Abhijit Bhaduri leaves PepsiCo to join Microsoft

Ok, here's a disclaimer: I am a big fan of Abhijit Bhaduri. As one of India's leading HR leaders, he's surprisingly open to learning and trying out new things like blogging and being on facebook !  The  reason, IMHO is that Abhijit is not just a HR professional - he's an author, a cartoonist, a theater person, has hosted radio shows in the US and has even acted in a Hindi film - and having a lot of interests and hobbies and passions is one of the things that makes a person ready for new experiences and to be creative.

Abhijit was also the moving force behind India's first large mainstream corporate Blog focused on showcasing it as an employer. In his final post at the Frito-Lay India blog Abhijit posts about the challenges of corporate blogging and social media:

To get it going there was a short 3 min video of What is it Like to Work for FritoLay? That video uploaded on Youtube (click here to watch it) got us a lot of eyeballs. Research (basically that means all the people I spoke to) showed us that it was the first place for candidates to get a feel of the culture of PepsiCo's Snack division in India. Candid confession: When I saw that a lot of people were using that to decide on whether they would fit in to this culture or not, I did feel a tad bit inhibited and stopped doing videos of giggling employees on candid camera kind of stuff. Thats was truly tempting given the number of applicants who wanted to come into work in a giggly environment! Honestly - someone did say that to me.Thereafter the focus was more on describing all the fun moments at work. The innovative people that we have here inspired us to do more. The media and other bloggers took notice and we got a gazillion suggestions on what to put into the blog. That made me realize that the challenge in having an unofficial corporate blog are two. One is to avoid sounding like a commercial for the company. More than that is the challenge of getting more than a few enthu guys to post. How do we update the blog continuously and frequently?

Abhijit now moves on to Microsoft India - and hopefully will continue blogging - there are lots of other HR folks in Microsoft in the US who blog - and I guess he will be the first in MS India :-) !

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