Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:00]
Hello and welcome back to the HFS GCC Advantage. This is the show where we speak with GCC leaders who are shaping the next phase of the model. Through this conversation, we try to understand what the leaders are building, how the work is changing, and what it takes for GCCs to create more enterprise value.
Today, we have Saraswathi Ramachandra, Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India. Lightcast is in a very interesting space, helping businesses, education institutions, and governments really understand jobs, skills, workforce trends, and how the world of work is actually changing. Saraswathi, welcome to the show.
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[00:40]
Thank you, and a pleasure being here, Achyuta. Thanks for having me today.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:46]
Saraswathi, to start with, can you give us a brief overview of Lightcast, the role it plays in labor market intelligence, and your own journey leading Lightcast India? How has the India center actually evolved from a delivery center into a deeper engineering and capability hub for the enterprise?
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[01:05]
Sure. A pleasure talking about it. Like you said, we are at the center of a lot of things that are happening in the world today, and it’s a very interesting domain to explain what we do.
I will actually talk about a real example. We work with a large multinational food and beverage company, and it was facing one practical question: do we have the right skills in our organization for the work we will need to do tomorrow, not what we are doing today?
They have thousands of roles, but a job title by itself doesn’t actually tell you many things. For example, take a role like marketing manager. The skills required for that role today may be very different from what they used to be three years ago, or even a year ago. And the same is true for technology, finance, supply chain, or almost any function we operate today.
So the company actually needed to understand three things. Which skills does each role actually require? What skills do its people currently have? And what are the gaps? That would then help them make better decisions about hiring, workforce planning, and developing their existing people so that they can upskill.
And that’s where Lightcast comes in. Lightcast is a labor market intelligence company. We are fundamentally a company that turns labor market data into intelligence that organizations can act upon.
We take an enormous amount of labor market information — job postings, profiles, government data, skills, and other workforce signals — and then structure them into a common language of jobs and skills. On top of that we use data science, AI, and our own proprietary taxonomy, which is very, very critical in defining everything around it, to make sense of that whole complexity and turn that data into intelligence that can then help organizations make better decisions about talent, skills, and more importantly, the future of work and skills.
That actually allows any organization to compare what it has internally with what is actually happening externally in the labor market. So often we get into a discussion of: where should we upskill? Should we hire people? Should we buy people? This is where the whole crux of intelligence sits.
So in this particular case that I’m talking about, the company used that intelligence to build a career skills inventory, understand the gaps, and make its roles and development plans more relevant to the rapidly changing market that is happening today in the world.
And the same intelligence, if you see, applies to a much broader application. Like you said, we work with enterprises, academia and government.
For enterprises, it helps answer: what skills do we have today? What skills do we need tomorrow? And how do we build that capability? Because the whole capability development is a discussion on the floor today.
For academia, the question is very different. When you talk to the academic institutions, they are asking: are we preparing students for the skills that employers demand? Are they employment ready? Will they actually be ready for what is needed? Where is the gap between what we teach and what the market is demanding? And Lightcast actually helps address that.
And for governments and policymakers, we provide a much broader view of the labor market. Where are the skills emerging? What are the shortages? Which industry, which location, which skills? Because we look at industries across, and then the data across all the countries, and then help decide how should the policy be designed and defined, what should be the educational and workforce investment that needs to go in to respond to that.
So in crux, as Lightcast, we sit at the intersection of all these three ecosystems — enterprise, education and government — and the common thread is skills intelligence.
That is why we are able to help transform the workforce; help academia make sure future employability, or the skills that are required for the students, are defined and designed, and the curriculum is designed around it; and help governments understand the workforce trend.
That is Lightcast overall. And it’s just amazing to me, Achyuta, because we are actually sitting and seeing — we get those signals because we look at the data across multiple countries and industries. We get those signals which we are able to capture much ahead of time, and define those skills as to what is going to be the future skills.
Your other part of the question was my own journey at Lightcast. My own journey with Lightcast has been closely associated with building the India organization, but more importantly, in redefining what the organization should be looking like.
Like any other organization, the same holds true for us as well. Within the organization, the nature of work today is changing so rapidly. And sitting at the center, we know what the signals are, and the same thing we are applying internally as well.
Our own Lightcast research shows that the average job has seen 32% of skill change in just three years. So if the skills required for a job can change that significantly, building a GCC around static roles or skills or processes doesn’t make sense any more.
So we did start with what work can we do from India, but we began building capabilities across engineering, product, data, data quality — which is very important for us — security, and other business functions.
More importantly, what we did is we brought our teams much closer to actual business problems, customers and products. And at that point of time, something interesting starts to happen. Because when they understand customer problems and understand business themes, they stop thinking about completing a requirement or a task that they have, and start thinking about solving a problem, whether it is a business problem or a customer problem.
Inherently, they start to make those decisions. They start to understand the commercial context of that product. They start asking whether they are building value. So these are small things, but they actually add up to the outcome.
For us, the evolution therefore has been less about a maturity curve in the GCC curve, so to say, but more about changing the definition of how we set up the GCC itself.
So in other, simple words, we were not simply saying what should be the delivery versus what should be the engineering. We started looking at what is the output versus the outcome. And that’s the crux of everything that we are.
It’s really: can we understand the problem? Can we build the capability? Can we make the right decision? And can we own the outcome? And that has been the journey at Lightcast, and we are consistently progressing towards that outcome.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[08:37]
Good to know that, Saraswathi. One of the interesting points that you just raised is that different products are being built and shipped from the GCC. Can you share some examples of products and platforms that the teams are contributing to, and what kind of impact and outcomes are being created from the work that they are doing over here?
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[09:01]
So what we do is we own core products, not just pieces of it. Of course, there are pieces of it as well. We are a global company, we have multiple products. But there are also core products that we own as a center.
And one clear example is a product called Lens, which is our resume parsing and classification service. What Lens does is it takes an unstructured resume — any resume, for that matter — takes that unstructured resume and turns it into structured talent intelligence.
Basically it extracts and structures the candidate information from resumes, including skills, experience, education, all of those that would be there in the resume, and other relevant attributes.
That means if anybody uploads a PDF or an image of a resume, the product will actually output individual skills and the job history into a standard form, using our skills taxonomy — we call it the Lightcast taxonomy. We map it to that.
We also take a national-level or regional-level taxonomy definition that might exist, and we extract that and then map it to the Lightcast taxonomy. We even do OCR on images and support a lot of local languages, because it’s a global product. It’s not just English — we also support various locales.
So basically, in short, Lens transforms any messy resume into machine-readable skills and roles.
Why does it matter? Because one person’s skills and experience are structured, but you cannot connect them to the broader labor market. For example: what job could this person do? What skills are they missing? How do they compare to what other employers are asking for?
Let’s feed this into our larger platform so that recruiters or talent platforms can answer those questions. And do we give a score for a particular job requirement, to be able to say what is the profile match that exists? That can happen. So accuracy is very, very important for us.
Lightcast India has been deeply involved in developing Lens models and integrating it with the global taxonomy. We recently also added an option to use LLM-based parsing for improving the accuracy.
So basically it is not just taking the requirement and developing. The end-to-end product and requirement, understanding customer needs, changing the requirement based on the particular scenario, and developing the whole product, and interacting with customers — all has been done through the team here.
And the crux to everything that we do, like I was saying, is data. Our value as Lightcast starts from data, from many, many sources. We collect labor market signals worldwide, whether it is job postings or profiles, education data, government data — all of this we collect. We aggregate job postings from over about 22,000 websites and job boards.
The challenge is that these sources don’t speak the same language. Every website, everything is different. One site might list a role, for example, as software developer, and another one says software engineer. Or one might list a skill as machine learning versus the other one says ML, which is the common lingo we use. So different sources have different classification formats.
So the real work is in making all these fragmented signals comparable and meaningful. So we clean the data. We de-duplicate identical postings. We standardize company and job names, because there are multiple subsidiary names — we standardize those. We identify the skills in each post, classify them into the Lightcast taxonomy, and link information across sources.
And then this is a rigorous data pipeline that we have automated using AI and taxonomies which are human-curated, which is very fundamental to everything that we do.
So it means that the output we give to our customers is a consistent, high-quality intelligent layer, and not just messy raw feeds.
And this whole data aggregation, data de-duplication, which is the core of everything we do — we do it from India. And that is the global accountability. And if you see, that’s the meat of Lightcast: the taxonomy, the annotation to those, the data cleansing, the de-duplication — everything happens from India.
And we take a lot of pride in that, because if the quality of that data is not true, then our authentication of what we are saying is not true. But that is the amount of responsibility the team holds, in ensuring whatever we are doing is actually very, very true to what we are saying.
That is why it’s important that we start understanding what the business needs are, and we understand that. And it’s not really how much code we are writing from India — that’s not what we measure. While that could be part of it, because like I said, we have all kinds of things. But it’s also how many business and product outcomes are actually done, and how much of the core are we holding, are we delivering as an outcome from India.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[14:29]
So, Saraswathi, Lightcast works with one of the most comprehensive labor market data sets globally, as you have explained. How does the India GCC help build or scale the big data core platforms that power Lightcast intelligence and insights?
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[14:44]
Like I said, there are multiple sources — about 220,000 sites that we parse and crawl. So the core challenge, if you see, is scale and variety. Taxonomy and modeling, because we have about 33,000-plus skills in the taxonomy. Data quality, that we talked about, because when we look at the data, 80% of the data is duplicate. So we need to de-duplicate, and layer the filtering, and make sure the insights are actually layered by intelligence on the top, which is the integration layer.
All these things the India team is contributing to, along with the global team. So our platform is global and real time. We update the data on a real-time basis. We update the job postings continuously. Our profiles are updated on a quarterly basis for labor statistics, which incorporate government sources like OEWS, ACS and so on, as the authoritative baseline. We actually integrate all of those as well.
India GCC has played a big role across all of these tasks. Our teams work on data engineering, pipeline creation, intelligence algorithms — which is NLP and ML models and rules that label the data — on product engineering, which is APIs and tools that serve customers, and on quality and platform reliability.
That means we are not just doing the back office work. We are contributing to the intellectual core of Lightcast.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[16:15]
Excellent. And I also got to know, Saraswathi, that beyond your engineering and delivery, you are also driving the India business and P&L leadership for Lightcast. I think this is a different responsibility for a GCC leader. So how are you thinking about this as an opportunity, and what does it take for a GCC to move closer to revenue, customers, and market outcomes?
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[16:41]
I think that’s something that we all talk proudly about in the India center, because we wear dual hats. One is the delivery itself and owning the outcome. The other one is the business impact.
So basically, if you see, we are today serving India customers, which means the scale at which we need to operate — because India is different, and every country is different. And I think one thing we have learnt as an organization is that while we have standard products, and that need is true for every country, the customer insights that need to be borne, and the quality of data we need to modify for the specific country, is very, very different.
So we started with five different countries, and now we are scaling up our ability to be able to cater globally across 165 countries, with the same kind of quality that we need to get to.
And to us as an India organization, it is a unique opportunity where we can serve enterprise, education and government across. And what it means to the team is — because we have different teams sitting here, as mentioned before — the opportunity to understand the customer needs directly is a brilliant opportunity that the teams are getting.
In fact, when we actually demo the products, we don’t necessarily go with just the sales team. We also have engineering, we also have our product teams demoing those products. That collaboration and understanding the customer is a sense of pride that is actually enabling us to understand the India market much faster.
From a leadership point, P&L ownership means we view our India organization as both a capability center and a growth engine for the Indian market. Our capabilities work across to support global products, but also developing solutions on a bespoke approach for India, because the insights need to be specifically done. That is something that we are looking at on a consistent basis.
This means we are organizing the full value chain around talent, capability, product, technology, cost, and then the market needs and the revenue and investment that is required from us. So bottom line, we are looking at the value creation and the ownership that we create from India.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[19:11]
Thank you. And given the work that you do, you have a very good view on what’s coming from a skills side. So if you look at Lightcast India itself, how does the next chapter of Lightcast India look? How will it look three years down the line?
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[19:30]
When I look at the next three years, I don’t think success of our India team will be measured simply by how big the center is, or what the headcount is, but more measured by how much more consequential we become to the overall organization in terms of our business and mission.
So like I said, AI is accelerating this transformation. For example, in 2024, our own study, a research paper, showed that 51% of job postings required AI skills which were outside of IT and computer science. As AI becomes embedded in all kinds of work that we do internally in Lightcast, it’s not just a technical shift — this is an organizational shift.
And then, given these shifts, at least for Lightcast India and for overall Lightcast, we are seeing the organization evolve around four dimensions in the next three years.
One is deeper product and engineering ownership. We will continue to look at the entire life cycle of products.
Greater business and market ownership, like we discussed before.
An even stronger AI and data intelligence hub, which is the combination of high-quality labor data, taxonomies, and AI that I mentioned. So India, given the talent we have in AI, can become the powerhouse for this intelligence.
And then building the whole talent ecosystem around it. This goes beyond hiring. It’s actually developing our people who are able to continuously learn and adapt.
So in effect, three years from now, I don’t see a big number for the GCC, but an organization which is responsible for outcomes like customer adoption, measurable client success, or even revenue growth originating from these efforts.
So the shift we are going through is: how much value can India create, and how much business outcome can we own? That is where we are looking — from a transition from a pure delivery center to an engineering, product, and business ownership hub. And that’s how we will be in the next three years.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[21:42]
Perfect. Saraswathi, thank you for joining us and sharing your perspectives. In a world where skills, jobs, and workforce decisions are changing so quickly, the ability to turn labor market data into useful intelligence will become more valuable than ever.
The Lightcast journey also shows where the GCC model is headed: deeper product ownership, stronger data capabilities, closer business accountability, and greater responsibility for outcomes. Thank you again for being part of the HFS GCC Advantage.
Saraswathi Ramachandra — Managing Director and Country Head, Lightcast India[22:12]
A pleasure being here with you, Achyuta, today, and thanks for having me.
