy.
Beyond that, speed, clarity of role, and communication are decisive in shaping whether a candidate sees an organisation as a long-term or a short-term career option. Today, even the definition of long-term and short-term has become very dynamic. There was a time when long-term meant ten, twenty, or even thirty years. That’s no longer the case.
A fast and well-orchestrated hiring process demonstrates organisational maturity. It reflects how you respect people and the kind of people practices you have in place. Similarly, clarity of role is fundamental. It begins with something as basic as writing a proper job description that accurately reflects the kind of work the individual is expected to do. This must then be aligned with the reality on the ground. When the person joins, they should be doing the same kind of work that was communicated during the hiring process.
This demonstrates the organisation’s intent and commitment towards the individual’s career growth. It demonstrates transparency regarding the work, its connection to future career progression, and its relevance to skills. Ultimately, communication builds trust. Together, speed, clarity, and communication provide a live preview of the employee lifecycle with the employer. This strongly influences a candidate's confidence in deciding to join and commit, even within today’s evolving definition of the long term.
Many professionals with two to five years of experience are already thinking differently about work compared to previous generations. Are you noticing shifts in what this group prioritises when evaluating new opportunities?
Absolutely. The thought process of professionals with two to five years of experience has changed almost 180 degrees over the last five years. There are, of course, different groups that prioritise different things, but some clear and consistent trends are emerging.
Quality of work and culture continue to remain critical. However, people today also place great importance on the organisation's broader social agenda. We have seen candidates go beyond the usual job-related questions during interviews. They want to understand what the organisation is doing for communities and society. They ask about our carbon footprint, our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how we create an inclusive workplace. These factors are becoming increasingly important for this segment.
At the same time, there is a strong focus on accelerated skill growth and exposure to multiple domains. Professionals today value high-impact work more than long tenure. Earlier, organisations could highlight the stability of a long-term project as a strong selling point. Today, that alone does not influence decisions. For companies like ours, the quality of engineering work we offer and the strength of our engineering culture play a far greater role.
Candidates want to understand how they will be rotated internally, how they will continuously upgrade their skills, how they will gain certifications, and how they can participate in technical communities. These are key drivers. When you bring all of this together, people are evaluating purposeful and compounding career paths. They want to see how organisations contribute to social causes, how they enable career growth, and how they provide exposure to cutting-edge work.
As a result, the decision-making process has become far more comprehensive. Stability, tenure, and compensation are still important, but they are no longer the primary drivers. Professionals today do not think in terms of twenty or thirty-year careers. They plan in three to five-year horizons. The key question for them is: what will I learn and achieve in the next few years, and how will that shape my long-term career strategy? That is how they evaluate opportunities and define their paths today.
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As AI becomes more involved in screening and shortlisting, do candidates ask how decisions are made? Is transparency in AI-driven hiring becoming important for employer credibility?
This is a very crucial space because it is bringing a lot of transformation in the way the entire talent supply chain works. Like any other domain or industry, there is now an infusion of AI across every part of the process. At Persistent Systems, we have built a framework called Talent.ai, where we have AI interventions right from sourcing and screening to the way we engage with candidates.
Your question is specifically around evaluation, and in that space, we are also using AI agents to engage with and assess candidates. But it does not stop there. These agents also stay connected with candidates after the offer stage, during the time between offer and joining. We have created a platform called PX360, which is backed by an AI agent that keeps engaging with candidates, answering their queries and supporting them through that phase.
Beyond that, once they join and move from candidate to employee, AI continues to play a role. Their deployment on projects is supported by agentic models, and their learning journeys are also agentic. The idea is that AI-driven interventions are present across the entire talent lifecycle.
Now, unless you bring transparency and create comfort, people will obviously question the sensitivity and reliability of these systems. Candidates want to understand how much they can trust the process and whether it is fair. So yes, we are seeing an increase in candidates asking questions about AI in the screening and evaluation process.
There is a strong need for transparency. When a human panel interviews candidates, they tend to believe that the person knows what they are asking and why. With AI, the same level of confidence does not come automatically. That is the shift we have seen over the last 12 months.
Interestingly, our AI-based assessments earlier had a very low acceptance rate of around 8 per cent. Over the last six to eight months, this has increased significantly to nearly 40 to 60 per cent. This totally shows that trust is growing as candidates experience the process and understand how it works.
We have also implemented these assessments internally. We use AI not only for external candidates but also to assess the skill proficiency of our employees. These assessments help us understand capability levels and guide career progression.
Similarly, even our training programmes are supported by AI. While the learning content is curated, the technology enables employees to define their own learning journey. It takes into account their current competencies, the skills they need, the openings available today, and the demand we foresee in the next three, six, or twelve months.
Overall, transparency has become extremely important. As technology continues to evolve and adoption increases, organisations have to ensure that they communicate clearly and build confidence among both candidates and employees.
What metrics/data tell you that the way you hire and develop talent is delivering results? Do you focus on how quickly people become project-ready, how fast their skills evolve, or how easily they move into future-focused roles?
Yes, I personally believe, and it has been said by many, that anything which can be measured can be managed. So we always try to convert whatever we do into a numeric form so that it can be measured. When something is measurable, we are able to establish baselines, and once the baseline is set, it becomes easier to track improvement over a period of time. The same philosophy applies here as well.
Time to project readiness is one of the core measures of hiring quality for us. It tells us how effectively we are bringing in talent that can quickly contribute to business outcomes. The speed at which new skills are acquired, or what we call skill velocity, is also becoming an increasingly important priority. We closely track how fast individuals are able to pick up new capabilities, especially in emerging technology areas.
Internal mobility rates are another critical indicator. They reflect how successfully we are able to deploy and redeploy people, and how easily they transition into future-focused roles. This gives us a clear sense of whether our learning and development interventions are aligned with business needs.
Retention remains a key metric across the industry. It tells us how motivated the workforce is and how well our people strategies are aligned with employee expectations. In a product engineering- and services-led organisation like Persistent Systems, where the business is also undergoing a significant AI-driven transformation, these indicators become even more important.
However, if I look at it holistically, time as a measure across every stage of the talent lifecycle is perhaps the biggest driver. Whether it is time to hire, time to deploy, time to redeploy, time to train, or time to build skills, these metrics directly influence business outcomes. They help us move faster, stay competitive, and ensure that our talent strategy is delivering measurable results.
In a project-based environment, bench time used to be seen negatively. Are younger professionals starting to see bench periods instead as reskilling windows, and has that changed how organisations position non-billable phases?
Not at all. In fact, I think you have partly answered the question as well. A lot of this depends on how the organisation positions it, and that is largely driven by the culture you build internally. If you are going to demean someone who is on the bench, then naturally the individual will feel bothered or concerned. But if the organisation treats it as an important phase, the perception changes.
Clearly, there is a very strong and evolving trend today where people are prioritising learning. And when learning becomes a priority, it requires dedicated time. Of course, there is always on-the-job learning, but in environments like ours, where we invest significantly in structured learning practices, we have seen that the incoming talent does not look at bench time as something negative or as a stigma. Instead, they see it as a structured window for reskilling and upgrading themselves.
In more mature systems like Persistent Systems, there are very well-defined and orchestrated bench policies. These are designed to ensure that employees are able to use that time productively to build new capabilities. For instance, if someone is expected to roll off a project in the month of February, they start receiving proactive alerts 60 to 90 days in advance. This allows them to plan, evaluate their current skill stack, and think about how they want to utilise that time.
As I mentioned earlier, we invest strongly in learning practices. There are curated individual development plans that are defined based on a person’s career journey, years of experience, domain exposure, and skill proficiency levels. Employees use this phase to focus on certifications, new technologies, and domain depth.
So today, the positioning of non-billable time is increasingly as an accelerated learning phase rather than an idle period. This shift has played a significant role in improving talent readiness. And once individuals invest that time in meaningful learning, their acceptance for deployment and redeployment also increases.
Are hiring conversations now including discussions around how often engineers can expect to shift domains or industries, given that cross-domain exposure is becoming a career differentiator?
Absolutely. The same mindset we see in the two-to-five-year talent segment applies here as well. Domain and industry mobility has become a critical lever in career development today. From the outset, individuals joining a system like Persistent Systems are made aware that continuous movement and learning are integral to growth. The ecosystem is deliberately designed so that individual learning aspirations align closely with organisational capability needs, creating career pathways that are both purposeful and future-ready.
This is why organisations need to make significant investments in learning environments, so that people are able to understand multiple domains and industries in depth. What we are witnessing today is that candidates and employees are proactively seeking multi-domain and multi-industry opportunities. They want exposure. They do not want to be restricted to one technology or one domain. There is a very strong intent to keep learning, to build wider experience, and to work across different domains and industries.
Because of this, cross-domain exposure is now viewed as a major career accelerator. In our case, we have a very diverse set of verticals, which naturally enables domain mobility. We also have initiatives like Gig Garage, which is an internal marketplace where employees can take up gig opportunities across the organisation. When they participate in such programmes, they need to demonstrate broader capabilities. The expectation is that they should not be seen only as a BFSI, high-tech, telecom, or single-domain resource.
This is how we drive rotation, deployment, and skill enhancement across the organisation. There is a lot of openness among talent today to move across domains and industries, and they are actively aspiring to make these transitions. As an employer, if we are not able to enable such opportunities internally, people will eventually look outside. Our focus, therefore, is to ensure that these pathways exist, which also plays an important role in maintaining strong retention by giving employees meaningful cross-domain and cross-industry exposure.
What is one aspect of working at Persistent that employees truly value after joining, but which is difficult to communicate effectively through employer branding?
Last year, we ran a series called Why Join Persistent, where we brought together leaders from across the organisation and asked them a very simple question. What is that one aspect that makes someone join and continue their journey with Persistent Systems? While we expected different perspectives, there were a few themes that consistently came out.
One of the strongest was the deep collaborative culture that exists within the organisation. There is a very strong engineering-first mindset, which employees truly value once they start working here. The leadership is very approachable, and there is a genuine openness across levels. People experience strong cross-talent and cross-level teamwork, which is difficult to fully communicate from the outside. Along with this, the investments in learning, which are deeply integrated into day-to-day work, create a high-trust and innovation-driven environment. There is also a unique balance between global-scale opportunities and highly personalised development journeys. These are things that employees truly appreciate after joining, but they are not always easy to express through external communication alone.
If you look at platforms such as AmbitionBox or Glassdoor, the feedback from employees reflects these experiences, and in many cases, the ratings stand out when compared to peers. Ultimately, it is less about what we say externally and more about the culture we build and how consistently we engage with our people. Employer branding initiatives can support this, but they cannot substitute for the lived employee experience.
Some strong indicators reinforce this. For example, close to one in four people who join us come through employee referrals. If employees were not engaged or confident about the organisation, it would not be possible for nearly 30 per cent of hiring to come through referrals. Similarly, our business performance is closely linked to the strength of our people ecosystem. We have delivered twenty-three consecutive quarters of growth, which is significant for a services-led organisation. This kind of performance is only possible when employees are aligned with the larger environment and purpose.
Externally as well, this reflects in the brand. We have been recognised by Brand Finance as India’s fastest-growing IT services brand over the last five years, with a strong increase in brand value in the past twelve months. Independent analysts such as Everest Group have also placed us in leadership quadrants across areas such as next-generation cloud, data, analytics, and AI. These recognitions reinforce the strength of the culture internally, which in turn builds both the larger brand and the employer brand over time.
Varun Gautam is a seasoned Talent leader with over 24 years of global HR experience and currently serves as Senior Vice President, Talent Supply Chain at Persistent Systems, overseeing workforce strategy for 26,500+ employees. His career spans key roles at Hexaware Technologies and nearly two decades at HCL Technologies across Talent Management, Workforce Staffing, Leadership Hiring, Global Mobility, and HR Automation. Recognised by Everest Group and Brandon Hall Group and featured by Forbes India, he is known for blending data-driven intelligence with a human-centred philosophy to build a future-ready, AI-enabled talent ecosystem.
