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It is hard to miss the white board at the luxuriant 14-acre campus of iGate in Whitefield, Bangalore. The prominent board lists out the vision, mission, and value statements of the company. "We aim to achieve $1 bn and be amongst the top 10 best employers in India working with hundred Global 1,000 customers". The target has been set as 2012.

It is only 2007 and according to the BES Top 20 Survey, iGate is already at the # 3 position. If you thought that is an impressive achievement, take this: to reach there, it has jumped twenty-six positions from the previous year. That probably is the highest single year jump (not including new entrants) by any company in all these years that the survey has been conducted!

Call it the realization that today you compete on people. Or, more bluntly, call it the Infy effect. CEO Phaneesh Murthy, earlier the worldwide head of sales and marketing at Infosys, while often challenging the established players on their client engagement models, has not hesitated to take the best things from them; more specifically, Infosys. There has been a lot of emphasis on employees benefits, right from a lush campus that has a wave pool to doling out stock options to around 50% of the 6,000 employees.

Srinivas Kandula, Global Head, HR
High Ratings Industry rank Relevancy of perks and benefits 3 Growth opportunities 3 Fairness of the appraisal system 3 Low Ratings Open to ideas and suggestions 3 Positive work environment 3 Fairness of business practice 4 Best Showing Growth opportunity/career development 3 Job security/stability 4 Policies and procedures 4

Critics point out that last years large stock option could well be the reason behind this sudden jump. That may be a little harsh though, because the company has scored well in virtually all the parameters.

Srinivas Kandula, VP, Global Head, HR, has put in some innovative practices: HAP-PSY-CAP (standing for happy-psychological-capital), an initiative wherein employees are psychologically profiled and undergo different levels of training to achieve mental satisfaction; flight risk evaluation, a retention program which aims at proactively finding out those wanting to leave; and the goal-flow-down approach where all goals and objectives of the company are shared on an open platform.

However, if iGate manages to do well next year too, it will be a decisive arrival of a new best employer in India.

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