The Imagence Partners

About Gautam

2012-05-21T20:49:00.000+05:30

Gautam Ghosh is an Independent Consultant based out of Delhi, India.

Gautam's expertise is primarily in the areas of capability needs assessment, gap analysis, intervention design and delivery, organisation change and transformation and capacity building.
Have developed business and led engagements across Real Estate, Manufacturing, financial services, BPO and technology industries.

Some assignments delivered while associated with a (during 2008-09) performance consulting firm based out of Delhi :

• Diagnosing the culture of an FMCG company and recommending what it needs to change to drive business growth.

• Designed and delivered KRA setting and assessment programs for two telecom organizations.

• Designed, Developed and Delivered a program on HR Capability Development for the Plant HR Managers of a FMCG company

• Designed, Developed and Delivered a program on Competency Based Interviewing for the Hiring Managers and Recruiters of a Financial BPO

Other consulting assignments

• Accredited learning partner with ICICI Bank, delivering training programs to executives and managers.

• Developed and Delivered a program on Performance Management for a IT Products company

• Designed and delivered a workshop on Employment Branding and Social media for Frito-Lay India.

• Designed and Implemented a Social Media Strategy for an executive search firm

• Capability building of new employees for a professional services firm

• Addressed project managers of an Indian IT firm on using social software tools for knowledge sharing.

• Was Associated with a HR Outsourcing firm to service their clients and Learning and Development solution design and delivery for its clients.

He's an avid blogger on Business and the next level of Organizations and on Social Media issues. These feature thoughts and links that he finds interesting and wants to share with others.

Gautam has given talks on “Blogging for Business” at organizations. He’s frequently quoted in the press as an authority on business blogging. If you want to interview him or invite him to speak at a conference, e-mail him or call at +91-98731-41236.

Gautam’s blog has been listed by HRWorld amongst the top 25 HR blogs worldwide and also amongst the Career 100 - a list of the top 100 career related blogs globally in the English language. His blog is also featured on the Alltop Careers and Alltop India categories. Earlier the blog has been featured as a case study in the book Business Blogs: A Practical Guide

Gautam is a social media and network junkie and can be reached here:
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Orkut

His experience in the corporate world was as a HR Manager at Deloitte, and in organizations like Dell, Hewlett Packard and Satyam Computer Services. His work primarily has been in the learning and employee relations domain. His detailed professional profile can be found here.

Why organizations 2.0

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

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Gautam Ghosh

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Using the Internet to Attract Talent

2010-09-02T13:50:00.001+05:30

Currently in India there is a severe talent shortage going on for consulting talent. This applies not just the IT consulting area where IBM, HP, Capgemini, EDS, CSC, as well as Indian IT firms like Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Satyam are planning to hire tens of thousands of developers and analysts in 2007.

Even the strategic consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG and the Consulting practice of Deloitte & Touche are all setting up offices in India to support the work of their client facing groups in the US and other western countries. Even HR and Outsourcing firms like ADP and Hewitt are using India as a base to provide data analysis and client solutions. Coupled with the fact that even investment banking firms like UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lehmann Brothers have backend centres in India, one gets to see how critical this talent crunch will be.

There are two challenges a consulting firm faces when trying to recruit and attract talent in such a market. One is to effectively target the potential candidate and secondly to use their branding to attract such candidates.

Traditionally in India employers have used three distinct approaches to hiring people:

Using the campus recruitment method at premier technology and business schools to attract entry level employees.
Advertising in national newspapers' careers section to reach out to active jobseekers
Using executive search firms to recruit senior consultants and practice heads.

However, increasingly, more and more the focus is shifting from the "active jobseeker" to the "passive jobseeker" in the younger generation of employees. This is because of various reasons:

Campus recruitment is a tough place to hire consultants for India. In the top 5 business schools in India (namely the Indian Institutes of Management and XLRI Jamshedpur) students are looking for global opportunities.
IT services firms are ramping up their domain knowledge capabilities (in the case of Infosys for example, by a fully owned subsidiary called Infosys Consulting) and increasingly poaching talent both from traditional industries as well as strategy consulting firms.
Younger generation of workers get most of their news from newer social media like blogs and other sources like Yahoo and Google news.

Various consulting firms are therefore turning to newer social media and using newer approaches to reach that elusive talent. Most consultants have a profile on a business networking site for example, like Linkedin.com . However, such consultants seldom use the real power of linkedin to either recruit fresh talent or to do due diligence and a referral check on a potential consultant for their firm.

Consultant recruiting groups in major consultancies are also slow to use the power of search engine marketing to reach potential candidates. In India, for example, Accenture Careers is the rare example of such an advertiser according to the Pinstorm –IAMAI report on search engine marketing.

To make the candidate experience even better is to use other social media like blogs of employees to communicate the experience of the workplace. One example of such an approach is Deloitte Canada's blogs (http://www.deloitteblogs.ca ) on their career site.

How would you rate your firm's career sites? Would a potential candidate have to jump through hoops to get to know more about your firm, your culture and the career path he or she has to go through? If you had to apply to your firm again today would you do it based on your career site? What other resources would you suggest to your HR and IT groups that would help a potential job seeker?

[Published in Kennedy Info's newsletter "Consultant's News"]

Preparing People for Leadership

2010-09-02T13:36:00.001+05:30

One of the biggest challenges facing Indian organizations as they grow to take on the world, is the severe shortage of skilled leaders who can actually lead them on their journey of globalization.

In fact a recent Business Today story quoted Shailesh Haribhakti, an independent director on the boards of several companies was quoted as saying: "There is now talk in boardrooms of sustainability and how to keep the companies going."

Another article in the Hindustan Times said "In the next two years, India needs to find around 500 to 750 CEOs and another 10,000 functional leaders."

K Sudarshan, managing partner at EMA Partners, an international CEO search firm, (who also provided the above estimates), says: "There is a huge gap between demand and supply for chief financial officers (CFOs) and human resources professionals—both leaders and professionals down the line."

According to an EMA Partners' five year study conducted across 100 companies during 2001-06, reveals that 66% of the companies have had a change of CEO's in the last five years. The industry with the fastest growth has the highest churn in the CEOs understandably due to the tempting offers oozing in for the CEO's. IT- ITeS leads in the category at 88% followed by Banking Sector at 70% not leaving Pharma much behind at 67%. As we can see, the demand for leadership cuts across sectors and industries. In Leading the Way (a study of the top twenty companies for developing leaders), Marc Effron and Bob Gandossy show that companies who are great at developing leaders tend to achieve higher long-term profitability.

Of course, there are short term measures to solve such issues. In the short term this would mean hiring expatriates to fill the vacant positions, and also escalate a price war for leadership talent. According to Hewitt Associates India has been consistently having among the highest increases of pay in the Asia Pacific region in the last few years.

However Indian organizations have to get their act together if they have to think long term.

What is leadership?

Leadership is defined in many different ways. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard have defined leadership as "working with and through others to achieve objectives". Some people link leadership to charisma. It is deemed to be individual specific Words like visionary, someone who articulates the path for the future etc crop up pretty often. A sales director in one of my previous organizations used to define it as the presence of three things in an individual – Ideas, Influence and Initiative. In my view it is a social process. Others have to accept you as a leader. No matter what your designation, if people do not accept you as a leader, you probably won't last.

How is leadership different from management?

For Marcus Buckingham, leadership is defined as tapping into the universal feelings of the group as different from management which is tapping into the unique strength of each individual. Management is also defined as "transactional leadership". Warren Buffet defined a manager as one who does things right as opposed to a leader who does the right things.

What they have got to do is the following:

Build the bench strength for leadership – A company can never have a surfeit of leadership. You can have too many engineers, too many researchers, too many managers, too many support staff. However, you can never have too many leaders. The more leaders you have the better it will be for the business. When I talk about leadership here, it is not the designation on the visiting card that I am referring to, but the ability to lead. The more leaders a firm has, the more opportunities it creates to compete and perform. So how can an organization build this bench strength
1. Look at competencies for leadership – Leadership like other roles is a type of role. Of course, there are different types of leadership. We shall take a look at them later. For each of these roles of leadership competencies should be mapped and validated by senior executives. Competency mapping methods like Assessment Centers as well as interview techniques should be used to arrive at these competencies.
2. Look the future competencies and business changes – Competencies need to be continually looked at in the context of the organization and the changes in business strategy and markets. The competencies of the past will not dictate the course of future successes. Hence these competencies need to be continually reassessed for relevance.
3. Decide how many would be hired externally and how many internally – An organization needs to also hire people externally in leadership positions, so as get fresh perspective on business and culture. However, these hires must always be assessed against the agreed competency models. Often, external leadership hires tend to concentrate on one achievement like being a 'turnaround' expert or a 'growth leader'. However sharper thought on how this new person will fit into the culture of the organization and how it impact the prevailing climate of the firm.
Build leadership development into the fabric of talent management. As we will see below, talent management processes which exist for all employees in the organization need to be the same systems that integrate leadership development needs.
Leadership development is not a standalone activity – Some firms try and focus leadership development by putting up a separate group. However such an approach cannot really succeed until this is tied up with other HR initiatives in Talent Management. Development of leaders is not just about 'teaching, training or learning'. Sport As Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan wrote in Strategy+Business, September, 2004 issue "Leadership Is A Contact Sport" and cannot be taught in isolation. It needs engagement with live issues and people within the organization.
1. Companies need to always focus on leadership development, during the whole talent engagement employee life-cycle.
  i.Attracting talent – Apart from assessing employees against the job competencies, they also have to be assessed for leadership positions and leadership competencies.
  1.    Does the person have qualities to influence a large number of people? How has he led people in the past? A proper due diligence by way of referral checks with past subordinates peers and supervisors needs to be taken to understand his/her strengths in the area of leadership.
  2.    It also needs to be understood that really good leadership is a function of both the leader and the market and his firm. Head hunting a leadership candidate without trying to figure out his/her actual contribution to the business' success.
  3.    Reaching out to good leaders should also focus on what his real motivator is. Does the person have a life interest, as Waldroop and Butler call it, of enterprise influence? What is his/her career anchor (according to Edgar Schien)? What are his talents, according to Gallup?
  ii.Motivating talent – Depending on the leader's motivational factors the role he or she would vary. How can the role be customized for capitalizing on the person's natural talents as well as experience? Does the person get motivated by external goals like meeting targets or internal goals like creating intellectual property for the organization? How open is she/he to travel? What are the leader's unique needs? How can the organization accommodate them? Has she/he been told what is specifically expected from her/him? How much support do such developing leaders have from the organization? These questions and their answers are not easy. However, only seeking such answers will lead to understanding what can motivate tomorrow's leaders.
  iii.Promoting talent – How do you promote people is integral to developing leadership. Leaders always may not seek a management career. Specially in a specialized domain like technology, pharma or consulting. What are the ways you can expand and enrich their roles? If they love managing people can you pose them fresh challenges every year? How do you build T shaped skills? That refers to a deep level of expertise in one are and a broad knowledge of many other areas. What forms the basis for moving people from one level to another? Potential or past performance? Other data points can also be seen apart from traditional performance appraisal. A lot of firms use tools like Assessment Centres, 360 degrees, to help aspiring leaders to know other data about themselves that are more qualitative in nature, other than just performance data.
  iv.Compensating talent – How leadership is compensated should tie in both individual motivator factors as well as industry best practices. Future earnings and linkage to business results should be clearly shown for such people. If they are really the future of the business, compensation, both monetary as well as non-monetary rewards should be open. The chasm between their compensation and the actual leadership should not be too great.
Understand that leadership development is not the HR function's responsibility
1. It needs to be the leadership's mission – Unless the leadership of an organization wants to develop leaders really really badly, it will not come to fruition. In a lot of firms leadership is not groomed as present set of leaders are insecure about their roles and want to 'hang on' to their chairs for a long time. Such organizations never will succeed in growing leaders successfully. That is because the current leaders have to mentor and coach tomorrow's leaders and yet leave them with enough freedom and autonomy to carve their own path.
2. Board members and function heads need to own leadership development in their domains. An organizational level leadership development program will not really succeed unless the various groups in the organization run their own leadership development programs.
3. To really be effective at identifying tomorrow's leaders, the organization needs to define different kinds of leadership it needs. For example it could choose to identify the following kinds of leadership
  i.Functional leadership – These are leaders who have a specifically designated role in the organization and might have to chart the future for their functions. They would need to have deep knowledge of their function, an overview of the whole business and be innovative enough to visualize the future.
  ii.Business leadership – Leaders with general management and innovative skills to help grow markets and products. A person who can think strategically as well as execute it. Someone who can satisfy both short term investors as well as build capabilities for the organization's future.
  iii.Global leadership – Leaders with cross cultural sensitivity who can help the business expand in countries other than its place of origin.
A leader is not a superman. By reading about the competency requirements and expectations one can be forgiven to be mistaken that so is the case. However, a great leader is a normal human being, not an alien from the planet Krypton. What can make him or her successful is the support of the organization. An organization needs to help such a leader be self aware and help him with aspects of his/her personality which might come in the way of the success. It is specially the case if such an issue is with the aspiring leader's personality, rather than with skills or knowledge. A shortfall in skills and knowledge can be solved by putting them through training or giving them specific assignments or projects. However an inability to deal with crises or a lack of focus on details are things that are not usually 'trainable'. For such people taking away the leadership issue is not a solution. Specially since there is such a shortage of leadership talent. Organizations can do the following:
1. Backup leaders – They can create backup leaders, who are people with strengths to complement a leader's shortcomings.
2. Two in a box – Two people together can share a leadership responsibility with a delineated responsibility.

So how would an ideal leadership development program look like?

Leaders who are to be developed would be chosen on the basis of the competencies of leadership. They would be then scrutinized to see what is trainable and what is not. For attitude issues, a backup person or a '2 in a box' can be proposed.

Theoretical inputs would need to be alternated with real life projects where they would be assessed on how they are developing. Each person in this program would be attached to a board member as a mentee. The mentor's jobs would be to guide them through the program and their performance would be a reflection of the performance of the board member themselves.

The program needs to also end with an assessment of how they have developed and for successful candidates it should result in an immediate change into a leadership role.

Any lip service to leadership development without it resulting in concrete action would be ignored.

About project managing, organizing and logistics

The leadership development needs to be project managed as it calls for a huge investment in matters of time from top management of the organization. They should keep their commitments sacrosanct and not pull out of them at the last minute. The person spearheading such a development effort also needs to be assertive with top management without being abrasive. He or she should be detail oriented and also understand human behaviour and learning to be successful in such a mammoth initiative. Having a network of supporters within the organization as well as outside would also help such a initiative.

Most important, the project manager of this initiative should also be a leader in the organization preferably from the business and should be assessed for this as a part of the annual role.

(Published in the "Effective Executive" magazine – February 2007)

Musings on the future of Recruiting and Human Resources

2010-09-02T13:35:00.001+05:30

A couple of days ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great sales people was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying "Sales folks who have worked in the consumer facing industry which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!". Talk about specialization.

As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.

HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, specially those skills of Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset. An "internal service provider" mindset will only reinforce the current perspective of the function. A "partner" approach however, also needs inernal strength to sometimes say "no" to a client, or to specify what one wants from them, to be successful. A lot of us have made successful transitions to that state, however, more as individuals than by any process.

Why is there such a need and challenge on HR and recruitment ?

The people who are their raison d'etre, prospective employees as well as hiring managers, are getting more demanding. They demand more in less time. They demand better service and without the frills. Faster turn-around times.

Organizations and senior management want them to contain costs, track metrics regarding employee productivity, morale and come to conclusions as to what they need to change/ do better so that they can control not just the bottom-line but also increase the top-line. They want better people to do the jobs recruited at less 'total cost of hiring', they want their best people to stay put and the bottom ones to leave with a minimum of fuss.

And increasingly, the organization's customers want to know about HR policies and how they impact quality of work, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose vendors.

What does HR in such a scenario [and these are getting more and more complex and demanding everyday] do? What path must it tread, what roles must it play, what skills must it gather to excel all these demands and satisfy them?

HR needs to structure itself differently, to move from the current functional silos of recruitment, compensation and performance management, training, employee and employee relations to a new paradigm of focusing on projects which are purposes. HR people no longer can make choices about whether they will be 'generalists' or 'specialists' in organizations. They have to be both.

HR's learning curve has to take into account not just today but tomorrow while keeping an eye on what yesterday has left behind. It has to focus on processes, customers, employees and discontinuous change. The question they constantly need to ask themselves is "what if all the knowledge and skills I hold becomes redundant tomorrow? What then?" and build a mindset in their organization where everybody asks this question about themselves.

HR has already been an reluctant adopter of technology and now it has to show how to leverage that technology, not just save time and money.

HR careers will soon become specialized and super specialized. HR vendors will need to offer services like "How to make an FMCG company which is focused on female products a learning organization"

Internally also Recruiting and HR will keep on specializing according to industry based knowledge.

Specialized HR people will work within organizations and yet will be part-free agents advising competition too, as they find a balance between what the job demands and what satisfies their inner strengths.

HR departments will lose many of the administrative work, as employees will take it into their hands and the corporate intranet rids them of standardized processes. They will soon be able to draft their own salary heads, leave structure and keep abreast of legal trends [all the work that HR does today!]

It's going to be an age of change and lots of HR professionals would themselves find the chasm a difficult one to cross.

[Published in the Recruiting industry's online newsletter "The Networker"]

The Changing Definition of Work Success

2010-09-02T13:33:00.001+05:30

The way people relate with their work and vocation is undergoing a change. While most people still are loath to change – there is a growing band of people who are looking at different ways of working – or looking at different ways they make meaning from their work.

There are various factors that are making people change their approach to the traditional way of work and defining success.

Most people yearned and look forward to the chance of moving from Industrial work to knowledge work – looking forward to produce intangibles like analysis from tangible things like widgets. However there is a growing realization that knowledge work (at least in the way it is done most of the time) is not the holy grail of work.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal featured an article called When Work is Invisible So Are Its Satisfactions where Homa Bahrami, a senior lecturer in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business is quoted as saying "Not only is work harder to measure but it's also harder to define success. The work is intangible or invisible, and a lot of work gets done in teams so it's difficult to pinpoint individual productivity."

Thinkers like Daniel Pink in his book A Whole New Mind are also quick to point out that a large portion of knowledge work can either be automated or shipped off to a lower cost country. The prescription seems to be to do creative work – and from moving from Knowledge which is more left brained- to Creation – which is a whole brain activity – involving both the left and right side of the brain.

Researchers like Richard Florida (author of The Rise of the Creative Class) are looking at how creativity is revolutionizing the global economy and what can countries do harness these energies that will be unleashed in the future.

What is changing in India and the kinds of people I have been following – is that they are much more willing to take risks in searching for their creative expression.

This willingness- I believe – comes because of four main reasons:

people have started discovering role models
the costs of the tools are very low
there is a robust support system in the community to support such experimentation.
The ability to act on a desire to contribute to the larger cause.

Role Models

Earlier the examples of success that were celebrated were the usual suspects, business leaders and political figures – however there is a growing realization by the popular media that successful people are from all spheres – and working not just for money or fame but other factors too – acts as a great motivator to people who are looking at different careers.

First of all they act as trigger for entrepreneurial ambitions, about how middle class salaried individuals can actually get ahead by creating their own enterprises. For example the Infosys and Mindtree founders have been an inspiration for lots of software engineers (and even others) to try and be the masters of their own destiny.

The examples of other people like SKS Microfinance founder Vikram Akula being featured in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people in the world , or the example of Janaagraha co-founder Ramesh Ramanathan who left an MNC career to help co-found an institution that encourages citizenship has also triggered professionals to look at other careers.

Cost of Tools

UK think tank Demos coined a term "The Pro-Am revolution" which stated how many people are doing things for their love of it rather than making a career/job of it

As they say:

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy.

For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

One big reason for this is the plunging cost and easy availability of tools that used to separate the professionals from the amateurs. One big example is photography – where people can now create professional photographs with easy to buy cameras and software tools. I know of three people who are amateurs and have already held exhibitions to sell their photographs.

Support Systems

With the rise of virtual communities – and the ability to find a group of enthusiasts about even any obscure interest – people find appreciation and feedback and mentors across the world. Continuing the photography example – communities on Flickr – the photosharing site have helped the aforementioned amateur photographer to learn from better people and also to discover similar enthusiasts in their own locations.

Writing used to be a lonely activity – however a recent public novel writing contest on the microblogging site Twitter helped established and aspiring writers be motivated enough to be focused on completing their novels – with an explicit goal of getting it published soon.

Such support systems and the approval they provide are often more real than the perceived lack of enthusiasm of immediate family and friends who really can not understand the context of why someone is excited by photography or writing a novel and not their regular job.

Larger Causes

The ability to create – when fused with a larger societal and community cause gives meaning to a lot of professional – in a way that formal job titles and business cards cannot.

Many organizations are recognizing this need of people – and are giving them opportunities to contribute to the larger cause – not by paying – but by creating things and contributing their efforts and time.

Conclusion

As people will get more and more such opportunities and discover tools and role models and support systems – more and more people disillusioned by traditional organizations will choose to find their own personal growth paths. And this, I believe is not going to be a once in a lifetime journey but a continuous one.

Growing an Employer Brand by Building Talent Communities

2010-09-02T13:30:00.001+05:30

Organizations face two big challenges in the context of two ever-changing realities - key talent is hard to find and job seekers look to peers and the collective wisdom of the social web to decide on what firm to join.

The two objectives organizations will need to start thinking about are:

How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of the key talented people and to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
Understand where these talented prospective employees are, what they talk about and how to engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.

Organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool.

When a person joins a talent community owned/ stewarded by an organization - he or she gives permission to the organization to have a conversation with him/her - and it is up to the organization to either mess it up by "pushing" its message or to take it to the next level by active engagement.

As this becomes more and more common - recruiters and hiring managers will move more and more into "community manager" roles and need to build and take on newer skills to augment their existing skill sets. The ability that will count will not be to tell their own stories, but encouraging participants to tell their stories.

Tomorrow's organization needs to tap into the talent pool will need to move from step 1 to 5:
1.Listening & interpreting what your prospective talent desires –
1. So, Listen & participate in relevant conversations
2. What do your prospective employees really look for in their ideal workplace ?
3. What's the perception in the market about your company and it's culture?
4. What's the perception about your competitors?
5. using tools like Alterian SM2, Buzzstream. This will identify the social places where they "hang out". Which will lead to step 2.
2. Find & attract good talent. Monitoring content that they create and queries they answer. Holding talent contests around the content they are looking in prospective candidates is a great way to finding talented people. If the organization builds virality in the contest it's a great way to spread the word and engage a larger talent pool
3. Engage with active prospects. Engaging needs to be done in two places – the niche social networks they converse in – and the organization's own branded social community – which could be a blog or a full fledged social network. It can be used to showcase organizational culture, with rich multimedia content like photographs, videos. Firms should encourage employees to participate in such forums – specially employees who are considered experts in their field. Both the employees and the organization benefit as both brands get built.
1. Content can be curated on the corporate site from the social web around different axes : product, market, industry.
2. Content can be created by the organizational employees on the organizational site too.
3. Prospective employees could also be invited to contribute content and showcased in a leaderboard.
4. Employee/ Team blogs serve two purposes specially for large organization – they act as communication vehicles with the media as well as engaging niche talent.
5. HR and recruitment focused community platform like Microsoft's http://www.microspotting.com/ also help give tips and tricks to prospective employees
4.Onboarding new recruits – While this is done offline, I feel a part of making initial connection could be done virtually even before people "sign up" and strengthen bonds between future employees.
5. Alumni connect – Today's employees can be tomorrow's ambassadors if an alumni program is managed well and alumni see value being a part of the community.
In Conclusion
The vast majority of organizations and job seekers are stuck at the "salary" discussions as they don't think about the desire of an individual to make a difference and meaning to others. And unless you can connect with that innately human desire which are discoverable and engaged via social technologies - recruiters and organizations will continue to judge a person by their current and future salary levels and they in turn will treat each firm as a mercenary would.
It's about time organizations and job seekers got to know the human side of each other.
About the author:
Gautam Ghosh is a Social Media Enthusiast and a HR professional. He blogs at http://www.gautamblogs.com and you can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gautamghosh

Google profile

2009-11-18T16:05:00.001+05:30

My Google profile page

in reference to: Gautam Ghosh - Google Profile (view on Google Sidewiki)

Welcome to Gautam's Blog

2009-11-18T16:04:00.001+05:30

Blogging on Gautam Ghosh's Points of view about Collaborative, Open and Transparent Organizations, Work and People.

in reference to:

"Points of view about Collaborative, Open and Transparent Organizations, Work and People."
- Gautam on Organizations 2.0 (view on Google Sidewiki)

Client Relationship Model

2009-09-30T13:37:00.001+05:30

Client Relationship Model

Understanding Client Business
- Industry
- P/L drivers
- Business Models
Delivering Value
- Execution Excellence
  - Design
  - Implementation
Building Relationship
- Understanding Client Needs
- Long Term Relationship orientation

Type	Focus Is On	Energy Spent On	Client Receives	Indicators of Success
Subject matter expert	Answers, expertise, input	Explaining	Information	Timely, high quality
Subject matter expert + business	Business problem	Problem solving	Solutions	Problems resolved
Valuable resource (broad)	Client organization	Providing insights	Ideas	Repeat business
Trusted advisor	Client as individual	Understanding the client	Safe haven for hard issues	Varied; e.g., Creative approach and involvement

ABC

AB C

Breadth of business issues

A, B c

B, a

Depth of Personal Relationship

Job related posts on Gautamghosh.net

2009-09-07T14:23:00.000+05:30

Now you can find jobs being posted on my blog Gautam's Net

Go check this category - http://gautamghosh.net/category/jobs

You can subscribe just for the Jobs posts here http://gautamghosh.net/category/jobs/feed/

Gautam's Net| Gautam on Management| Twitter| FriendFeed

Media Mentions

2009-05-21T21:53:00.001+05:30

Featured in the Mail Today

Building Blogs - Hindustan Times, April 20th 2008

Careers at Alltop

India Alltop

That Blocking Game - quoted in Mint WSJ

Blogging buzzword among fresh grads at NDTV

How to make money from blogs - Outlook Money and Rediff.com

A very personnel touch- Corporate Trends-News By Company - Economic Times

Its HR’s turn to face staff crunch 30 Aug, 2007 … Economic Times

How to Hit Back at the Boss you Hate Economic Times

Beware of Lying on your resume DNA

Desi Cos. Blog On to Lure Job Seekers - Economic Times

Maven Reach - Case Analysis on Blogging for Business World

How to make money from blogs - Outlook Money and Rediff

From the Field: Gautam Ghosh, Human Resources Consultant - Web Worker Daily

Best Indian Bloggers - Labnol List

Top Ranked Indian Business Blogger - Blogstreet Rankings

Featured as a case study in the Business Blogging Guide written by ex-Accenture KM Practice Leader, William Ives and Amanda Watlington

Business Blogs I follow

2008-12-29T17:22:00.000+05:30

Gautam's Net| Gautam on Management| Twitter| FriendFeed

My HR Blogroll

2008-12-23T17:24:00.000+05:30

Gautam's Net| Gautam on Management| Twitter| FriendFeed

My Recruiting Blogroll

2008-12-22T17:25:00.000+05:30

Gautam's Net| Gautam on Management| Twitter| FriendFeed

People Management Skills

2008-09-24T09:43:00.001+05:30

Vyaktitva is holding an open program for building people management skills in NCR in the middle of October.

More details here Big Ticket Ownership of Team Aspirations

For nominations, please mail info@vyaktitva.net

warm regards,
Gautam Ghosh
Blog - Listed amongst the top 20 career and top 4 HR blogs in the world in 2007

On HR.alltop.com

2008-08-04T21:36:00.000+05:30

My management related blog is now on three of Alltop sites, Career, India and now on HR

Now if only my other blog gets on Alltop's Social Media page, life would be so cool!

Gautam's Net| Gautam on Management| Twitter| FriendFeed

Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na's Godot conundrum

2008-07-18T21:50:00.001+05:30

I still can't figure out the last scene of the movie. As the cast move out of the final frame of the movie, we see a bearded man, sleepily holding a placard that reads "Mr. Godot". Why does Abbas Tyrewala have a final tribute to the Beckett play? Is he equating waiting for Love to be an endless and eventually fruitless wait like the wait for Godot?

If somebody has any ideas, please let me know.

This is totally driving me crazy.

Coke Brazil and Bloggers - Ethical?

2008-07-10T10:11:00.001+05:30

My friend Apurba Sen has an interesting question on Linkedin.

What do you think? Ethical or Non Ethical?

Apurba Sen wrote:

Coca Cola is trying to buy bloggers with "rent a blog" strategy

Last Thursday (July 3rd), Coca Cola Brazil launched the drink i9 - Hidrotonico, the Brazilian version of Powerade. As a part of the i9 marketing strategy in blogs & social media, Coca Cola handpicked 9 prominent bloggers, custom made their homepage and gifted them a fancy USB mini fridge with the new product to be tested – a reason to blog about.

Read more here :

http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog/?p=407
http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog/?p=408

Is that Ethical??

Banking in India

2008-07-07T10:14:00.000+05:30

Interesting data from RBI site compiled by Dr. Madhukar Shukla

From millions of possible locations on the net, I could finally zero down to a 421pages, 5mb pdf document from the RBI site!! ;)

... then gave up, and resorted to googling... and could finally recover some data from the cache memory of the website:

http://iibf.org.in/portal/documents/fininclusion_perspectiveofrbi.ppt

which is the trascript of a presentation by one Mr Samantaray, who is GM RBI...

this is what I found (just in case anyone is interested):

- % of adult population having bank accounts: 59% (i.e., 41% are unbanked)

- in Rural areas, the banking coverage is: 39%

- % of adult population having a loan account: 14%

- of the 89mn farmer households in the country, 73% have no access to formal credit (51% have no access to formal or non-formal credit)

- Share of money-lenders in rural areas increased from 17.5% (1991) to 29.6% (2002)

- those who are financially most excluded: Marginal farmers, Landless labour, Self employed, Unorganized sector, Urban slum dwellers, Migrants, Ethnic minorities, Socially excluded groups, Senior citizens, Women – NER, Eastern & Central regions...

etc. etc..

ciao

madhukar

[Gautam] Warm regards,

Gautam Ghosh

Blog | Website | Linkedin Profile

Cell: +91-98665-11236

Good "Typeing Skills"

2008-07-04T17:26:00.000+05:30

Oh man! The person who posted this on Brijj Q&A would do better than to make this typo!

Check out

http://www.brijj.com/qna/QuestionDetail?questionId=3459

“I HAVE GOOD TYPEING SKILL I NEED DATA ENTRY WORK FROM HOME”

Dudettes and dudes, if you need to advertise your skills, make sure you don’t do a hash of it like this lady!

About www.rentimental.com

2008-07-03T21:32:00.000+05:30

Am sure with the rise of people's increasing mobility Rentimental addresses a big need in the market.
Here's some info about them that they sent me

Rentimental.com was conceived amongst a melee of ideas about services that reach out to people. It soon emerged as the unanimous choice for our first venture at Munificent Ventures Private Limited. The 'world's on rent 'now – broker and hassle free!
In today's world people change jobs and move to a new city more often than they used to. Rentimental.com focuses on easing out the challenges involved in this process.
Finding the right home to rent is the first challenge. Our Residential properties service provides you with your choice of location, integration with Google maps to ascertain proximity to schools, offices, shopping, medical care, recreation and much more. Absolutely broker free, no hidden costs. Just walk in and make yourselves at home.
Once you've found a wonderful home and saved on brokerage, hire movers and packers and also choose to rent rather than buy everything else – furniture, washing machines, refrigerators, computers, TV, laptops, cars and bikes, catering and tiffin services – we did tell you the world's on rent, didn't we? Keep visiting Rentimental – our list of new products and services on rent is growing!
We have ensured that the renting experience at Rentimental is broker free, safe and secure. Besides a comfortable and enriching online experience we have ensured that you receive excellent offline support when you call in.
Our team here at Munificent Ventures is a blend of youth and experience from IMT Nagpur and NIT Warangal. Together we bring to the table IT, engineering, management and entrepreneurial skills, backgrounds in banking, systems consulting and systems integration, project experience with international funding organizations and apex bodies of the government and above all, a common vision to combine social responsibility with business acumen and endeavor.
Although Rentimental.com has just launched in Mumbai recently, we will be opening up in several other cities in the next few months.
Rentimental is the first of many exciting ventures from Munificent. Ventures that empower people and communities, open up opportunities and options and bring them within reach.
Meanwhile, the world's on rent! Make it yours!

Rentimental.com is based around the "Need-Gap filling" business model. We provide everything, which your employees will need- On Rent.The most relevant feature for your employees are our Resiprop (Residential Properties) & RoomMates sections.Once your employees, find a Broker-Free place to live, they can: Rent out Mover & Packer Services. Hire Tiffinwala services. Rent out Car-Hire Services. Laptops on Rent. Bachelors can look for room-mates to share the renting costs. Look for "Lease & Hire" agreement lawyers. Rent out Refrigerators, ACs, furniture, etc; Corporates can also look for Broker-free Hiring of Commercial properties.Service DetailsResidential properties is Rentimental.com's exclusive broker-free rental property search feature. Now your Employees can:Search for all kinds of residential properties in Mumbai. Locate it on a map, to ascertain the distances from your daily destination.Directly contact the owners of the flats/apartment. View pictures of the place of residence.Choose from preferences, budgets, micro-locations etc; Save the brokerage and rent a place, absolutely broker free! Click on the report a broker tab, in case the listing is a broker listing. Help us keep residential properties, broker free!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Regards
Shubham rai
+91 9821506923
www.rentimental.com

Notchup ties up with Facebook to make Resume4life

2008-07-03T11:22:00.000+05:30

Interesting premise. But have seen very few people actually use the work experience section on Facebook in any amount of detail.

This is what the email from NotchUp states

With our newest feature, Resume4Life, you don’t have to update your NotchUp profile at all. Simply install the Resume4Life application on your Facebook profile, and every time you update your education or work experience on Facebook, it will be reflected on your NotchUp profile. Resume4Life is a great way to keep your personal and professional lives separate.

We respect your privacy and will never post anything about NotchUp or paid interviews in your News Feed, Mini-Feed or on your wall. You can turn off Resume4Life anytime you want to. Soon, Resume4Life will be available for other services as well.

Kunzum.com Travel Photography Competition

2008-07-02T21:40:00.001+05:30

kunzum.com launches Travel Photography Competition, and I am sure that bloggers like Charukesi and Twilightfairy would be some of the frontrunners to win it :-)

India is a photographer's delight with its natural features, wildlife,flora, people, cultures and festivals providing more fodder for a shutterbug's creativity than one can chew.

So why not take out your camera, or dig out your stock, and participate
in Kunzum.com's travel photography competition? Bring out the spirit of
a place, or its people, its flora and fauna, or things you may have done
in India through photographs for a chance to win a professional LCD
monitor from Viewsonic, or holidays from Banjara Camps?

Add to that the possibility of your images featuring in travel books to
give you a portfolio to show off.

What are you waiting for you? The contest has already started, and you
have up to August 31, 2008 to submit your entries. There are no
guidelines here about the images to be submitted: We do not want your
creativity to be restricted.

Will you be that talent who will show India in a new light?

If the answer is yes, check out more details at
http://kunzum.com/photo-contest. There is no entry fee, nor a limit to
how many photos you can submit.

Happy Clicking!!
__,_._,___

Brijj's contest to build network and go to London

2008-07-02T13:25:00.001+05:30

Interesting email from InfoEdge's Business Networking site Brijj.com to take on Linkedin's growth in India!

Will this work to sustain the growth in the long term? Unlikely, because the focus here is going to be personal gratification than any kind of network building. Why would my contacts move from Linkedin to Brijj just so that I can get to go to London.

Contests like this won't work, InfoEdge. Think of other ways to grow the network!

You are registered on brijj, build your network
& win a Holiday package for 2 to London

Invite now

Member with highest growth in network
during contest period will fly to London.
Just invite contacts - it's that simple!

Your username:
password:

Over 900 CEOs | Over 3300 Directors | Over 9,00,000 users

The contest closes on 30^thSeptember

My responses for the Blogworks.in Thought Leader Survey

2008-07-01T22:31:00.001+05:30

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rajesh Lalwani <rajesh.lalwani@blogworks.in>
Date: Jun 19, 2008 10:16 AM
Subject: RE: Thought Leader Survey [#4]
To: i@gautamghosh.net

Thanks much Gautam.

Cheers

Rajesh

What, in your opinion are trends you can see on the blogging/ self-publishing scene in India?


3 distinct themes are emerging. Apart from more and more Indians blogging as a personal reflection on sports, movies and politics - their is a greater effort on blogging about one's subject matter expertise. Photographers, journalists, consultants are using blogs to tell their stories directly to end users and potential clients. Digital media and advertising firms no longer have static websites. Having a blog is imperative for them. Local language blogging will take all this more mainstream, and falling costs of broadband will make video and audio blogging also more popular. This however will take time.
What's impact of blogs & social media that you see on society, culture, marketing and in mainstream media.	The awareness of blogs has gone up. Even my retired uncle knows about them thanks to Bollywood blogging :-) What I currently see is that people are struggling to figure out how to make sense of this blogging phenomenon. While moving to the technology is easy, moving to the 'cluetrain' and participative mindset is the tough part. The people/institutions who will leverage blogs better would be those most open and transparent.
Which verticals have you seen emerge and think will continue to grow and dominate enabled by social media?	Can't say if any one vertical is emerging thanks to social media. Players in each vertical are dabbling in it. In India however, blogging is still dominated by outstanding writers. Maybe some of them will go on to develop large blogging networks. Traditional publishing hasn't been able to embrace the openness that blogging requires. There are no conversations happening that show that current users of social media are actually listening.
How important a role will the mobile phone play in India in relevance to Internet and social networking?	I do not see the phone replacing the laptop yet. The platforms it uses are too prone to manipulation and control by service providers and the government. Small group networking might survive, but in the next 1-2 years I do not see it impacting social media much. If mobile platforms become more open due to some technological change in the meantime that would be welcome!
Three key trends you see emerge	More and more websites will embrace social media tools. Embracing social media mindsets would be much more difficult. Dealing with the cult of the free will differentiate how online and offline businesses survive and move to the next level.
Which online players do you think are doing good work in India - worthy of emulating or to learn from.	The online players that are successful are folks like Naukri and Makemytrip. However the people who will benefit most with social media is someone who will reach out to the long tail. Those names if any are not known yet.
Which brands, in India, do you think have best used the web to project themselves?	IBN comes to mind. It has used blogs by its big names to attract online readers and differentiate itself from NDTV. No other name comes to mind :(
Which media companies, in your opinion, have developed the most attractive web services in India?	IBN again. No one in the print media has embraced blogging. JAM magazine has gone a good distance. It enables people to contribute to the mag using a Ning social network it hosts/
Who do you respect in Indian online media?	Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration. He's a global brand, quoted by Steve Rubel