Reliance’s retail hiring goes wholesale

Fourteen months into the business and the headcount stands at over 6,000. It’s hiring over 100 people a day, touching 3,000 people a month and this is just the initial warm-up phase. That’s what happens when a group that thinks big and executes fast decides to put its muscle and might into a red-hot sector of the new economy. This is the revving up of the Rs 25,000-crore Reliance Retail venture. And if the rollout goes according to plan, it sees employee count touching a million people by the year 2010. Reliance Retail has roped in the who’s who of Indian retailing to put the plan on ground. One of the imperatives for a business that would need many shop-floor staff is putting in place a robust internal process of recruiting, training and retaining talent across all functions. Sources said that it’s systems-oriented HR team numbers more than 500. Backing it up is a research team which tracks the best practices of Fortune 500 companies to assimilate learnings and incorporate them into its own processes. The venture may be just 22-stores old now but Reliance retail has readied the framework necessary to scale up aggressively towards the 1,500 stores across verticals from food and groceries to consumer electronics. “Within HR, there is a team solely responsible for researching and collating the best practices from MNCs like Wal-Mart, Tesco and Citi-group. The processes have been created by analysing the HR practices of existing players within Indian retailing and also global companies,” sources said. The system ensures that every minute detail is documented. “Details like hiring a car, uniform colour of store personnel to even requisition for office stationery have been incorporated and put on board the technology platform. Employee retention tools like stock options and referral programmes like each one bring has been instituted as part of talent engagement and sustaining employees,” sources said. Reliance Retail sources told ET that in the last 14 months, the firm has been readying its HR strategy with emphasis on recruitment, training, retaining and sustainability of employees. “The roadmap was created, processes have been developed and have been mapped on board the technology platform,” sources said. They added the system put in place can handle recruitment of one million employees all over India in the next four-five years, from the current base of 6,000. Though Mukesh Ambani announced plans for the retail business as late as June 2006, it is understood that plans to create the necessary internal process was put in motion much before that. While professionals like Bijou Kurien from Titan, Gunender Kapur from Unilever, Raghu Pillai from the Future group were roped in for various verticals to be rolled out under the initiative, the group brought in Bijay Sahoo, former global HR head of Wipro Technologies as president and chief people officer of Reliance Retail to create the framework for recruitments. Reliance Retail has roped in Susan Bloch, chief cultural and diversity officer, HR. The move to hire Bloch, former partner at Whitehead Mann and director executive (coaching) with the Hay group consultancy, comes as the group is emphasising on creating leadership skills within, enabling them to create opportunities for employees to move up the ladder.