Take-2

I spoke about HR's role in catalyzing Business success from 'Happiness @ Work'; at NIPM Kerala Chapter's biennial conclave, HR Con2017, last week.

Highlights

Involve your New as well as Existing team members:
A. Don't just recruit professional mercenaries; enlist passionate revolutionaries instead.
Engage their emotions during their induction; feelings before facts, and principles before policies.
B. Don't treat them as pieces of your strategy, but as partners in your endeavor.
Respect their contributions; inputs before instructions, and shoulders before strategy.

Fully Engage them with the Goal:
A. Clear Links - Ownership of the Goal; Accountability to the Team; Contribution to the Success.
B. They may not find purpose of life, but must be fully engaged with the purpose to work.

Identify the Right Indicators:
Don't measure things only because you can.
A. Induction success > do they feel they Belong?
B. Objectives success > do they feel Responsible?
C. Reviews success > do they feel they are Accountable?
D. Development success > do they feel they are Benefitting?

Loved interacting with the audience and with the panel for this segment, Harish Jayachandran Pillai and Vikram Sridhar.

Thanks for the opportunity, Anish Aravind.

Leaders Make it Personal Amateur long distance running is not an exciting spectator sport. But, it can be enlightening for a keen observer. One of the most interesting aspects is that the ecstasy on the face of the runner who

1. Validated and regularly reviewed goals
2. Awareness of available finances at time of appraisals
Critical to reducing dissatisfaction irrespective of Bell or No-Bell

Don’t blame the bell How does the Bell Curve actually prove useful and what is it that organizations can do to make their performance processes effective

What kind of a recruiter are you?
(Part 1)

Where are the Recruiters?

Some of the most difficult hiring mandates I have faced were the ones to find recruiters! It was a near impossible task to find one with the right combination of attributes - drive for delivering result, relationship skills with stakeholders, diligence to manage data, innovation to source applicants, and ability to assess applicants.

The last one in the list above is a fast disappearing skill. Not only are recruiters not using this skill enough, but their stakeholders and managers are not demanding that they do either. And, that is a sorry state of affairs for this community. All the other skills, notwithstanding the difficulty in finding someone with them, are transferable. You don't need to be a recruiter to have them, and many of the fantastic recruiters that I have hired in my career so far came from outside the recruiting and HR community. But, the ability to understand the stakeholders' need and assess applicants' suitability accordingly is the special skill that the recruiter must build. And, because this has been ignored, you will find that recruiters are near the bottom rung of the pay scale for HR jobs despite being a specialist function.

Recruiter? Or, Paper-pusher?

So, why are most recruiters not focusing on the one thing that can differentiate them from other HR professionals and from also-ran recruiters? And, more importantly, why are their managers not demanding that they do so?

The questions that a recruiter gets asked by the 'stakeholders' on either side are:
Business manager - "Why am I not seeing a steady pipeline of resumes?"
Recruiting manager - "How many resumes have we shared with the hiring manager for this role?"
Both, unfortunately, are making the recruiter think of shoveling in as many resumes into the pipeline. So, the recruiter is now looking for a minimum resume fitment and forwarding applications, in effect, making his role unimportant beyond a paper-pusher.

One of my managers once told me something contrarian to the conversion ratio driven approach to recruiting I see all around me. He said, "you only need 1 resume for 1 post; you have got to find the right one". So, recruiters, spend time to understand what your stakeholders need and then take the effort to assess applicants accordingly; recommend only the right applicants to them.

In Part 2: How to find the right applicants from the pool?

Who can benefit from coaching offered by take-2?

Take-2 offers coaching support that can help experienced career professionals:
a. Add a new skill/capability to their repertoire, to help them take on new and challenging roles
b. Accelerate development to prepare for greater responsibilities and growth
c. Strategize and implement critical changes for a specific goal or challenge at the given time