Gautam Ghosh on Human Resources

The Future of the Resume

2012-01-26T22:50:00.001+05:30

I tweeted this WSJ article "No More Résumés, Say Some Firms" and got some interesting responses from folks. Yes for some jobs your "web presence" is becoming more and more important. And others require you to do online quizzes and solve problems before you can apply (therefore weeding out people who don't meet some requirement for the job)

One recruitment consultant replied that two of her clients ask her to send candidates' social network URLs to them. And one of them, a startup IT firm, insists that all the candidates should have tech blogs. (this is in India!)

However, the death of the resume is greatly exaggerated.For one, such roles and organizations are miniscule. The processes and systems of traditional organizations with its armies of sourcers and recruiters and technology like Applicant Tracking Systems understands the resume better. And while you might be fortunate to get interviewed by a company that can make a decision about your expertise using your social web presence -that will continue to be in the edge as that method is not scalable yet for large to medium organizations where the number of applicants per job vacancy go from 10 to 25.

However, for key skills in certain roles focusing on social web presence is critical as external people often trust a regular employee over a financial or technical analyst and the CEO according to the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2012. So we will continue to see services like re.vu (you can find mine here) who aim to turn your resume into a visual story too. Looks kinda pretty, doesn't it? Then there's About.me (mine) and Flavors.me (mine) who all try to get to unify your social web presence.

Not to forget the 800 pound gorillas fighting to own your digital identity - Google (my Google profile is now Google+) and Facebook and Twitter (which adds a rel="me" tag to the URL you add to your website there)

So the moral of the story, keep your resume polished and keep the same information in the big profile pages too. And start writing a blog (specially if you're in technology!)

The Best Companies to work for - social media wise!

2012-01-21T10:36:00.000+05:30

Fortune put out its list of 100 best companies to work for. But it also put up another list on which of the top 100 are leveraging social media and networks both externally and internally. I loved the list and thought I'd share some examples here:

Marriott : The longtime face of Marriott International, Bill Marriott, has operated a blog since 2007, and the company uses mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter extensively. the company ventures into new ground with its My Marriott Hotel social game. The game allows users to manage different elements of a Marriott hotel. Even with languages such as Arabic and Mandarin supported, it might come as a surprise that the city with the most players is Cairo, according to the company. Associates can post ideas for corporate changes to the "Did You Think of This" internal website, and several hundred entered a video contest submission through Marriott's jobs and careers pages on Facebook. The company also periodically has its officers hold question and answers sessions online, such as a human resources executive providing insight into the job search.

Google: Social media used: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Google , Google+, Google Groups, Magnet (internal tool), internal and external blog
Google also uses social media heavily in its recruiting operation. In addition to a Google students page, the company posts live streams of Google+ Hangouts on Google provide applicants with feedback on the hiring process, such as what code languages to know at interviews.

SAS Institute: SAS offers substantial training in social media for its employees: its new education program, "Social Studies," provides workshops and training modules, while an optional responsible-use course had several thousand participants last year.

Intuit: Internally, Intuit has a news portal, SNAP, within its proprietary intranet. Employees can share news stories, discuss them, and even send pieces to friends and family. Internal blogs and Yammer also keep Intuit workers connected, through Yammer groups such as one for members of a "high potential" leadership program to connect outside their hands-on training.

Executive Search Firms and Social Media

2012-01-19T23:41:00.001+05:30

Image by Esthr via Flickr

An interesting meeting I remember with an executive search firm was "We don't need to go social. Our ability to charge a higher search fee is based on senior exec people not being available"

Another exec search firm (one of the biggest in the world) has asked me to address their "researchers" in their Knowledge center.

So what do you think? Is the Exec Search firm a fundamentally different one that they inhabit?

If yes, how does it impact the profitability ?

The Talent Series event report

2012-01-18T14:18:00.002+05:30

From left: Lucian Tarnowski, Madan Padaki, Pratik Kumar and Krishna Prasad

As you know we had planned a gathering of business and HR folks in Bangalore on 6th January to have a conversation about Talent and Technology and specifically about the Future of Talent in India.

There were some fascinating points and experiences shared about what employability means, the future of training and teaching and how technology is transforming organizations.

Read the full report here

Members of the audience

Photos via Dheeraj Prasad

HR should act as an enabler for Social Business

2012-01-17T13:33:00.001+05:30

Image by Cristiano Betta via Flickr

On the social business news blog Michael Brito posted about the SHRM survey that finds that HR would play an increasingly important role in Social Business.

However the crux of that involvement focuses on "creating and enforcing a social media policy"

To me that sounds like policing - not acting as the enabler and empowering the energy of the employees to be the organizations' advocates on social media.

To do that the focus has to be on building an empowering and trusting culture within the organization and then following that with education and training on the dos and donts of social media. Governance, while it is critical, cannot be purely on the basis of publishing a policy.

A company cannot be asocial inside and social outside.

HR has to evolve to catch up with the rest of the organization to embrace social.

Culture is the Employment Brand

2012-01-12T19:53:00.001+05:30

No the employment brand does not exist in advertisements or what you tell your marketing agency.

Your company's employment brand is shaped by conversations that are triggered by questions like this on social web these days.

Your employment brand is built and shaped now by such conversations. It is what your employees say to their friends and what their friends reply to questions like the above.

In short, if you want to really impact the employment brand - start with the culture of your organization. Because that is the brand that people actually care about.

Start with being authentic. Open. Upfront. Both externally and inside. Listen. Talk less. Do more.

If you are authentic about the kind of culture your organization has - conservative, experimental, edgy or whatever it is - you will attract people who would be comfortable with that culture.

Sure culture is a messy thing. Not usually articulated easily. It is not the "values espoused" but demonstrated by the "values in action" and hence open to perception and biases.

Culture is also defined in various contexts. If you're a bank then you have a certain kind of culture, right. Not really. Because if you're the bank's BPO or IT center in India then the culture would be either subtly or radically different. If you're in another country the national culture would also shape it.

So how do you showcase your myriad cultures to the myriad applicants who apply to you or the people you want to hire?

Do share what has worked for you.

Online Influencers in Recruiting

2012-01-12T00:02:00.001+05:30

The HRExaminer brought out its version 5 of the Online Influencers in Recruiting - this time moving away from Traackr to using HRMarketer's SocialEars to "assess influence"

Surprisingly I am number 6 on the Recruiting list with high scores in the areas of "Social Recruiting" "Recruiting" "Staffing" and "Recruitment Advertising" (strangely, I don't remember having posted/shared anything about Recruitment advertising)

You can see the full list here, and how they scored

Musing on Identity and community

2012-01-02T18:44:00.000+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Communities have always existed and people have given them different names for it. In ancient times the community was about a place. Every village was a community. Every tribe a different community.

As civilisation took root, the ideas of a community became more and more complex. We had communities based on regions, nations (all based on place) , communities based on professionas (what we do - which was taken to an extreme in India - with caste)

The interesting thing to note is that one's community becomes one's network - you get access to a certain world view, specialised skills and knowledge - and are better equipped to deal with certain opportunities.

Then came modern education and training and it lowered the barriers to access but not substantially so. If you could afford it you could be anything.

And then came the online world - which lowered the access to resources and therefore skills.

You could have been a Chartered Accountant's child, or a Doctor's but you could become a writer, artist, photographer, programmer.

Now with ubiquitous access to the net and cheap access devices like the Akash tablet we are bound to see the barriers come crashing down even more, with anyone who wants to getting access to the best teachers and resources to learn skills one wants to learn.

The online world also has communities. Communities of people learning something (skill or talent communities), communities of people interested in solving problems (activist communities, support communities) or communities of interests (lifestyle communities, brand communities).

Earlier communities were the source of your identity.

Now, you can choose your identity and join your community.

So will you choose your identity based on who you are or who you want to be?

Future of Talent in India - Panel Discussion by BraveNewTalent on 6th January

2011-12-30T16:30:00.003+05:30

As 2012 kicks off I am glad to announce that BraveNewTalent is launching a global series of talks - the first of it being in Namma Bengaluru - focused on the Challenges regarding Talent in India.

It will focus on the critical business issues relating to talent and insights around how demographic changes are coming up, new models of education like peer to peer learning, and using digital and social media in the talent space.

If you're a CEO / HR head / Academician interested in these issues, register for it here. Limited seats available :-)

Finding great talent in the not-so-usual way

2011-12-26T23:48:00.000+05:30

I recently came across reference to George Anders' book "The Rare Find" first by a video talk my friend Gaurav Mishra shared on Facebook and then coming across the review of the book on HRExaminer and an interview of George by Daniel Pink. I then discovered that George was following me on Twitter too :-)

In the interview with Dan Pink he shares the way recruiters normally get it wrong.

You need resilience to be a great CEO, a great teacher, soldier, investor, etc., etc. But when we hire, we’re taught to regard setbacks — regardless of what came next — as flaws in a candidate. So when we prepare our own resumes, we hide our stumbles. That’s wrong! We should cherish people who have extricated themselves from trouble in the past.
Find the frontier. If you want to be extraordinary, restlessness is a virtue. It’s also a great traveling companion for resilience; if you can combine the two of them, your chances of finding society’s greatest opportunities in any particular decade are huge. Hang out with people just as driven and passionate as you. The great hotbeds of talent are self-sustaining because competitive internal friendships guide rapid progress. When in doubt, come back to autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Personally, I think the greatest recruiters are the hiring managers. In certain industries the real talent scouts are people who have done the job, and so they know exceptional talent when they see it. Talent is also demonstrated in "doing" rather than interviewing. Of course, as he says for some jobs like coding software or writing it is possible to look at the results before you select them. How do you do it for other jobs?

The 6 big blog posts of 2011

2011-12-24T18:18:00.002+05:30

I decided to put together a list of posts of 2011 that had maximum views

Here they are:

Your thoughts?

Leveraging Social Media for Job Hunting

2011-12-23T17:52:00.000+05:30

Image via CrunchBase

My colleague Ramon Bez at BraveNewTalent's London office recently wrote an article in The Guardian about how graduates can leverage Social Media for Job hunting. This was after a research that showed UK graduates not leveraging social media for their job hunting. I suspect the same is true of India.

Here are some insights from the article:

Connect with people
Start following people. Twitter is an amazing tool because even the most seemingly unachievable professional can be found and followed, and there are millions of those there, from the most diverse industries. Facebook and Linkedin are a little more private, but I'm sure you'll find people in your own network from all sorts of backgrounds who just might happen to know about a vacancy that's perfect for you.

Engage Let people in your network know who you are and what you are looking for. Produce or share content around your professional life and interests. While it may sound intimidating at first to start writing, filming or even tweeting your own ideas, step two will give you a good understanding of your field and the sort of content that is relevant. If you keep your ears open you should be able to find and write lots of useful content.
Share it on Facebook, but especially target it on professional networks such as Linkedin, Twitter and BraveNewTalent.
While our study revealed that job seekers over 55 are less likely to share their job plans (35%), only 7% of 18 to 24 year olds are prone to secrecy, which at least shows a change in mentality. Very often, where the US goes, we soon follow, so we can expect many more people in the UK to find jobs through social media websites in the near future. But those who are starting now surely can get some good competitive advantage.

UK HR professionals feel most valued

2011-12-20T14:27:00.001+05:30

Image by zachstern via Flickr

I get a lot of email from HR students via this blog asking "Should I take HR as a career? My friends/siblings say that only losers go to HR"

Then when they join organizations "I am unable to contribute to this organization. Nobody listens to me. I don't get budgets"

While it is never easy to read such letters - maybe they are the minority. Maybe most HR professionals - the ones who don't write to me - presumably do feel valued at their workplace. Maybe I am coming to conclusion only by listening to the exceptions.

That thought was triggered by this news I came across about UK's HR professionals.

Almost nine in ten (86 per cent) HR professionals believe their work is key to the overall success of their employer, according to a survey of almost 2,200 office workers by recruitment specialists Robert Walters. This is considerably more than the other roles in the survey, risk professionals (69 per cent), bankers (68 per cent), lawyers (65 per cent) and accountants (66 per cent).

I wonder what would be the percentage if such a survey was conducted in India? Any thoughts?

Jobs in Social Media - what you need to know

2011-12-19T17:42:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

My latest post on Social Samosa is for young job seekers who are looking for a career in "social media"

So, you’ve recently graduated from college or you’ve been working in a company for a while. You love hanging out on social media platforms like Facebook, and have even got a Twitter account, and maybe a Google+ account too (you really are a geek, aren’t you?) And then you read this news item in the newspaper. How companies are hiring people to Facebook and Tweet for them. “Damn, that is an easy job. Even I can do that!” you think to yourself. What could be easier? And you’ll be getting paid to do it! Uh-oh. Interacting with friends and updating your status on a regular basis is not the same thing as doing it for a firm (either in-house or in a social media agency)

Here are the things you have to understand

With Rypple Salesforce becomes a bigger social provider

2011-12-16T18:26:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

I had reviewed Rypple earlier in the year and am excited for them as they are disrupting the HR software market by building a true social HR product.

Still, the news of them being acquired by Salesforce.com is quite unexpected !

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is one of the champions of "The Social Enterprise" buying firms like social media monitoring tool Radian6 and now Rypple. With Rypple Salesforce.com makes its biggest move to becoming something more than just Sales. Using Salesforce's Chatter (which is similar to Yammer) employees can already connect and share information and now with Rypple their clients will do Talent Management socially, for managing goals, giving feedback and socially rewarding people.

The fact that this has happened barely two weeks after SAP acquired SuccessFactors (which itself was acquiring some social firms) and it is clear that cloud and social HR are critical to the large ERP players.

Perhaps because their users are more bothered about HR than they were in 2000?

The other thought that crossed my mind is that Salesforce.com now competes directly with the social business players like Jive (which just had a good IPO) and Lithium. Rypple is available on the Jive App Market. I wonder what happens now? (Update: Constellation analyst Alan Lepofsky shares that they will continue as usual, which is good news)

Exciting times ahead, folks!

NetApp India's focus on building a great culture

2011-12-16T14:41:00.005+05:30

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Vikram Shah, President of NetApp India where he shared the focus NetApp India (and worldwide) places on building culture and developing their people (they are in the top 10 Great Places to Work in various countries – including India). I met him on the sidelines of a NetApp training session called T.O.A.S.T. (which stands for Training On All Special Things !) – where all the 800 people who had been recruited over the last year came together and interacted with the company’s worldwide leaders who had flown in from all around the world.

That was something special – not many companies fly down their top leaders including the worldwide head to interact with ALL new joinees once a year. Typically such trainings/interactions are restricted to handpicked “high potential” employees. A word about NetApp – they are in the computer storage and data management business, competing against the likes of EMC and Seagate as well as the storage businesses of IBM and HP. NetApp India has been growing exponentially almost doubling this year to 1900 employees from last year’s 1100.

When I asked Vikram how does he hire so many people in such a niche industry, he shared that 45% of their hires come via referrals from existing employees. And they come from allied industries like chips and networking – spurred by their friends’ sharing of the culture at NetApp.

Vikram shared that values are the bedrock of NetApp and employees commit to it every day and at every opportunity. When I asked him to explain what he meant by values, he shared that it meant adding value to employees, customers, partners and society as a whole. He said that ethical behavior is critical and he addresses all new joinees in the first month stressing the fact that they have to behave ethically and legally. In the interview stage if they suspect a great performer hadn’t achieved his success in an ethical manner they would rather not hire the person.

"Employee engagement is a key focus. Be it in terms of contests , soliciting feedback on issues like talent development or initiatives that they would like to either steer themselves or make a recommendation – there are different forums that they can utilize. We have an effective Intranet where employees can brainstorm an idea, discuss an issue, post videos, upload pictures etc. NetApp encourages a healthy dialogue within employees as that promotes a collaborative culture."

How does NetApp ensure that managers and supervisors also focus on values and ethics, I asked Vikram. He shared there are various interventions like Brown Bags, Manager’s Round Table to surface issues. "To recognize and celebrate our employees' dedication to delivering outstanding results, we have Living Our Values Awards. The Living Our Values Awards are given to NetApp employees or teams around the globe who are inspiring examples of living the NetApp values and who "go beyond" for our constituent groups. Nominations for the awards are submitted by employees for a peer/colleague whom they perceive to be the embodiment of NetApp Values. Employees share the stories of the people they work with who demonstrate immense enthusiasm, passion and commitment in whatever they task they undertake."

On being asked why the focus on culture and values, Vikram shared that it impacts the bottom-line of the business in the long term. It helps to open the doors of clients and the constant feedback that customers give is that NetApp employees are easy to work with. "Our engineers and product managers regularly interact with the customers to understand what business challenges they face and their future needs. Such interaction helps us work towards customer-focused product engineering; customer delight is very important to us."

It all sounded hunky dory so I asked what happens when an employee is struggling due to work, how does NetApp support him/her?

Vikram shared an amazing practice. He said every day, he sends a list of such employees to the Vice-Chairman of the firm who makes a call to all such employees, giving a word of encouragement and support! Vikram shared that it often acted as a huge source of inspiration for people stuck in a tough situation at work. The Vice – Chairman calls up employees who have been “caught doing the right thing” to appreciate their efforts towards making NetApp a Great Place to Work. In India, NetApp understands the importance of family to the employee – hence whenever a new employee joins the company, Vikram sends a a personally signed letter to the spouse (if married) or the parents (if not married). In fact, they once gave annual gifts to all the employees’ spouses saying “Thanks for supporting your spouse for their work at NetApp” I can imagine that impacting the attrition rates at a company :-). Vikram will be sending out personally signed New Year Greetings cards to the families of employees this December

NetApp in keeping with its value of positively impacting society gives 5 paid days off for employees to do volunteering work via the CSR program called ‘VTO on the GO!’ ( Voluntary Time Off). Leaders and employees come together to offer their time to a community service. "In December we will be having an Executive Chef Day where the leadership team will take over the cafeteria and will be serving lunch to employees. The proceeds from lunch will go towards sponsoring the ILP educational visit and the ‘Habitat for Humanity Magic Build’ for December 2011." shared Vikram

(Disclaimer: I was reached out to by NetApp's communication team. However I was not compensated by cash or kind in any way for this post. The only thing NetApp team did was send me a car to navigate the insane Bangalore traffic to reach the venue :-))

The Strategic Priority in most Organizations

2011-12-15T22:31:00.000+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Today morning a person on twitter posted "hey HR how about you give us some time to use the 3 day trainings you've asked us to attend this month?"

Then I tweeted back "Looks like they are looking to exhaust their training budgets for this year"

Then she replied "Yeah, only wish they had employee learning more important than merely checking in the box"

That's when it suddenly struck me - most organizations are only focused on checking the boxes. That's their strategic priority! It's about doing what my boss expects me of doing and not something that discomforts the organization.

So instead of thinking of increasing the customer and employee experience/ satisfaction managers focus on building their budgets and checking the boxes.

So how can we focus more people in the organization to focus on customers and employees instead of sub standard metrics?

Before the How and the What comes the Why

2011-12-13T22:50:00.001+05:30

I apologize for the weird title this post has. However I am finding it useful to use that sentence when people ask me "How can I leverage social media?" or "What should I do to make a 1000 people like me on Facebook?"

For heaven's sake, "Why?"

Why do you want to leverage social media? Do you want to create a more engaging brand? Give customers support? Help co-create products? Empower your advocates ?

I told Lighthouse Insights in this interview, also check the comments out:

The big one is to understand why they want to be on “social media” – If they view it as a channel to broadcast then they will never be successful. The focus should be in defining whom they should listen to, and engage in conversations for a business end. That business end could be co-creation, feedback, customer service – even HR.

Reason why Master Burnett is joining @BraveNewTalent

2011-12-12T18:43:00.000+05:30

Yeah, the news is out. Master Burnett, international HR and Recruiting thought leader is joining BraveNewTalent as Director of Strategy and in this ERE article he shares his reasons:

“I have never before seen a company with as grand a vision as this,” Burnett said in a conversation Sunday. “It’s what convinced me (to take the job).” So enthusiastically did he speak of the company and its plans to “defragment the social landscape and the knowledge landscape and bring it together in a way that will be a complete solution,” that if his excitement could be harnessed it would power a city.

“One of things that attracted me most about BraveNewTalent is that they made delivering value to the talent the primary goal, i.e. it’s a talent-centric solution,” Burnett says. In the company’s grand vision, narrow-casted talent communities will be developed, where content will be targeted, useful, and current. These communities will have characteristics drawn from other sites; LinkedIn’s professional tone, for instance; Facebook’s strong social interaction; Quora’s crowd-sourced information, and so on.

In an email before our conversation, Burnett explained BNT this way: “It pairs skills communities with organization-supported talent communities, creating a diverse ecosystem where developing talent, organizations that leverage talent and individuals/organizations that impart knowledge and skills can robustly interact in a way that has become the new norm for those active on social media. “While integrated talent management is a buzzword we hear a lot in this profession, very few solutions are truly integrated, instead they offer suites of silo’d tools.

The BraveNewTalent Community Platform that is currently under development (you’ll be able to see the first glimpses of it around Christmas) addresses employer branding, holistic labor sourcing (all labor types), development, performance management, and retention without any reference to traditional HR departmental boundaries, it’s truly exciting.”

Another article about BraveNewTalent at the HR Tech Blog - BraveNewTalent - the company you don't really understand but should

Posting on Two new Social Media blogs

2011-12-08T12:12:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Over the last month I was flattered to be approached by two new social media and social business blogs to be a contributor.

The first is Social Business News an initiative by Michael Brito to create a resource dedicated to covering enterprise social media, collaboration, governance, technology, and change management. The goal being to help enterprise professionals and the agencies and consultants that serve them with valuable, relevant and actionable news, opinion and insights related to the industry. Other contributors include thought leaders like Dion Hinchcliffe, Christopher Carfi, Jacob Morgan and others.

My first post here was how social business can help employees find friends and increase engagement.

The other blog I have become a contributor to is the quirkily named "Social Samosa" - a venture by Ankita Gaba and Aditya Gupta - which hopes to become a knowledge repository for thoughts, ideas and dialogue about social media scenario in India.

My first post there is how social media skills are going to be a most jobs in the future.

Go ahead check them out :-)

The difference between a Talent Pool and a Talent Community

2011-12-06T10:34:00.001+05:30

My colleagues at BraveNewTalent have made a nice infographic that summarises what the difference is between a talent pool and a talent community

You can create a Free Talent Community for your organization too. To start go here

HR and Social Networking - The BraveNewTalent way

2011-12-06T10:06:00.001+05:30

On 24th November I had the opportunity to present at the Delhi Management Association's "3rd Mega HR Conclave" . This is the presentation I made on Technology and HR Innovation for Networking

Feel free to download and share it with anyone interested in the topic :-)

HR and Social Networking

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh

Using Twitter Hashtags and Lists for Building your Network

2011-12-04T19:04:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Over the last week I talked with a couple of folks in the HR and L&D domains who had started using Twitter but were wondering how to use it.

Twitter can seem daunting for a new user. Unlike Facebook and Linkedin which are "mutual connections", Twitter is a one way connection platform - You follow someone without needing their permission and they are not obliged to follow you.

If you are not a typical social media user then chances are that you would find very few former connections on Twitter. The people Twitter suggests you to follow are usually celebrities and unlikely to follow you back.

So how do you discover people who share your interests?

One of the best ways to do that is leverage what are called as "Hashtags" Hashtags are (according to Twitter) phrases or words preceded by the # symbol

People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search.Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet.

So one of the best ways to leverage hashtags is to find the conversation related to your domain, in case of HR it could be #HR or #trdev There are also time based Twitter chats that happen using these hashtags like #lrnchat for learning professionals

When you respond to tweets using these hashtags you demonstrate your domain expertise and gain followers.

Lists are some of the most ignored resources on Twitter. You can find people in your domain expertise using Twitter lists of people and create your own lists. For example I have curated global HR and Indian HR folks on Twitter. Following them would help to grow your own network

One can also use sites like Listorious to discover such lists

Need any more help to grow your Twitter network ask me on Twitter :-)

Video of our panel on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business

2011-11-29T21:11:00.001+05:30

This is a video of our panel discussion at Nasscom Product Conclave. Moderated by Vivek Paul (of Kinetic Glue) and a panel of D Vijay of Texas Instruments India, Sumeet Anand (of Kreeo) and yours truly

From left: Sharad Sharma of Nasscom, Vivek Paul, Vijay Doddavaram, Sumeet Anand and me.

Sign up for the BraveNewTalent India newsletter !

2011-11-21T16:48:00.001+05:30

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2011-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

Why didn't Mohandas Pai become COO?
After his resignation was announced today, Mint had this story. Shows how much a business (even something as delivery focused as IT services) depends on sales, that a Finance turned HR head can't really hope to land the top job without sales and marketing experience

Read more below

Links for 2011-03-20 [del.icio.us]

2011-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

Challenges and Trends for HR services
Some excerpts from the latest article I wrote

Links for 2011-03-14 [del.icio.us]

2011-03-15T00:00:00-07:00

The 4 kinds of Learning
As a HR professional one always thinks of training but as I mentioned before, learning is a much more broader term. I came across this interesting article which focusses on the different kinds of learning. I've blogged about connectivism before and I suspect would hear more about it in the future.

Here are the 4 kinds of learning
SuccessFactors into Social Learning
HR software firm SuccessFactors has acquired Jambok reports TechCrunch. This is interesting because it shows a sign in the HRMS space. Some time ago a company like SF would have taken over a LMS or eLearning company to shore up their offering, while now it is focusing on social software related firms like CubeTree and Jambok.

Read more about the news and Jambok below:

Links for 2011-01-28 [del.icio.us]

2011-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

Peter Block says HR's Compensation Philosophy leads to unethical behavior
This is an interesting view. Peter Block, author of the bestselling book on Organizational Consulting, Flawless Consulting, says that HR compensation and benefits systems encourage unethical corporate behavior.
He singles out stock prices and ESOPs along with variable pay for encouraging short term thinking. Here's an excerpt of his thoughts at India's leading HR publication People Matters:

Links for 2010-12-27 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

Sharing the Journey
Makes others fellow travelers.

Bombay Addict ruminates what makes him share deep personal details on Twitter

Links for 2010-12-26 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-27T00:00:00-08:00

Quora is not like Blogging
I really don't think of Quora as blogging. More in the nature of Linkedin Answers or Yahoo! Answers. But Scoble does make a point as to what it borrows from.

I don't think Quora will replace or even be a substitute for blogging by a long shot. The big value it has is the quality of people who are answering, IMHO.

Links for 2010-12-25 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-26T00:00:00-08:00

Social CRM and Employees
Article on what it takes to make the transition from CRM to Social CRM. However most of such discussion is missing the critical point of getting employees ready to make that transition - and whose role that is

A lot of HR people now are approaching me to conduct "social media awareness" sessions - so I guess is the movement to really becoming a "Social Business" is still some way off in India
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