The decision of India's two largest business groups, Reliance Industries and Adani, to enter a no-poaching pact has been interesting in many ways. Both of the behemoths are not in direct confrontation with each other, strictly speaking. The battlegrounds between renewable energy and petrochemicals will now lead to them competing, with renewable energy and petrochemicals businesses being the obvious battle grounds.
It has had several large organisations get into some form of informal agreement not to pick up talent from one another. HR consultants talk about an implicit understanding that existed between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Infosys and Wipro, Hindustan Unilever and ITC to name a few. As more sectors start to take shape in India, demand for talent has taken off quite a bit, along with the need for specialized skills. With billions of dollars being pumped into various sectors that Reliance and Adani operate in, both groups are compelled to hold on to their biggest resource, as well as very ambitious plans.
According to Bhavishya Sharma, MD, Athena Executive Search Consulting, the mobile business always looked at FMCG majors for talent while the latter was sourced from retail. One is talking of very large businesses with scale in the case of Adani and Reliance. He says talent is hard to come by here and poaching from one another hurts the ecosystem.
In the last decade, the thrust into big-ticket areas has been most obvious for both of these large groups, including oil and gas, power transmission, power transmission, port, airports, gas distribution, cement, retail, FMCG, renewable energy, among others. On core infrastructure businesses, Sharma estimates that demand for talent has gone up 5 x 10 x on a frenetic growth story that often sees doubling of revenues each year. While the two groups may not be in direct conflict with most businesses, they want to avoid a conflict of talent. Demand-supply mismatch is avoidable and they recognize that there is not enough fresh talent. One head of an executive search firm, who has worked with both groups at different points in time, thinks renewable energy ambitions could be a reason or for matter Adani s decision to enter petrochemicals announced last July and an industry where Reliance has a dominant position to not poach from each other. He says all this is rarely put in writing and is implicit in nature. The story on talent is not done yet, by the looks of it.