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Breaking Traditions to Increase Inclusion at Infosys

In 2017 Infosys, a technology company based in India, had earned $10.2 billion in revenue, largely by helping companies around the world create and execute digital transformation strategies. President Ravi Kumar was excited about a new strategy to expand its US presence. He made a huge pledge to hire ten thousand employees from the United States that year. As an India-based technology company, Infosys had traditionally hired very little in the United States. “When we made an announcement that we’re going to create ten thousand in the US,” he said, “it was actually a surprising announcement, because people said, ‘We don’t find good technology talent in the US.’ That’s how it has been.”

Still, the company was excited about the pivot to expand its US workforce, but Kumar knew the strategy would have to pivot from how Infosys recruited talent in India, where the company runs the largest corporate training university in the world. “Our ten-thousand pledge was built on hiring from schools and colleges, which by itself was very new to us because we don’t traditionally hire a lot from schools,” Kumar explained. “We hire experienced talent from the market. So that by itself was a big leap. Before 2017 we hired zero from schools. And in 2017, we hired a thousand people from schools.”

By 2021, Infosys was one of the largest direct recruiters from US schools, hiring four thousand employees. To do this, the company took a unique approach. Not only did it hire at the top colleges and universities, as did many of its competitors, but it went heavily after an untapped source of talent: community colleges.

Kumar explained how the strategy was born out of necessity: “Skills of the future are going to be depleted very rapidly. We realized that the jobs of the future are not just going to be core digital jobs. As digitization goes up, you will need a lot of backbone jobs, like data operations and end-user security operations. Given the need for back bone jobs, we started looking for alternative ways to bring talent into the workforce, and we found community colleges could be a great source for talent.”

This was a unique strategy—to go after a largely untapped market in the technology space. Traditionally, graduates with two-year associate’s degrees experience higher unemployment rates than do those from four-year bachelor’s degree programs, yet they make up one-third of the available undergraduate talent pool in the United States.¹ Further, community colleges offer a more diverse and experienced talent pool, as many students already have workforce experience. Community colleges enjoy a more diverse population in general. Half of students enrolled in community colleges are racial and ethnic minorities, and more than two-thirds of these students come from families earning below $50,000.²

Employers say finding people with adequate technical and digital skills is a challenge.³ But research shows that associate’s degree graduates are well positioned to be adaptable to the future needs of organizations and that those with relevant experience perform equally as well as, or better than, college graduates do on the job.⁴

For Infosys, it was like discovering an untapped vein of rich ore to mine. It seemed like a simple formula to gain US talent: recruit from community colleges, pay them higher than market value, and easily reach the goal of hiring ten thousand people in the United States.

But Kumar and his recruitment team experienced the opposite of a simple task. What threw up the roadblock?

When Pay Isn’t the Only Motivator

Kumar and his team discovered only a lack of interest in their company from community colleges. “The first time our recruiters went to community colleges,” he recalled, “they came back saying people are not willing to join. I was actually shocked that with a compensation structure, which was 25 to 30 percent more than anybody else was offering, people didn’t apply. I thought it was a slam-dunk thing.”

Kumar said the team learned that people didn’t even know what the promoted jobs were. Infosys would advertise a cybersecurity job, and people would say, “We don’t even know what that is. What are you talking about?” The team pressed, focused mostly on pay as a lever, but the effort was futile. Even when Infosys promised higher pay, people were still not interested.

In retrospect, Kumar and the recruiters seemed to be pulling on the wrong lever all along. No matter what, they kept focusing on how competitive their wages were. And the more resistance they met, the more the recruiters tried to point out how much more money they were offering, thinking that this enticement, above all, would motivate people to join the company.

Kumar and the recruiters worked closely together to figure out what was causing the issue. They eventually realized that many of these community college graduates simply didn’t know anyone who had done a remotely similar job. They had no role models in technology. They had no people to ask about their experiences in the field. Working for Infosys was remarkably unfamiliar territory to the recruits, and unfamiliarity creates uncertainty. Better to focus on something you under stand or at least know you can learn about through trusted friends and family. The lack of role models is a huge psychological impediment for people trying to see themselves succeeding in a role. Research has shown that women and minorities are more likely to feel capable of success in a job or leadership role when they have models with similar backgrounds to look up to.⁵

The associate’s degree holders’ reluctance was brought into high relief when compared with what Infosys recruiters were experiencing at four-year colleges. For these colleges, Kumar said, “we didn’t have the same problem, because while they have not seen technology jobs before, they know somebody who is doing a technology job. They were able to participate in the process.”

All the focus on competitive pay would never move the needle. Pay wasn’t the issue, Kumar learned. “The issue is, do they have the confidence to do this?”

Infosys tacked to a new strategy, finding the organizations that were trusted in the communities where these students came from. “We realized we needed the nonprofits who work in these communities, who have trusted relationships, to be that bridge,” Kumar said. “We also started to work with companies that were more interconnected with the communities and use them as the bridge to funnel talent into our organization.” For example, Infosys has partnered with the California nonprofit MV Gate to host family code nights, evening events hosted by K–5 elementary schools where children and their parents pair up to carry out their first hour of coding together.⁶ Other community partners along a long list include Girl Scouts of America, Girls Who Code, and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.⁷

DEI in a Time of Expansion

Infosys was founded in Pune, India, in 1981 by seven engineers with $250 of investment capital. It is now a $72 billion company, recognized as a global leader in tech services and consulting, with almost a quarter million employees worldwide in more than fifty countries.

For years, Infosys has known only growth and expansion. Expanding beyond India, the company opened its first international office in 1987 in Boston. In 1993 Infosys became the first IT company from India to be listed on the NASDAQ. That was followed by more expansion, first a European headquarters in the United Kingdom and then a global development center in Toronto in 1995. By 2000, Infosys had offices or development centers in Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Australia, France, Hong Kong, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its growth in revenues and locations continued at a steady pace from 2000 to around 2003, reaching $2 billion in revenue less than two years after reaching $1 billion. It reached 50,000 employees by 2006 and doubled that within three years.⁸

Infosys’s DEI journey has had to scale at the same rate as the company’s own breakneck rate of growth. By most measures, the journey has been successful, through that simplest of strategies that most companies espouse but do not always live up to: focus on your people, your talent. Infosys seems to have pulled it off, though. Its successes were first acknowledged in 2001, when Infosys was rated as “Best Employer” by Business World/Hewitt.⁹

In 2012 Forbes ranked Infosys among the world’s most innovative companies. Infosys was also recognized among the twenty-five performers in the Caring for Climate initiative, the world’s largest corporate sustainability endeavor.¹⁰

While technology is generally a male-dominated field, Infosys has increased gender diversity through its sponsorship programs that aim to strengthen the talent pipeline of female leaders in business. These efforts include the Infosys Women’s Inclusivity Network for women and their allies and the company’s innovative Restart with Infosys program.¹¹ The Restart program focuses on bringing back women after career breaks by helping them develop relevant skills, providing real-life project experiences, and mentoring. In fact, Infosys also provides support for mothers through its return-to-work post-maternity programs. Through these efforts, Infosys has managed to see 89 percent of its women employees return to work after maternity leave.

The work Infosys has done to increase gender diversity has not gone unnoticed. In 2019 the company won the AccelHERate 2020 and DivHERsity Awards in three categories: top five in Most Innovative Practices, Women Leadership and Development Programs (large enterprises); top twenty in DivHERsity (large enterprises); and top twenty in Most Innovative Practices, Women Leadership Development.¹² And after all the growth and expansion, Infosys has not suffered declines in its reputation. It ranked third on the 2019 Forbes World’s Best Regarded Companies list and was recognized as a 2020 Top Employer in Australia, Singapore, and Japan.^{13 14} Infosys was also declared one of the best companies for women in India and ranked number one for anti-sexual-harassment practices among 357 companies in India at a conference sponsored by the publishers of Working Mother and Avtar. As a champion of inclusion, Infosys was listed—on the Working Mother & Avtar Most Inclusive Companies in India Index in 2021. Infosys was also honored by Great Places to Work and Fortune as one of the 2021 Best Big Companies to Work.^{15, 16}

What’s most impressive about these gender diversity efforts is that Infosys has managed to have such an impact on gender diversity all while the company has been in hypergrowth mode. Since 2010 the company has reached many firsts, such as crossing $10 billion in revenue in 2016 and increasing to $15 billion in 2021 while also serving 185 clients on the Fortune 500 list.¹⁷ The company has managed to keep an eye on its diversity efforts by being willing to experiment with novel approaches and celebrating every milestone as a big deal.

Gender parity is a clear global issue that makes sense for a company like Infosys to focus on. Today the company has an ambition of creating a gender diversity workforce with 45 percent women by 2030 (in 2022 around 38 percent of employees were women).¹⁸

Yet, creating racial equity and inclusion has been more of a challenge for the organization, which has more than 156 nationalities represented. Some employees have raised concerns that despite its multinational presence, the company’s workforce is disproportionally South Asian and Indian, more than 90 percent, to be exact.¹⁹ In the United States, the company has not been immune from EEOC claims of racial and gender discrimination.²⁰

When I interviewed a Black woman who was a former Infosys employee in the United States, she described the challenges of having few Black role models in the firm and, often painfully, being the only Black person on her teams. “I was the only Black American woman in my cohort of twenty-five people when I joined the firm,” she recalled. “Yet, I talked to other Black employees who have since also left, and we each had similar experiences. Even though I had an MBA and significant consulting experience before Infosys, I was put on teams to take notes. . . . I did not feel valued. Whenever I did have ideas, they were not really taken seriously.”

Like many companies, particularly large global entities, Infosys has done a stellar job in some areas but still has work to do to make sure all employees have inclusive experiences. Part of embracing the complicated nature of DEI is embracing the fact that no organization, and no person for that matter, is perfect. But seeking perfection should not prevent a company from trying.

Breaking Old Models

Infosys lives in the world of technology and is therefore constantly looking ahead at what’s next. Kumar sees a world in which technological realities make diverse workforces necessary. In a future diverse world in which technology has transformed the need for talent, you simply won’t be able to compete if you have a homogeneous workforce pulled from four-year colleges.

“One of the reasons why people are not able to find jobs is that there is often a prerequisite for a degree, which is not needed,” Kumar said. “Everybody wants a degree, but if you really look at the roles and responsibilities of the job, you don’t need a degree.”

What’s more, Kumar said, tech moves so fast that a four-year degree is virtually obsolete in two years. “So, by the time you come out of college, you are automatically going to look for newer skills.”

At the heart of this disconnect, education has become divisive rather than bridging, Kumar believes. “The whole debate of diversity and inclusivity and equitable access to jobs has happened because of education. The cost of education has gone up almost 150 percent since around 2000. Education has not been the bridge that it historically was to a good career. “It has actually created the divide,” Kumar said.

Kumar thinks technology and its rapid reinvention is, in a way, fostering diversity by breaking down old models of education and career entry and presenting new opportunities, such as those at community colleges. “We are lucky that digital technologies have a shorter life,” he said. “They’re challenging the traditional four-year degree. It led us to hiring without a degree and hiring based on learnability.”

Infosys has expanded its recruiting beyond community college graduates to offer specialized training to some students who are working low-wage jobs and going to school to make a midcareer shift. Basically, the company can say to students, “Come take our courses rather than general courses at community college.” Kumar explained, “We said, ‘Why couldn’t we go and run programs for the specific jobs rather than only going to community colleges?’ So, we recently started a program where we look for people in a midcareer shift. If you have high potential but you’re working on a low-skilled job, we are willing to take you to a high-skilled job.”

Hiring from the diverse pool of talent at community colleges has proved beneficial to the business, Kumar said. “Our internal numbers show that if I hire an undergrad from school, the attrition rate is higher than the rate from community colleges. The talent we get from community colleges has a bigger emotional connection with us because we’ve invested in them. It’s a really viable business model because they don’t attrition out.”

The Future Is Diverse by Default

For Infosys, the DEI journey is really about business continuity. Without DEI, there is no continuity. Kumar said:

When you build the products of the future, which cater to every constituent in the society, you see that diversity and inclusivity will create better products and will create more efficient ways of building better products. You build the services of the future; you will build the right ones as long as you build them with a diverse workforce [because they’ll be serving a diverse client base]. That, to me, is the real thing. It so happens that it’s also the right thing to do. But we’re not doing it for the sake of the narrative. We’re doing it because it is a viable business model. And it happens to be the right thing for an equitable future.

To that end, Kumar is as focused on looking to the future as he is on meeting certain demographic profiles in the present. Many companies are focused on demographics to improve their diversity, and while this is foundationally important, they should also be thinking about cognitive diversity, socioeconomic diversity, and other facets of the breadth of diversity that will help prepare their workforce for the future.

“I don’t think we will have to force the diversity and inclusivity metrics on people,” Kumar said. “It will just happen by natural force” because there’s a viable business model here that is just waiting for people to take advantage of it. In the future, they will have to. The demand for talent will be too intense to leave any stone unturned, never mind a massive opportunity like the one Infosys has found in community colleges.

Influencing the Future of Education

Infosys is a company at the tactical to integrated stage in its DEI journey. It has clearly been thoughtful about DEI across its multiple spheres of influence. Specifically, its out-of-the-box thinking with nontraditional recruitment strategies and its broader definitions of diversity (e.g., community college graduates versus traditional four-year college graduates) has helped to increase their workforce diversity and they have also reached outside of their internal company to impact the larger global community. Yet, as noted, the company must be intentional to create inclusive experiences for all its employees, not just those from community college backgrounds. With so many new initiatives, it will take time to see the long-term impact of these efforts and whether the company can continue to mature to the sustainable stage of its journey.

Infosys’s noteworthy sphere of influence has matured; it extends beyond its own employees. Infosys has tactically used its sphere of influence to expand its learning and training ecosystem beyond four-year college programs and even beyond the diverse and valuable community college programs it has successfully fostered.

In addition to being an early champion of the talent hidden in plain sight at community colleges, Infosys has partnered with organizations such as Merit America, Per Scholas, and Woz U and a network of academic institutions that have fostered the connection between tech companies and communities with little experience in the tech industry. The Infosys Foundation, a not-for-profit initiative established in 1996, continues its reach into underprivileged communities by supporting “programs in the areas of education, rural development, health care, arts and culture, and destitute care.”²¹

The company still also works with colleges directly, but in ways that continue to challenge the traditional four-year model. Infosys partnered with Arizona State University on “stackable credits,” a program that allows people to earn credits toward a degree while working at the company. Efforts like these represent a different approach to skills and career development. “The experiential learning, it’s like an apprenticeship,” Kumar said. “And if you do well, we will promote you to the next job and make sure you progress on an ongoing basis.”

Kumar also extends the sphere of influence to state governments, running a career pathways forum for the governor of Connecticut. As Kumar sees it, without participating in, or even creating and driving, your sphere of influence, you won’t get far in DEI. “If you want to make a huge impact, it can’t be done just by enterprises,” he said. “It has to be done by enterprises, academic institutions, and state governments.”

Infosys’s DEI efforts are deliberately connected to and informed by what’s going on in the world. Kumar makes sure that as the world changes, inclusivity is not forgotten, especially in crises. The Covid-19 pandemic led to more workers in technology who could rapidly upskill in a remote environment. Infosys recognized this as an opportunity for talent but also intentionally focused on communities hit hardest by Covid-19 job losses such as minorities, women, and nondegree holders.

Infosys and its partners created Reskill and Restart, a free online platform that matches potential employees to roles in tech, non-tech and support functions. The platform is unique because it also offers training programs in technology, which helps skill people for future jobs while also connecting them with current job opportunities to provide experience.²² This approach helps solve the pervasive cycle job seekers encounter: trying to get a job to gain experience but finding that all jobs require previous experience to be selected.

This includes people without bachelor’s degrees. The macro trend that Kumar believes is most important in the future is the shrinking life cycle of technical skills and how it doesn’t mesh with an education system based on a four-year undergraduate program. It has him convinced that you can use training and learning aptitude to get people into good career-building roles without requiring a bachelor’s degree or any other degree. Infosys has piloted a program with Google to this end. “We have already hired a hundred people without degrees, and we found very good results,” Kumar said. “So, we’re going to scale. Now, that is a big part of DEI.”

For Infosys, talent is much more about aptitude to learn versus a degree. In an interview with Forbes, Kumar shared his perspective on the value of intentionally hiring nontechnology, nondegree talent as a strategy:

We know there are millions of Americans who lack a traditional college degree: they may be stuck in low-potential jobs, but they have very high potential. For instance, we can hire someone with no technology experience for a data operations role, which is an entry-level role in our company. In just a couple of years, with the right training, education, and support that we’re able to provide, that individual can move into a skilled data scientist role. And we are doing that at scale.²³

Kumar is looking more and more outward, beyond his own company. For any company that has a culture of scaling at high speed, it’s no surprise they would take the same approach to DEI. “We’ve been experimenting with these things. And every time we’ve had initial success, we celebrated it so much. We also spoke about it for others to learn from. Now, my endeavor is no longer about Infosys doing it. My endeavor is, ‘Can every enterprise do it? Can my customers do it?’ Because there is a vantage point: if everybody does it, that becomes mainstream. Then all the hard work I’m doing to evangelize diversity will be done by a bunch of organizations together.”

Challenges

Infosys’s necessary journey continues. The United States was one of the first non-Indian markets where the company really ramped up its DEI efforts and the community college, nondegree hiring programs that have contributed to both the company’s overall diversity and its competitive advantage. Infosys is starting similar programs in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

But repeating these programs is not a simple one-to-one experience. You can’t just transplant these programs. “The US is very uniquely different,” Kumar noted. “It’s fascinating how on one side the US has the American dream, where anybody can become anything. On the other side equally, you have a situation where the access to the future jobs is not there for many parts of the community.” That, Kumar said, makes the United States a great experimental ground for reimagining hiring, training, and career building in a more diverse and equitable way. And fortunately, right now, he said, “There’s a lot of openness to experiment with that.”

Another challenge Kumar sees is getting the hiring managers themselves to think beyond the traditional way of doing business, in which you check certain boxes such as a bachelor’s degree before even allowing candidates into the pool. Many of these managers are products of a system that rewarded four-year degrees, so a different approach seems counterintuitive to them. Kumar has seen some resistance to some of the new ideas that are driving diversity in the workforce. He believes this resistance may require mandates before it is overcome, but he hopes that it’s accompanied by organic acceptance and recognition of the success of this new way of bringing talent to the company. “The hiring managers are not convinced yet,” he said. “They want to see more data points. And that’s because we’re all so wired to think in a [certain] way. So I do think there will be a top-down push on this, but there has to be a natural force that has to come from behind, too. Can we solve this at one shot? Maybe not. Do we have the natural forces coming together now? Yes. And there has to be somebody who has to stand up and say, ‘Okay, for these jobs, we will not ask for a degree.’”

Unsurprisingly, Kumar focuses on questioning the status quo when he’s asked what a workplace utopia would look like to him: “My workplace utopia would be one where we naturally ask these questions that break the traditions. We are asking, ‘Why do you need a degree? Because we always said you need a degree?’ We are asking, ‘Why does it need to be that you have to go to a physical workplace? Because it always happened that way?’ And the perfect workplace for me would be one where we don’t even have to ask those questions. We hire based on skills. We hire based on talent.”