“We took every single application and business process and made them more digitalised” – Nikhil Nanda, Innovations Group UAE

CNME Editor Mark Forker secured an exclusive interview with Nikhil Nanda, Director at Innovations Group UAE, in an effort to learn more about some of the trends influencing change with the remote working space, how they leverage their bespoke services to find the right talent for organisations – and the factors behind their decision to pivot away from HR and Payroll services to focus more on recruitment.

Nikhil Nanda is the Director at Innovations Group UAE.

Innovations Group has been operating for almost two decades across the UAE, and during that time has firmly established itself as one of the leading market players in recruitment and employee outsourcing.

Nanda joined Innovations Group as a Project Manager in 2016 and has quickly climbed the corporate ladder within the organisation and was subsequently appointed as a Director of Innovations Group in 2022.

He has played an instrumental role in the evolution and digital transformation of the company over the last 5 years.

In a candid discussion with CNME Editor Mark Forker he explained that evolution in more detail.

He kickstarted the conversation by outlining in more detail some of the services that they provide to businesses on a global scale.

“Innovations Group UAE manages HR, recruitment, and payroll for various entities across the world. When I say HR, recruitment, and payroll, what this essentially means, is we take the requirements from our clients, and we source candidates from across the world based on certain skills, budgets, and designations – and we employ them under our own sponsorship. We manage their entire payroll, visa processing, and their mobility solutions in terms of helping them source suitable housing, schools and healthcare, and other various elements that an individual needs when they move into a new job, or relocates to another country,” said Nanda.

As a caveat to that, Nanda added that their mission statement was all about identifying the right talent for the right job.

“Our mission statement is to identify people with the rights skills and deploy them to a position where that skill is most valued and required. We have entities across Europe and the United States, India, and the Middle East, so any client that requires a particular type of skill would come to us, we then identify the candidate and help them move to the relevant region,” said Nanda.

The bespoke services provided by Innovations Group is all born out of the fact that businesses need to concentrate on the core services they provide to remain both relevant and competitive amidst a backdrop of an increasingly evolving digital world that we all operate in.

“The whole idea and concept behind Innovations Group is driven by the fact that companies need to focus on their core services. It does not matter if a company is in advertising, or construction, they need to be 100% focused on the services that they are providing to their customers. However, we know that a lot of entrepreneurs and conglomerates focus on things like HR, managing payroll, and identifying the right people to join their company. In addition to this, they are looking at the legal side of things, compliance, and medical insurance, which just consumes a lot of your time, and ultimately detracts them away from the core services that you want to deliver to your customers,” said Nanda.

The world of work changed forever as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and from that global crisis, remote working is now the new norm.

However, Nanda outlined that the rush from employers globally to provide remote working opportunities for all their employees was in hindsight the wrong thing to do.

The Director at Innovations Group UAE pointed out that some jobs just cannot be done remotely, and the one size fits all approach that was initially offered in relation to remote working is now obsolete.

“There are always a lot of trends around remote working, with many companies looking to reinvent, or reimagine their workplace. However, what I think is very evident when it comes to remote working is the fact that it is not a one size fits all concept. I think what companies did in order to maintain fairness at the very beginning of the move to remote working was to offer remote working to everyone across the board. They couldn’t be seen to allow one department to work remotely, and another department to retain the status quo. We know that it doesn’t really apply like that, because some positions like sales, IT and tech are all very doable whilst working remotely, and companies appear to be happy to accommodate people working in these roles to operate remotely. However, if you look at departments such as finance, legal and HR, they are actually quite hands-on. Take finance for example, there is a lot of cash handling, transactional work where you need someone to responsibility and be supervised day-to-day. In terms of HR, it’s all about people at the end of the day. If you are communicating warnings, or promotions online then it just does not have that same impact. The one size fits all policy that was adopted by businesses really hurt them. They were acting in good faith, and were trying to be fair, but it didn’t work,” said Nanda.

Nanda used their IT operations in Romania as an illustration of how successful and efficient remote working can be for certain departments within an organisation.

“In relation to Innovations Group, our entire IT team in Romania all work remotely. We have seen an increase in productivity and efficiency – and we believe a big factor in that is the fact that Europe is a much more developed market, and the concept of remote working has caught on a lot more because there is less attrition, and people generally stay for longer. Whereas in the UAE, and across the Middle East, there is always an ongoing process around visas, contract periods, and these factors lead to higher levels of attrition, and an increase in costs around the onboarding process. In Europe, there is no real onboarding cost, you hire someone, and very quickly you can get an understanding of how efficient they are, and they generally stay for a longer period of time,” said Nanda.

The conversation then shifted towards the new kind of hiring trends emerging in the talent acquisition space.

Nanda highlighted how psychometric assessment were now being adopted by businesses globally to ensure that not only do they find the right candidates, but can also determine, whether they are suited better to working remotely, or in an office.

“The new ways of assessments have really defined whether an employer is comfortable with a new employee working remotely. When I say assessments there are a lot more psychometric assessments that are being used and background checks, and there is a lot more offline tests that are conducted during the screening process. In relation to psychometric technical competency and background screening compliance, if all these factors meet quite well during the interview process, then it allows employers to be confident to say this is the right person to work remotely. However, at the same time it can also be the opposite as a lot of employees actually prefer to work in the office, many of them feel that they are not appreciated and not valued. From the trends that I have seen it has become evident that you need to understand the employees’ approach to their work, it can’t just be the employers’ approach to work and how they believe the operation should be run,” said Nanda.

Nanda used an analogy of someone growing up with siblings compared to an only child, to better explain the science behind these psychometric assessments.

“Take for example, an only child versus someone that has three siblings. If someone growing up has always been around people, sharing and working with them and has had to sacrifice their time for others, then that inevitably results in them becoming a more community-centric personality, whereas if I’m a single child then I’m used to doing everything on my own. I want my own time and my own space, but as an employer how do you provide the same strategy to both those different personalities? That is where the level of psychometric assessments have grown exponentially over the last 3-5 years. They are able to identify these parameters within people’s personalities that would allow you to change your strategy on employment across both those different personality types,” said Nanda.

In the technology space there is always a lot of focus on the ‘culture’ of a particular organisation, with many claiming that their own unique culture is ultimately what differentiates them from their market rivals.

However, many technology executives have been quite open and transparent regarding their fears over the impact remote working can have on their culture, fearing that those being onboarded will not actually be able to get a proper feel for the culture of the organisation.

Nanda is sceptical of how important the culture really is to most employees within a technology company and claimed that the most important thing was for employees to feel ‘valued’.

“The way technology companies are run are extremely unique, and I think as a result of that is why they focus so much on their culture. We understand what a tech employee would require in terms of flexibility, and are cognisant of the fact they don’t want to deal with too much bureaucracy, and quite a number of them aren’t overly interested in participating in many social activities, they like to say it how it is to some extent. I think it is extremely difficult to hire someone remotely to show them that aspect, but the question is does that employee really care about what’s going on in the office environment, or the company culture? Or does he really care about their team specifically and their tasks. Most technology companies work off a massive ticketing system, and these tickets are assigned to various teams within the company, and the time taken to complete these tasks are a KPI. They are essentially saying that employees are completely recognised digitally, where they know how many tickets you are completing, and they know how much you are doing – and that’s what I believe a developer, or a program manager cares more about rather than what sort of events are happening within their company. That’s a big part of how they are pushing the remote working culture, but there is enough data with the ticketing system to give employees a monthly report on their performance and show them how valued they actually are,” said Nanda.

Nanda then explained the evolution Innovations Group UAE underwent as part of their efforts to be more digitalised and gain more visibility on the data they had across all areas of their operations.

“What we did at Innovations Group was take every single application and business process and make them more digitalised and data driven. We needed visibility on the number of processes, services, and tasks that were being completed. Before we embraced on this digital transformation program and implemented all this current technology, the process we used was fairly basic. We would track the total number of joiners that my recruitment team had hired in the last month, and although that was great, it didn’t tell you the entire story of the efforts that were being put in to get that joiner onboard. So, when we set-up our tech system, we started tracking the number of CVs submitted, the number of interviews that were conducted, and the number of candidates that dropped out of the process. We started realising that within this data a large part of the hiring process was about the input being put in at the beginning, as opposed to the output of hiring the joiner at the end,” said Nanda.

Nanda added that gaining access to this type of data changed their thinking towards the performance of their own recruiters.

“The visibility on all this data enabled us to examine how good were the quality of CVs being shared, and how many of those CVs actually got to the interview stage? The access to this type of data allowed us to see more accurately how our recruiters were performing. Instead of thinking they weren’t performing, we could see that maybe the portal they are using, or the headhunting strategy they were implementing was not effective, or in some cases they simple didn’t know the client well enough. Having this visibility brought a lot of efficiency to our entire operation, and value to our employees that were working remotely as recruiters. Because now they were being given a clear KPI on each of these processes, so if I am not having success then this where I’m going wrong, instead of just saying this recruitment isn’t performing. We have implemented this across all our business functions, such as HR, visa processing, the number of payrolls and accuracy of payrolls, and we brought in data and analysis across the entire service line,” said Nanda.

Nanda said that the biggest change undertaken by Innovation Group UAE over the last number of years was their shift towards recruitment.

As Nanda pointed out, as the market had evolved and matured, the company had become a luxury instead of necessity.

“We actually started to become more of a luxury than a necessity, so that is when we decided that we had to start to evolve with the market. We realised that the game was on the supply side, and in recruitment. In the past, we would not recruit as much, we were more of a HR and payroll provider. Our recruitment then became our core focus, we realised that if we identified the right supply of people, where there is a clear shortage and difficulty in sourcing candidates in this area, then selling was going to be easy,” said Nanda.

“Changing the way that you are recognised in the market is how you evolve when times change. Without these technologies and without the advent of remote working then we wouldn’t have been able to cross borders. We’re not just about visas and HR anymore, we are committed to solving the problem businesses have in terms of finding the right people wherever they are in the world to make sure they are the right people for your entity,” concluded Nanda.