Interview - Cognizant Consulting's Mark Livingston and Natarajan Radhakrishnan

Can you elaborate on two or three things that you have established?

Consulting and delivery are two different business models, two different cultures and operating models. So we really had to build the Consulting career track. These 2,600 heads we have now are pure consultants, people who work only in consulting and not in delivery. And we do not include systems integrators (functional folks who provide ERP, SCM, CRM services) as part of it. When people join the consulting practice, they have a consulting plan on what they would do for the year, we have a consulting evaluation process, separate promotion committees, a different bonus structure for senior consultants, and so on. In addition to trying to sell work and hire people, we have created the infrastructure behind the scene to run the business. Not that this capability did not exist before but it was sharpened. We have built the business, created an efficient consulting and training model.

The other area where I spend most of my time is in recruiting and interviewing. We built it both ways � hired a number of senior people and also built it bottom-up. We have the largest MBA recruitment programme in India. Nat drives that. We hired over 220 professionals from premier B-Schools with a 96 per cent joining ratio.