On June 6 this year, a batch of 17 management graduates, including one from Harvard Business School, will walk through the doors of the Tata Management Training Centre in Pune to start its tryst with Tata Administrative Service (TAS). These 20-somethings are certainly not the first to do so, nor are they likely to be the last. Why, then, do they matter? Because they’re walking in at a time when TAS is making a conscious effort to break from the past, and reinvent itself to meet the needs of the changing times.

Given its relevance to the development of a leadership pipeline, TAS is being given a makeover. Says Satish Pradhan, executive vice president, group human resources, Tata Sons: "It’s about growing tigers. You cannot grow tigers in your backyard, you need a jungle to grow them. TAS provides that space, and scope. It’s vital to sourcing talent for the group." It’s almost as if ‘discontinuity’ has become a need at what’s perhaps the only cadre of its sort in the private sector, grooming talent for a career of life-long mobility across industries and functions.

Once considered the private sector equivalent of the IAS, it’s going out of its way to shed that similarity by doing away with the ‘misnomer’ Tata Administrative Services. From now on, it’s going to call itself TAS, much like International Business Machine calls itself IBM. A significant break from the past has been the decision to shut its doors on non-management graduates. All 17 recruits this year are management school products. The ‘eclectic recruiter’ who welcomed people from all streams will now recruit only from the best B-schools in the country.

Explains Allen Sequeira, vice president, group resourcing and TAS: "We do not have the luxury of grooming talent from scratch as we used to in the past. We’re a business and times demand that we hire management graduates who come with a certain level of understanding about the ways of business." Following its chairman’s ‘back-to-basics’ philosophy, TAS too is concentrating on what it’s best at — grooming the best and the brightest from A-rated campuses who have already passed through the stringent admission procedures of top business schools.

Aggression is the new order at TAS — nothing but Day One status will be acceptable while visiting campuses for recruitment. It’s competing with the Accentures, Citibanks, GE Caps and HLLs of the world for the same talent at the creme de la creme of management schools. It’s also differentiating itself in the crowded placement market. When it went to B-schools this year, it preferred not to follow the Power Point presentation routine.

Says a TAS recruit of 2002: "They branded their talk in a very un-PPTish way, and made it very exciting by combining it with off-campus activities." For the uninitiated, PPT stands for pre-placement talk by companies at B-school campuses. TAS conducted market research on campuses across the country last year, and then followed it up with a series of initiatives to talk about the group. Not only was a ‘Tata Business Leadership Awards’ contest conducted on various campuses, an old Harvard case study on the Tatas was dug out for circulation on campuses.

R Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons and a member of the Group Executive Office, was asked to teach the Tata case study at a few campuses. Says Pradhan: "By moving in to the premium status in B-school campuses, we’ve reclaimed the status lost in the last few years." Of course, the downturn in the job market has helped. TAS competes directly with consulting firms because of its general management career path. Given that not too many consulting firms were in a hiring mode this year — after the spate of layoffs announced last year — TAS moved up the preference list fairly effortlessly.

It’s also become more competitive in terms of salaries. Says a Tata manager who graduated from a B-school in 2000: "Salaries were a major part of why TAS lost out when the MNCs came in; the pay was incomparable and acted as a discouraging factor." Current recruits have been offered a salary of Rs 6 lakh per annum, which is pretty competitive with the average Indian salaries of Rs 5.5-6.5 lakh on various B-school campuses this year.

The selection procedure itself is being given a technical shot in the arm to make it more robust. The recruits this year had to undertake IRIS, a new tool with scientific determinants to gauge a candidate’s capabilities with respect to the six ‘work levels’ or layers of management, being followed internally by the group. The group heavyweights who sat through group discussions were given a set of Tata leadership practices, and a guide on how to recognise those in an interviewee.

It’s also going to be more proactive in future. Unlike in the past, when projects were decided once the TAS recruits arrived at a certain company, a rigorous 12-month schedule is being drawn up for them. To start with, there will be a gruelling routine while undergoing a 3-5 weeks of classroom training at TMTC, Pune. The legendary ‘Bharat Darshan’ tour of Tata companies is also being put to use. The cosmetic change is that it’s being renamed ‘group induction tour.’

The actual change from past is that recruits will have to make a presentation on what they saw and how they understood it after they come back from a two- or three-week tour of various Tata companies like Tata Tea plantations in Assam and the Jamshedpur steel plants. And that’s not all that is being demanded from recruits. Unlike in the past, just getting recruited will not be enough. A performance evaluation at the end of the 12-month training programme will decide whether the recruit will be confirmed or not.

Also, of the four assignments that cadre recruits will work on, one will have to be in community space, and will involve living in a village for at least a week. Shades of Hindustan Lever, did you say? These efforts seem to be paying off, though it’s early days yet. Of the total batch strength of 1,395 in the top nine institutes, around 951 applied to TAS. Moreover, 17 of the 20 offers made by the Tata group were accepted. Those who made it had grade point averages in the top end of their batch. Says Sriram Chandrasekharan, manager, TAS: "In the last two years, the number of IIM graduates joining us has increased substantially."

This in itself is a big change from the past. Says a graduate who’s joining TAS this year, "They had a severe image trouble on campuses in the last five years. They were too fuddy-duddy." Unfortunately, this was also the time when foreign firms in India and abroad were coming live on those campuses. As a result, TAS failed to find its place in post-liberalisation India. There was simply too much baggage associated with it: unglamorous, laid-back and unfocused being some of them. Moreover, a ‘life-time employer’ was no longer an attractive option for life in the fast lane.

Not that TAS itself did much to improve its image. Says Jamshed Daboo, a TAS recruit from 1986 and COO, Indian Hotels, a rising star at the Tata group: "TAS has never been a vacancy-filling job. Since there was no magnet of demand, it did not market itself to suppliers. So if anything, it’s the marketing of TAS that failed it in the past few years." Even within the Tata group, TAS was losing its aura. The entry of professionals like Gopalakrishnan at the top tier of management within the group in a way reflected that TAS had lost out on providing leaders for the group. Sequeira clarifies: "Of the 120-odd TAS recruits at present, about 17-18 are CEOs of group companies."

There’s a view that with the entry of some top management professionals from Hindustan Lever, the recruitment and training procedure is borrowed in bits and pieces from the most admired multinational in the country. Pradhan denies any similarity between the new TAS and traditional management trainee programmes run by companies like HLL. "TAS recruits work across at least four Tata companies — if not four industries and four functions — in their first year itself. Which other company can offer a training programme like this?" he counters.

All said and done, the death of the TAS of yesteryear is also a sad occasion for old-timers, for whom the tag was a life-long value addition to their résumé. The new TAS resembles any other training program followed by a GE or an HLL, in spirit at least. That’s very different from the institution that Tata Administrative Services was — sourcing multi-disciplinary talent and grooming it in its backyard. The old order changeth...