Recently, Avani Prabhakar, Chief People Officer, Atlassian was on a visit to India, Delhi and BW People happened to have an in-person interaction with her, where she discussed the future prospects of Atlassian's expansion plans in India and how do the plan to hire more talent remotely.
1. What does your company Atlassian deals into and what are your plans with regards to expansion of your brand within Indian masses?
So, we as a company build these products which are used by all knowledge workers in the process. It's an Australian born and formed company. It's an Australian Unicorn, but we are now headquartered out of Sydney.
Now, talking about expansion plans, we are already growing, so for me, it's like India has always been a growth story.
So, it's not future, it has been a very consistent growth since 2018. We started with about 60 employees. Our first employees we hired were in 2017 and since then I would say the journey for the last six years has been growing from 60 to close to 2000 employees that we have.
I know we're talking about numbers, but I think what I do want to add to our conversation as to why Atlassian is unique in its growth journey in India, is that we haven't traditionally grown in like how any other company grows. India is a cost play and like let's kind of put all the services roles over here.
2. Now that your employee base has grown from 60 to 2000 in India and you are also dealing with employees from all across, what difference do you find in specifically dealing with Indian employees as compared to employees from across?
I would say before I dive into India, because we've got employees globally; if you ask me the cultural nuance in life of Turkey is very different to Poland. It's very different to Manila. If I was to focus on India, I would say India talent market is a very unique, highly competitive market as compared to other markets. You get the best talent, but you also have to fight really hard to get that.
The complex compliance requirement for each state made it a little bit harder to implement, I would say distributed teams, which means if somebody wants to work out of Kashmir, you want to work out of any state, Gujarat or any other places. It wasn't that easy in India's compared to say, if you are US or Australia, you can work from anywhere in the country and the local framework kind of supports that.
So, I would say that was a learning, but we have been very successful in terms of implementing it. And again, I would say if I looked around, because we did a lot of benchmarking to see if any other company have been able to do it. There's no other company in India who's actually doing fully distributed remote work.
And by saying that what I mean is - usually people feel like you have offices in all the states and people are working in offices. So, we are saying no, we don't have offices outside of Bangalore in the country. And so, there's just this one head office. People are working remotely from any state. We optimize for where the talent is rather than saying, we only want talent out of Bangalore and Hyderabad. That is the typical place where you would go and hire.
So, we have found actually very good talent in the regions like in the city of Ajmer, a grad getting one of the top offers and the talent, just the whole talent pool that you get access to is pretty exponential. And a lot of our employees who stayed in these cities, big cities want to go back to and be with their parents or be with their families. So, it has been quite a journey like it's very powerful.
3. Avani, you claim that it has been simple for you to maximise talent across, but let us talk about the controversy surrounding hybrid working in India. Whether an employee should work entirely remotely or return to the office is still up for dispute. What is your take on the same?
The whole return to office debate as we call the RTO debate is fairly global, it's not just unique to India. I've seen a lot of companies in the Silicon Valley like, when Google made the first move and then other companies followed.
There are very few companies like us, I would say, a handful, who are kind of putting their stakes in the ground to say that remote is the future of work. And we are going in that direction in Australia as well. All the geographies are having a similar kind of debate and every country, and companies are different I would say in that matter.
When we started off, the whole thing about remote being future of work even before COVID happened. So, we had close to about 8% of our population already working completely in the remote. We were already experimenting heavily because, our products and our philosophy as a company is to unleash the potential of every team. So, we were any which ways very invested to really get ahead of in terms of what will the future of work look like. And we had identified remote is going to be that.
But I think when COVID happened, it just accelerated the whole journey for us.
So we just made the switch from that 8% to 100% over COVID and we decided that's where we are going.
Two things that we have learnt. The two things that people or companies or from an employee perspective, they're trying to solve is - one is connection because you keep hearing that and survey and we do our research like almost on a regular basis.
Today in the world of remote era, one has to start from a place of trust, and you have to really believe in the fact that it's not important where the work gets done, it's important how the work gets done. So that is our philosophy, so we don't care where you're working from. It's more in terms of the ways of working.
4. What kind of strategies do you use to attract top talent across different regions and ensure consistent and engaging recruitment experience globally?
So, we have been on a journey. Like I said, when you're recruiting globally, it has to be a very nuanced approach for each of the markets. So, our hiring strategy for India may look very different to what we do in the Valley versus Australia. In Australia, we are a very well-known brand. So, we are the employer of choice. Our hiring strategy there is very different. We are focused more on hiring from the pipeline over there and building the tech talent in Australia.
In the valley, it's very cut throat. There are special specialized skills. All the big companies, Metas and Googles of the world are going after the same talent pool. So, our hiring strategy and our hiring practices may look slightly different.
For India, it has always been interesting in terms of we are seeing what is attractive for top talent has evolved over the course of time. Even though they are joining in multinational, they need more entrepreneurs play. Can I come and can I experiment with your new product, do you have a new lab where you are doing some experimentation. So, I think our recruitment strategy across the globe has been kind of very nuanced for each market.
What we do from a consistency perspective, we really optimize for the interviewer experience and candidate experience. So, which means all the tooling that we're talking about, we index really heavily on both interviewer and candidate experience. Because internally, our interviewers go through a quite a lot of training and upskilling and then we have a very high bar who even gets to take an interview, across.
If I give an example of the engineering hiring, which is the biggest hiring that we do for devs, we have a very clear candidate assessment framework. We have a very strong bar for our, once you go through the whole process, there is we call it bar test. So, we have a calibration team of very selected few leaders who will go through each one of them.
So, we invest 80% more on the recruitment up front to make sure that what is coming through the pipe is at least 99% accurate. That reduces the work throughout down the line.
On the recruitment thing, Team Anywhere is our biggest value proposition. We index heavily on making sure that we have a very diverse in oscillator pool, from a pipeline perspective for each role, how the diverse pool looks like before you go through the selection process?
5. What steps have you already taken to streamline the onboarding process for remote parts?
I would say it has been one of our key learnings, distributed work force and I will say like it has also been pretty challenging. So, what we have seen with onboarding, of course we do full onboarding, remotely. So, you get your laptop delivered at your home, you get all the tutorial and everything in terms of how to set it up. All of the IT setup is one part of it. If you are remotely onboarding, then we make sure that you go through a remote onboarding program with the entire pro board.
We emphasize a lot more on in terms of what does it mean to work in a distributed team. A lot of people who haven't worked in that environment, they don't know in terms of what does it mean. They just feel like it's working from home, so we spend a lot of time up front in that onboarding. But then we pivot to craft onboarding. So, if you're an engineer, then we do go through a bootcamp, say for engineering.
What our learning has been the onboarding experience based on the employee’s seniority that you're hiring needs to be different. So, for example, grad hires - if you're fresh out of campus and you just say that you are remote, it’s a recipe that will not succeed.
So, we have pivoted our onboarding to be like more in-person onboarding for us. Then you cohort that hires, intern hires who then come into office, so they get a more in person experience. For very senior hires, when you're coming at a C-Suite level and then you really need to get close to the company culture and everything. I think that either if you're at the high end of the spectrum or as a new starter, we saw that these two cohorts need a much more in person. We make them travel a lot to make sure that they understand that helps them being very successful in there.
That has been learning in terms of what cohorts and we're also testing and making sure that we're not using the same onboarding experience for all cohorts. So, we are building more nuanced programs.
6. How do you integrate different carriers across into a company’s culture? There has to be a company culture, there has to be a vision and since you have people from all across and all walks of life, how do you integrate them into your company?
We do have a lot of training modules which is focused on values and action like these are the values, but this is what it means to put values in action. So, when we say open culture no bullshit, we give them very realistic examples. Open culture no bullshit means you can express whatever you have to express, and we are big on making sure people speak their mind. But at the same time, how do you do it in a remote work environment. So, you have to be even more respectful when you are writing things down. It's one thing when you say, but when you write it down, so written communication and then this is because your body language is involved.
So, we do in build lot of our training and everything up front on values and like I said, it's very nuanced for each team. If I'm joining in Turkey, they need to understand in terms of – what is the local regional culture and then what is the company wide culture. So, we make sure after they join, they do get to attend some of ITG.
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