Q. Do you see a promising growth trend in the design market?
A. Yes, absolutely. We think the embedded space is one of the most promising verticals for growth in the industry. The main challenge is to get skilled personnel and retain them. During the recession, consumer electronics was one of the very few markets to actually record a growth in sales and value. The number of electronic gadgets in the space around us is increasing like crazy. Our cars and homes now have ten times more electronics in them than the amount five years ago. Devices are increasing in number and so is the complexity of the technology they incorporate. The connected devices market is also increasing manifold.
In the next five years, we foresee a huge growth in our verticals. Lab-on-chip is another field which will explode in usability. It’s basically a chip that can measure a person’s vital parameters (heart rate, pulse, etc) and send them to a remote server for analysis. There is so much potential for growth in this field that it is close to impossible to even imagine that it’s getting saturated at least for the next 15 years.
Q. Could you describe your recruitment process?
A. We strongly work through campus hiring. We hire people pre-dominantly from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and a few colleges from outside these two states. We also work in close association with a few colleges from where we have been hiring regularly for the last five years. We became the company we are today through campus recruitments and they still remain the best way to induct talented individuals into our company.
After recruiting them, we make them go through a rigorous two-three month training programme to make them “project ready”. They are then put in various projects as junior engineers where they get to work on real-time projects with a team. For specific key skills that we want to grow into, we also hire laterally. For e.g. when we built our telecom team, we had a team of key people to set-up the whole idea and navigate us in the beginning.
Q. Any preferences towards the IIT/NIT crowd ?
A. We do not go to the IITs. We go to the mid-level engineering colleges. Since most of our operations revolve around electrical and electronics, we hire mainly in the electrical and and electronics stream and also from computer science and IT.
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