N.R. Narayana Murthy at the lecture. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Infosys founder and chairman emeritus N.R. Narayana Murthy had some valuable pointers for all engineering students eyeing a job with the infotech giant.

Delivering the Globsyn Annual Lecture Series 2012 on August 3 at Oberoi Grand, Narayana Murthy gave the audience a peek into how Infosys recruits its employees.

“We do algorithmic models to test the learnability of our incoming talent. We conduct written tests for a million engineers every year to select about 25,000 of them,” said Narayana Murthy.

Aspiring techies must go prepared because, as per Infosys rules, those who miss their chance at cracking the written test in the first go will not be allowed to sit for it again for at least a year.

According to Narayana Murthy, the biggest challenge for organisations is the “ability to attract, enable, empower and retain” the best and the brightest minds.

He also stressed the importance of values in the recruitment process at Infosys, a company whose tagline is “powered by intellect and driven by values”.

“Intellect alone is not sufficient. Intellect has to be used for the right purpose.... It is very important for us to ascertain that these bright people have a basic grounding in values. We believe in some ways values are more important than intellect,” said Narayana Murthy.

But how are values ascertained across the table? “It’s not easy in a short interview… at lower levels where we hire 25,000 engineers a year it is obviously not possible to go through such value-driven exercise. So, we do a thorough background check on the antecedents of every engineer selected. We spend lots of time on exposing every new entrant to the basic values in life through various classes, case studies, interactions with senior people and, most importantly through leadership by example.”

According to Narayana Murthy, leadership by example is one of the “urgent and eminent” needs in the country right now.

He also highlighted imagination and excellence in implementing ideas as the two most important things for survival in today’s competitive environment.

“Learnability”, which he defined as the ability to “extract generic inferences from specific incidence and use them”, is the key to success in an environment where change is the only constant, underlined Narayana Murthy.

Bikram Dasgupta, chairman and CEO of Globsyn Group, opened the session earlier in the evening, highlighting the company’s achievements last year — the completion of the national campus, launch of the Globsyn Consulting Group — and giving the audience a glimpse of what was in store for Globsyn in the near future — like Kommunity Plus, a web portal to be launched in 2013.

St. Xavier’s College celebrated the opening of its Bengali honours course with a Bengali play Aajir, based on a Mahasweta Devi story, in the main auditorium on August 4 (top). The play starred Xaverians past and present and was directed by professor Ashis Siddhanta from the chemistry department. (Above) Transport minister Madan Mitra, higher education minister Bratya Basu and Father Felix Raj, principal of the college, attended the play. Pictures by Sayantan Ghosh