Xilinx

Challenge

Xilinx, a global leader in the semiconductor industry specializing in reprogrammable logic, was struggling to recruit and retain high quality talent in their Indian talent market. Although Xilinx offered world-class career opportunities to India-based engineers, key performance indicators painted an uninspiring picture, including a high turnover rate and a lengthy time-to-fill. Worst of all, despite offering some of the most challenging work available to Indian engineers, the brand was virtually unknown. So target college talent and current employees were frequently poached by other, better-known MNCs across India. Xilinx commissioned Evviva to find out why this was happening—and to help Xilinx dramatically improve their recruitment and retention performance.

Solution

After a thorough review of secondary sources and a series of key interviews with Xilinx executives, Evviva developed an insight program to investigate exactly what Indian target audiences—both internal and external to Xilinx—thought of the company as an employer. On the ground in five key markets in India, we spoke to existing and target talent, both experienced and recent graduates, to find out what Xilinx’s strengths were as an employer, what the barriers to employment were, and how the company could enhance both its employment offering and its image.

Our learnings were stunningly actionable. Xilinx recruitment was missing out on specific structural realities of life in India. To be competitive, Xilinx needed to tailor its recruitment strategy to engage more directly with educational institutions, adjust recruitment communications to address all stakeholders in the decision-making process, and adapt its media-buying to include more locally-relevant placements. 

More fundamentally, we saw that Xilinx needed to showcase its commitment to India by both better, more localized brand expression and by addressing structural challenges in location and facility quality. To accomplish this, Evviva created an India-specific sub-palette of Xilinx colors to celebrate the brand’s ties to its location.  An in-market photo shoot followed, resulting in on-brand, localized photo assets to feature in recruitment and internal communications materials. We also worked with Xilinx leadership to take on their facilities challenges. As a result of our work, Xilinx dramatically improved the workplace environment by moving to a new, higher profile location its employees could be proud of.

Results

Returning to Xilinx India’s key performance indicators, results were off the charts. After implementing Evviva’s recommendations, Xilinx India saw time-to-fill decrease by 28 days, and hiring from top companies increase by 25%. 

“I was particularly impressed with the research element of the process, which not only enabled us to create the differentiated brand we needed, but also resulted in us effectively overhauling our hiring and onboarding experiences for candidates and new employees. We went on to execute additional successful projects in Singapore and the US, again utilizing Evviva’s expertise. David and the team are highly knowledgeable and a joy to work with. I highly recommend working with Evviva Brands.”

–Rachel Watkins, Director, Internal Communications