More than 85% of all academic admission assessments, including the Common Aptitude Test (CAT) for the Indian Institutes of Management, the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) for the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Joint Engineering Entrance (JEE) Exam, are executed on this platform.

Recruitment assessments to all public sector banks— including the State Bank of India, the country’s largest; several public service commissions, including the UPSC; the high courts; several police departments in different states and a large number of public sector units also happen on this platform. The most talked about among them is the ongoing assessment for the Railways Recruitment Board, believed to be the world’s largest recruitment drive ever.

“The Indian Railways have more than 100,000 posts to be filled, and 28.9 million candidates applied for it,” Ramaswamy says. “It’s almost impossible for anyone in the world to conduct an exam with 28.9 million candidates at the speed with which TCS iON does. Just imagine the complexity of applications; scheduling, especially in a country as big as ours; and the malpractices. It’s a very tough job.”

The railway recruitment drive, he believes, highlights the “large view” the team took while creating TCS iON: “This is a seven-year old business and to create a digital platform in that time and reach this kind of volume is primarily because there is a pull rather than us pushing. There was a huge unmet need; we went and occupied that vacuum. That’s how we have been able to push the whole game to a different level. Honestly, we don’t sell much.”

Discussing this at the TCS Q2 FY19 Earnings Conference Call in October 2018, Mr Rajesh Gopinathan, chief executive officer, TCS, noted, “The transformation that TCS iON has brought about in recruitment in the country across all elements and the scale that it has been deployed at is unprecedented and absolutely transformative. We are now using that scale to transform our business model… The opportunities to leverage this are practically unlimited.”

Shifting Focus

But that wasn’t always the case. TCS had incubated iON to venture into the small and medium businesses (SMB) segment with a large aspirational goal of reaching $1 billion in revenue in five years.

Ramaswamy, who has been TCS’ global head of SMB Solutions since 2007, says, “We started with manufacturing. The rate of growth of adoption and the challenges that SMB manufacturing companies go through as an industry have an impact on our ability to grow as well. Today, 99 percent of companies in this country are SMBs; the large companies are sub 1 percent. But their longevity is very low; a large number of SMBs start every day, and a vast majority of them eventually die. This industry reality means that when we provide services to them in a model where they pay for what they consume, when they die, it becomes a bottomless pit for us. The rate of growth in such industry sub segments will always be a challenge when compared to others.”

Since the business took time to scale, the inherent agility of the TCS iON platform allowed the unit to swiftly adapt to market dynamics and venture into learning, assessment and recruitment, all businesses that have grown faster than the manufacturing business.

“The challenge is to reimagine that business model to grow faster than what it is doing today,” says Ramaswamy. “Not because it is a low-growth business or not profitable, but because we believe that we need to continuously reimagine the business processes and help create many start-up-to-large-company stories as part of our responsibility to support that segment. We can play a very significant role in that.”

Gitobitan, the TCS iON centre in Kolkata, is said to be the world's largest assessment centre

The Business Of Talent Spotting

In September 2018, TCS reimagined entry level college hiring with its National Qualifier Test (NQT). It not only democratises hiring but also brings in the country’s best talent to fuel TCS’s growth plans in line with its Business 4.0 Strategy.

Ramaswamy puts the enormity of it into perspective: “TCS hires approximately 30,000 freshers in the country. The approach that we used to take was visiting 300+ premium colleges across the country before any other companies. We would conduct a test, shortlist them, do an interview, give them an offer and come back. If there was a bright student in Kohima (Nagaland) or Dibrugarh (Assam) or Asansol (West Bengal), s/he wouldn’t come into this process at all.”

The first year of conducting the NQT allowed TCS to reach ~280,000 students from ~1,800 colleges. “This completely changed the way we looked at talent,” Ramaswamy says, listing the advantages. “The quality of talent we are hiring has gone up. NQT increases our ability to improve the joining ratio, which increases the yield from our efforts. And the last and most critical is that what we used to do in about four months, we are now finishing in just three weeks.”

Gopinathan says, “The scale of the infrastructure we have deployed is unparalleled in this country. We have been doing this for commercial purposes through the TCS iON network, and we are now using it for our internal transformation.”

Team TCS iON is already scaling up NQT as a Common Corporate Qualifier Test (CCQT) for both freshers and lateral hires. “We have started certification tests for vocational and professional skills to create a talent pool that can be made available corporates,” says Ramaswamy. “They are all in play with a large number of participants. This has fundamentally changed the way recruitment is seen and executed by corporates.”

Addictive Learning

TCS iON is simultaneously leveraging the wave of digital learning. “First of all, India being the largest learner population in the world is a huge opportunity,” says Ramaswamy. “Secondly, learner requirements and characteristics are changing dramatically, and technology has evolved significantly enough to put a lot of opportunities in the hands of service providers to reimagine learning for them. Keeping these, in mind, we are thinking about how we can make learning addictive.”

They are doing so with products and platforms like the TCS iON Digital Learning Hub, which connects teachers and learners, and by betting on phygital training.

“One of the things that made us think about going phygital is the fact that the number of people who initiate learning and complete it is sub 5 percent today. You will see from public domain and research that this is true of any famous learning portal,” says Ramaswamy. “The second thing is there are a number of topics that are just not possible to learn through a book or a video. These two dimensions inspired us to integrate digital assets and digital knowledge with physical assets and physical interventions.”

The phygital portfolio contains multi-modal learning products across two categories. It recognises that learning is no longer about sitting in a classroom, that multiple people can learn in multiple ways, that learners fall into different categories, and that the content must be customised.

“One category is the TCS iON branded learning products like CCQT, an assessment for getting jobs,” says Ramaswamy. “The second is third-party learning products, where a company or an individual can leverage our platform to reach students, thus expanding the ability to share knowledge.”

TCS iON has also brought the phygital concept to the assessments business by creating two-step assessments, one to test knowledge and one to test application of the knowledge.

“We are expanding very, very fast,” says Ramaswamy. “We are launching a large number of learning products in multiple categories every day. The only thing we have to be careful about is the investment in launching them and the returns that we get out of that investment.”

They are doing so by looking at horizontal-use cases. “This means,” he explains, “today we are using assessment as a product for segments like recruitment bodies and education. But can we also use assessment for pharma companies to drive surveys? We are taking our existing investments in products and platforms and applying it to a large number of industries horizontally rather than narrowly focussing on one or two industries.”