Cadence has been in India since 1986. And though it is small—it made it to the top this year due to one of the highest average salary levels in the industry—Rs 11.3 lakh, against an industry average of Rs 4.3 lakh. It also has the third-highest levels of perks and benefits, next only to Adobe Systems and SAP Labs. But one of the major factors that accounted for its ranking is a very high score on almost all the 14 attributes measured for each company.

Effects of Recession Salary Increment affected: 64.7% Increase in workload: 35.3% Change in composition of variable and fixed cost to company: 32.4% Strengths Highest average salary among all surveyed High perks, benefits and attribute scores Weaknesses Low focus on training and high employee turnover Staff most satisfied with... Compensation, benefits and facilities Technology working on, co-workers Staff least satisfied with... Training and development Policies and procedures

Despite this, the company has a few issues—prime among which is high employee turnover, despite the obvious benefits the company offers. It ranked 11th on retention, which, at 89.1%, is just marginally better than the industry average of 88%. On attrition (at 9.1%), it ranked 9th, below the industry average (12.3%) but still not too good a score for the second-best IT employer. And it ranked 16th on tenure—which at 1.3 years on an average per employee is extremely low. In addition, while Cadence did well on ‘Preferred Employer’ rankings (4th) with a good 81.8% of its own employees voting it as their dream company, it wasn’t too hot on ‘Preferred Company’ scores—ranked 7th with 3.9% of overall votes. Interestingly, while 12.1% of its employees voted for Infosys Technologies, it also attracted interest from 4.9% of Hughes Software Systems employees and 1.9% of Infosys employees.

The company did well on most attributes for which employees joined the company, though the relative scores for job content, career development and overseas opportunity were comparatively lower. However, it had the top scores on most attributes, including compensation and benefits, facilities, resources and support, professional competence of peers, technology, work climate and organization culture.

The company’s major HR initiatives include a talent development program which consists of a value rating system, succession planning, identification of high potential employees, critical employees and "at risk" employees (those likely to be actively wooed by other companies). In the end, all the figures put together indicate that though employees rate the company highly on most individual attributes, their overall satisfaction levels are not commensurately high (ranked 6th on overall satisfaction and 11th on peer satisfaction). There is a pointer to the future here—it is often easier to meet specific employee aspirations when a company is small—HR processes have to do more than just that as the company grows. That will be the challenge here for Cadence.