Cognizant Technology Solutions is recruiting management graduates from Ivy League B-schools in the US such as Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Columbia. The new recruits are being shipped to India for 6 months to a year for training and orientation. 
 
"We are hiring management graduates, about 15 of them from top schools in the US," said Lakshmi Narayanan, CEO and president of Cognizant in Wednesday's earnings call. 
 
"We then plan to deploy these professionals back in the US in customer-centric and consulting roles such as relationship managers and account managers, and in our Business Technology Consulting practice providing advise to customers on their IT roadmap, change management initiatives, etc. This investment will help us provide greater value to our customers," he added. 
 
The training in India would cover the different aspects of the onsite-offshore model including Cognizant's pioneering fourth generation offshore model. Process and quality management, program management, strategy and consulting, domain specific solutions, financial modeling would be some of the areas of focus for this training. 
 
These professionals would also work in specific projects. Cognizant has been pretty active among the leading IT services players in India in recruiting from premier B-Schools in India. Cognizant recruits only from the Top seven B-Schools in India -- IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Kolkata, IIM Lucknow, IIM Bangalore, ISB, XLRI and NITIE. 
 
In the recently concluded B-School hiring in March 2004, Cognizant hired 60 management graduates from these seven Indian B-Schools. In the last four years, Cognizant has recruited about 200 management graduates from these campuses. 
 
"In all the years, Cognizant has consistently been the first IT company to visit the campuses to recruit the choicest from among the best, sharing the premier slot with globally reputable corporate houses such as McKinsey, PwC, Citigroup, JP Morgan, GE, HSBC, American Express, Unilever and Cadbury," added Lakshmi Narayanan. 
 
The recent Forrester report which analyses the six large offshore players -- including TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL technologies, Satyam and Cognizant -- cites one of the most important areas of differentiation for Cognizant to be its "relationship management". It places Cognizant to be in the "leader category" for its mature relationship management skills. 
 
"Cognizant is known for its excellent customer relationship disciplines, including its pioneering use of American nationals for key customer relationship roles in North America," the report added.