Mourning a loss

Dear all, my father passed away yesterday at 4.23 pm at Lucknow. Thanks for all the messages of condolences and support.
This blog may be silent for sometime. But I urge you to go through the blogs listed in the blogroll for lots of thought provoking posts by some great people.

On Alltop and list of 100 freelancer blogs

While I have been off the net I didn't realise that the blog has made it two two lists, the careers page on Guy Kawasaki's new venture - Alltop. I actually mailed and tweeted Guy and begged him to consider the blog for the Alltop Career page. Alltop.com is a site which helps its users explore their passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web.
It was a total surprise to me however, to see this blog on the list of the 100 freelancer sites compiled by Bootstrapper.
Thanks folks!

Interview with RiseSmart CEO Sanjay Sathe

When Sanjay sent me a mail I asked him if he would like to be interviewed for the readers of this blog he readily agreed. So I emailed him some questions and he readily mailed me back the answers on RiseSmart and its unique business model of providing personal support for CXOs who are job-hunting. The interesting part is that there is an India component in RiseSmart too. Read on to know the details.

1. Tell us about yourself, what have you done and how did you become CEO of RiseSmart?

I'm like many RiseSmart customers in that I've spent my career climbing the corporate ladder, in jobs in both the U.S. and abroad. In 2006, I was vice president for enterprise data management for Sabre Holdings in Dallas when I was "transitioned." During my subsequent job search, I became very frustrated with the options for searching for senior-level jobs online. This is what inspired me to start RiseSmart.

2. RiseSmart has a very 'different' business approach. How did you come up with the idea?

During my job search, I was spending probably 30 or 40 hours per month signing up on job boards, recruiter sites and corporate sites. When I used one of the aggregator sites, I would receive literally thousands of results for a search term like "vice president of marketing" -- and most of these results were really poor matches. This whole exercise was too time consuming and inefficient - “going across a multitude of website and a multitude of pages within a site looking for that needle in the haystack”.

The irony was, here I am, a senior executive used to having a staff working for me, and yet when it came to finding my next job, I had to do all this grunt work myself. Why wasn't there a service that could sort through these job results for me? Why wasn't there a service that treated executives like executives? That's why I created RiseSmart -- to provide $100K+ earners with the level of job-search support they've earned the right to expect.

3. Am quite interested to know about what are profiles of people who will be assisting the CXO levels with their job search. What kind of people are you hiring for those positions?

The RiseSmart Concierge center is based in New Delhi. All RiseSmart Concierges have two to three years of HR experience working for US based RPO companies, thus understanding the subtle nuances e.g. the difference between the managing director in India and in the US. Additionally, we put all concierges through an extensive training program, and we monitor their performance on an ongoing basis to ensure that our customers are receiving the right kinds of jobs.

4. What is the ratio of 'job concierges' vis a vis job seekers?

Each RiseSmart Concierge is assigned up to 25 customer accounts. RiseSmart's proprietary search technology first does the heavy lifting to present a filtered number of job results before the concierge enters the process. The technology narrows it down from a ocean to a bucket and the concierge from a bucket to a cup to make it really relevant to the customer. The first time around the Job Concierge spends a little more time in servicing the customer, and then the incremental results are less time consuming. Also we have split the concierges by Functional areas so they really can get specialized and get a good understanding of the nuances of that particular function.

5. Who do you think are your main competitors?

No one does what we do, which is why we're so excited about our future. TheLadders has carved out a niche as a job board for $100K+ earners, but it offers members only a limited pool of jobs which are posted on their site by recruiters. Their database of jobs is less than a tenth the size of ours. And the monthly subscription fee they charge is comparable to ours. So why would anyone choose them over us? I think our value proposition is pretty compelling. Just that we are new so people do not know about us.

6. How many employees does RiseSmart have?

Currently 30 across New Delhi and Dallas.

7. Are you focused on the US or do you have plans for other countries too?

We are focused on the U.S. market initially, with plans to expand internationally once our business model is firmly established. Much of my experience is in global marketing, and I see many opportunities for RiseSmart service in other labor markets, including India's. So stay tuned.

Thanks for the support

Thanks to all the wonderful people who mailed, called or left messages to convey their best wishes for my dad's recovery.
I wish I could share some good news with you but the fact is that he's battling COPD in the ICU along with a secondary infection of pneumonia. It's a tough time for him and for all of us, so thanks for all messages of support.
It makes me strong.

Off the net for sometime

For people who are wondering what's up at this blog, I'd just like to update that my dad is admitted in a hospital in Lucknow and I'm in the city being with my parents. Don't know how long I'll be here, but I just wanted to share with all of you who take the time and effort to read this blog.
You might instead take a look at the comments in this post instead, some very interesting perspectives.

The battle for the internet

Between employers and employees is what blogger and journalist Sidin Vadukut writes in Mint WSJ today. Interesting read on the perspectives. Sidin also asked my view on a particular issue:

The battle to control employee access to the Internet is not one that employers will win easily. That is why, perhaps, ImmersiveX, a Mumbai-based Internet design firm, has tried to rewrite the rules of the game. A recent job posting by the company on a youth job portal had an interesting couple of lines. In the Benefits box, the company has added: “Free Internet! No Orkut blocks!”

But, will the strategy work? Gautam Ghosh, a human resources consultant, is sceptical. “Open Internet and Orkut use might be a differentiator for attracting people, but the company itself would lose out in the long run if the employees cannot manage how much time they spend on the sites, and if work productivity suffers.”

Digital Inspiration blogger Amit is also quoted on workarounds on how people can get Orkut scraps as rss feeds and updated on Facebook by email :-)

Recent news item I read reported on how the bandwidth of a company came down because too many employees were watching YouTube videos at the same time. Am sure the CIO did not find it funny.

Koffee with Karan, not!

OK, it was not Koffee with Karan but with Google employee and blogger Sundar where he decided to do an e-interview with me on topics covering blogging, consulting and looking back with regret (heh!)

So go ahead and read it.

Too bad I didn't win any koffee hamper or get any coffee mugs to sign for the coffee wall :-)

But overall it was a fun experience, my first virtual interview :-)

The 25 most wanted US professions

Jobfox did a survey and found that Software Design/Development, Nursing, Accounting/Finance Executive, Sales/Business Development Representative and Administrative Assistant are the top five most active professions in the March 2008 Jobfox Top 25 Most Wanted U.S. Professions rankings. The report reflects the professions most often targeted by employers and recruiters using Jobfox to search for and find new or replacement workers during a 120-day period ending February 21, 2008.

Professions rounding out the top 10 are: Corporate Finance; Networking/System Administration; Intelligence; General Accounting; and Technical Customer Support. The complete list of rankings is available at www.jobfox.com/Site/PressRoom.aspx

The March 2008 Jobfox Top 25 Most Wanted U.S. Professions rankings were derived from a stratified random sample of more than 4,000 U.S. job openings from the Jobfox database during a 120-day period ending February 21, 2008. In total, Jobfox identified more than 150 distinct professions for which employers were seeking candidates during the period. Also captured in the rankings are the median salary ranges desired by candidates for top-ranked professions. A stratified random sample of more than 100,000 Jobfox candidate profiles, matched to specific professions, was used to determine median salaries for each profession.

hat-tip: Barry Lawrence of Jobfox's email to me.

RiseSmart gets angel funding

RiseSmart, yes the same folks behind the Career 100 rankings have just announced that they have got angel funding. In an email they sent to me they said:

RiseSmart, the human-powered job search service for $100K+ earners, announced today that it has secured a $1.5 million seed round of financing from angel investors, including leading authorities in the human resources and recruitment industry.

Bridging the gap between traditional job boards and the personal
attention of a career coach, RiseSmart - a subscription-based service
competing with executive job sites such as TheLadders.com - assigns
each member a personal "Job Concierge" who is responsible for matching
member profiles with the most relevant job listings returned through
an intelligent automated search of its million-job database.

The RiseSmart Concierge is the centerpiece of RiseSmart's strategy
of building deeper customer relationships than other $100K+ job sites.
Each RiseSmart Concierge is responsible for reviewing the resumes and
learning the job preferences of assigned members. Concierges can
modify future searches based on member feedback - for example,
screening out jobs from undesirable companies.

So would there be takers for RiseSmart's services? I think so. Senior executives, in my personal experiences, are really not very technology savvy and while jobs have moved to the jobsites, CXO level folks are chary about doing a job hunt through job sites. One CEO I was talking to was so concerned about his privacy that he hadn't even opened a Linkedin profile.

So in my view RiseSmart is competition not just for specialised jobsites like ladders.com but in this part of the world it can be a viable competition for executive search consultants, depending on the value their "Job Concierges" can add to their clients!

GG's "CoHR" Mela

"Mela" is the Hindi word for Carnival and since this Carnival of HR is hosted by yours truly, hence a little bit of local flavour from India!

On this corner we have the Cranky Middle Manager, Wayne Turmel who is not really that cranky (actually quite a nice chap ;-) who posts on the generation gap and draws parallels between the US elections and the current reality in his family.

For the first time in over 40 years, the workplace contains people with two very different sets of experiences. As managers we're in the middle of both the age and technology gap, and that is the point

Jon Ingham posts on the costs of bad performance management, go see the figure at his carnival booth. Let me tell you, it's huge! And that figure is only for Britain. Extrapolate that number to the whole world. Whew!!

To be effective, HR needs to beyond best practice, and design performance management and other processes in a way that provides best fit.

Alex Andrei nominates his wife's post from the blog "Escape from Corporate America" (I love that name, it reminds me of the blood and gore movies of the 1980s) on staying sane in a horrible horrible job. My favourite from her 10 ways is:

Did you know that humor can reduce job stress, boost morale, strengthen workplace bonds, and even help ward off burnout? And here you thought all those stupid forwarded joke emails were complete wastes of time

Dan McCarthy of the Great Leadership blog handed me a tough assignment (and I thought it was my turn to be mean!) asking me to choose between two of his posts, and I chose Feedback for Virtual Teams because I think we need to focus on them separately from "traditional teams". And I think this piece of advice applies to all kinds of managerial relationships, although the effort has to be greater in the virtual team:

Focus on personal, as well as professional. Building a strong relationship with a virtual team member requires extra effort to get to know the person as an individual, not just a direct report.

Michael from Execupundit at his stall has a modest proposal for HR, on relooking at the job application process and technology. In some matters the old-fashioned carnivals were

Jake Flanagin of the Maximize Possibility blog has an astounding story about how a business leader is destroying employee morale by bringing politics into the workplace. No, not office politics, but national politics !

store leaders had stated emphatically that if employees of the store cared about their organization's success that they would vote for the candidate of Party X in the general election. These store leaders stressed that if a candidate from party Y were elected it would be disastrous for the organization

All the way from Dublin, Rowan Manahan of Fortify Your Oasis has probably the first audio post in all the CoHRs so far, where he talks on the radio on "Can you have it all?"

Payal from the Spearhead Intersearch blog adds the desi flavor to the HR Mela with a post on Kolkata's work culture!

But Bongs, they are a-changing. The latest news is that "rowak adda-bajs" are joining the list of the endangered. Can it be that Bengali-s are finally trying to get some work done? Could well be. Leave Dalhousie's laid back lumbering afternoons and head towards the swanky buildings of Salt Lake Sector 5. The only locality in Calcutta spared the onslaught of Bandhs (another word recently introduced to the Oxford dictionary). That's the IT hub in the city, trying hard to look and feel Bangalorean.

Heh, and with that we come to the end of this mela! And I hope you have had the good fortune of having it all!

See you at the next Carnival of HR on March 19th which will be hosted by Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership.

See you all there!

The story of two bloggers and blogs as businesses

I guess this is where things are headed.

Businesspundit which was one of the first business related blogs I started reading in 2001 and was written by Rob May was recently sold to Ryan Caldwell's firm and so now Businesspundit will have a group of bloggers at its helm.

Isn't this the way forward from businesses when they scale up. As Larry Griener stated in his seminal paper on organizational growth and development, when an entrepreneurial organization scales up it needs to pass through a period of change from being entrepreneurial to growth through direction.

On Twitter I was having a conversation with him that knowing when to quit when you're ahead is a tough one and even great people mess it up, so it was amazing for someone like him to do it so gracefully. He admitted it wasn't so easy. Rob will now be blogging at Coconut Headsets and I have already subscribed, because while he says he won't match the volume that he set at BP, I'll be looking forward to his irreverent and sceptical take on business issues.

What does this mean on how I will engage with Businesspundit? Well I will read the feed and make up my mind about whether to continue with it for sometime or to unsubscribe from it. The blog will come with not one but a diverse perspective of many bloggers. That can be a good thing, but for me Businesspundit was Rob May and his individualistic "voice" and perspective. It's a classical positioning issue that organizations face when trying to vary their products or diversify.


On the other hand there's Penelope Trunk (author of Brazen Careerist) who has announced that she has just started her own business- a site with 50 bloggers called (what else) Brazen Careerist.com

Penelope's approach is different. She'll continue to blog at her individual blog post, while launching a new site which is closely connected with her identity also. It's a different approach and ties up with her passion for writing which she's converting to a business while what Rob really wants to do an entrepreneurship and blogging for him is not so central.

Best of luck to these folks and the other new bloggers I haven't read on both BP and BC. Wish them all the very best !

Rowan Gibson on Social Innovation in India

Rowan Gibson, author of Rethinking The Future was in India recently and he writes this about his impressions about the country:

Of course, India doesn’t have to go out looking for problems to solve. It has enough of those on its own doorstep. With 40% of the world’s poor, one-third of the world’s malnourished children, 800 million people in need of education and proper employment, the world’s single largest population of people infected with HIV/AIDS (not to mention other widespread diseases), 17% of the world’s population but only 4 per cent of the world’s freshwater, a looming energy crisis, relentless terrorism, and a dreadfully damaged environment, India faces some of the most daunting challenges on the planet today.

That’s where there’s a need for innovation at an unprecedented scale. Not just innovation in the traditional business sense, but “social innovation” that addresses the needs of India’s society, schools, healthcare systems, cities, and environment. Thirty years ago, the late great Peter Drucker pointed out that this, too, is an important definition of innovation. In his seminal book Management he writes that modern social needs “are not too different in kind from those which the nineteenth-century entrepreneur converted into growth industries – the urban newspaper and the streetcar; the steel-frame skyscraper and the school textbook; the telephone and pharmaceuticals”. India, perhaps more than any other country on earth, has recognized the need to turn its social problems into opportunities for innovation, and is rising to the challenge in a grand way.

Look anywhere in India today and we see exciting examples of social innovation combined with profitable business innovation. And behind each of these examples we usually find some wonderfully heroic entrepreneur who has battled with heart and soul to give ordinary people a better life. I think of Dr. Reddy, founder of Apollo Hospitals Group, who is using state-of-the-art technologies, breakthrough business models, and revenues from medical outsourcing and medical tourism, to put world-class healthcare within almost everyone’s reach. I think of economist Muhammed Junnus, founder of Grameen Bank, who pioneered the concept of micro-credit, and in the process became the world’s first “banker to the poor”. I think of Ratan Tata, India’s answer to Henry Ford, whose tiny $2,500 Nano automobile (the same price as a Louis Vuitton handbag!) is set to do for mass mobility in this century what Ford’s Model-T did in the last. I think of amazingly unpretentious Narayana Murthy, now retired cofounder of Infosys, who has repeatedly demonstrated his belief in “compassionate capitalism” – an altogether different paradigm that focuses not just on wealth creation but on making a significant contribution to society.

Three cheers for India’s irrepressible optimism and can-do spirit in the face of almost impossible odds. What many in the country have clearly figured out is that every great challenge presents enormous opportunities, and that success at innovation is about much more than revenues and profits; it’s about doing well by doing good. There’s a lesson in this for all of us.

Why have a compensation philosophy

When a firm becomes large it needs to rationalise its salary structures. It no longer pays salaries on an ad hoc basis. People at a certain parity as far as responsibilities and authority go need to be paid similar salaries.

Salaries also need to be maintained with external competition.

So when an organization looks at salary levels there are two reasons - for maintaining internal equity and for external equity. Setting a salary level also means consciously looking at two things- financial budgets and corporate strategy and taking a decision on where to peg one's organization in relation to the market.

Salaries are usually reported by compensation consultants in percentiles. So if one draws a graph of the 1st percentile to the 100th percentile at any time for a particular role one gets a graph of how the salary changes across organizations. Averages are not used to track salaries across organizations or industries, as any outlier in the data can skew the whole data. Outliers are much better tracked on a percentile graph.

Typically organizations look at certain key numbers for deciding their salary philosophy.
What is the median of the distribution?
What is the budget for salaries as a percentage of turnover?

Typically an organization that starts off in an industry to attract talented people pays a very high percentile, in the range of 85-99 percentile. They define the higher levels of the distribution. Typically these organizations are cash rich or have investments from VCs who earmark a proportionately large part of the budget for attracting talent.

At the lower end are organizations for whom the role is not core to the business. Typically the support functions roles are pegged at lower percentiles like the median or even lower.

The organization therefore has to look at how it will peg itself against the market and therefore what are the trade-offs it has to make. For example, if an organization pegs itself at the 65th or 75th percentile in comparison to the industry it is effectively ruling out the candidates in the higher 35 to 25 percentile range. While this seems a good trade-off the thinking is usually jettisoned when business pressures force organizations to overshoot their pay ranges and offer higher salaries than the norm internally.

While throwing money seems to be the only option when candidates are not willing to join, organizations need to keep in mind that there is an option. Building a great employment brand using learning opportunities and other benefits like organizational culture and nature of work as an attraction basis rather then just numbers.

On teamwork

Prasad takes a close look at the term and the underlying assumptions about it. I agree that when clients come up with needs like interpersonal skills/teamwork that their people need to develop it is usually time for a deeper analysis, which they usually don't want to do:

when different people say 'team work' or 'team player' in a workplace context, they might be using the sports metaphor (team) with very different types of games in mind. Of course this can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. Actually, there additional complicating factors here. The tacit definition of 'team work' in highly individualistic cultures could be significantly different from that in collectivist cultures. It has also been observed that there could be gender related differences in the understanding of what makes one a good team player. Part of this could be because of the fact that young boys and young girls tend to prefer playing different types of games (e.g. war games and doll games - to use a stereotyped and possibly extreme example)! By the way, it is interesting to note that we can learn a lot about an individual/ team/ organization from the metaphors/expressions they use to describe key experiences.

It can be seen that, from a team effectiveness point of view, different types of team work are required in different workplace contexts. So it would be a good idea to analyse, understand and agree upon what exactly is type of team work required in the case of a particular team/work group in a particular organization context. This would also help us to develop and communicate a good 'operational definition' of 'what makes a good team player' in that context. Of course, an 'operational definition/working definition' is not very glamorous and it does not fully capture the mysteries of the broad concept of team work. But it can help to avoid a lot of avoidable unhappiness!

Sexual harassment claims filed by men

Interesting trend watch by i4cp:

-Sexual harassment claims by men have risen from 11.6% in 1997 to 15.4% in 2007
-This harassment comes from both men and woman; from other men, it's not necessarily homosexual intent, but rather men putting other men down "who fail to conform to masculinity norms"
-The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition suggests expanding to "Gender harassment" and other terms to be more inclusive.

More here.

I wonder what the corresponding figures would be for India?