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

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

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

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

Here they are:

• Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0
• What Recruiting needs to learn from Social Media Marketing
• Are you going for National HRD Network's conference?
• 7 reasons why Google+ won't be enterprise social yet
• How people used Social Media during #mumbaiblasts
• Thoughts on Talent Communities

Your thoughts?

Leveraging Social Media for Job Hunting

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

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

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

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!

Related articles

• Salesforce.com's Rypple buy shows the appeal of HR apps (gigaom.com)
• Salesforce to acquire social enterprise player Rypple, will re-name it 'Successforce' (venturebeat.com)

NetApp India's focus on building a great culture

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

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?

Related articles

• Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent (forbes.com)

Before the How and the What comes the Why

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

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

Related articles

• Video: BraveNewTalent, on home turf (musingsfromsussex.com)

Posting on Two new Social Media blogs

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

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

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

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

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.

Related articles

• Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0 #e20 at NASSCOM Product Conclave (gautamblogs.com)

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Tweets from #nhrd11 - A recap

Image via Wikipedia

Here are the tweets I have been making from the National HRD Conference since yesterday


RT @Rajlakshmi_S: Make your own conference - a big hit, a big innovation at #nhrd11 #unique
27 minutes ago

Executive coach is the new freelance consultant - impressions after a day of #nhrd11
27 minutes ago


China has a shortage of 500,000 CEOs says Mohandas Pai #nhrd11

HR people should hire people, train people based on what customers and investors expect - Dave Ulrich #nhrd11
5 hours ago

Delta gives employee bonus coupons to customers asking them to give it to employees when they get great service - Dave Ulrich #nhrd11
5 hours ago

Prof. Dave Ulrich is now speaking on the future of HR #nhrd11 - theme "HR from the outside in"
5 hours ago

RT @AbhijitBhaduri: 12.2 million user base of 3G in India; 15m mobile subscriber added per MONTH. 100,000 tablets sold/month. #NHRD11
6 hours ago

RT @AbhijitBhaduri: "HR has to be a specialist in community processes." PM Kumar at #NHRD11
7 hours ago

PM Kumar says "Management gets the union it deserves" #nhrd11
7 hours ago

Don't understand why an organized movement against corruption is applauded, but organized movement for people (unions) discouraged #nhrd11
7 hours ago

Formal employment only accounts for 10% of Indian workforce - max 45 million people. Non-formal work accounts for 400 million-Bijou #nhrd11
7 hours ago

Processes cannot create resourcefulness. Processes are like the road on which F1 race take place - PM Kumar #nhrd11
7 hours ago

My blogpost on the 1st panel discussion at #nhrd11 bit.ly/sga1Sh
7 hours ago

The line manager can handle toolkits - HR people overrate their needs. says PM Kumar #nhrd11
7 hours ago

RT @Ester_Matters: If everyone's business is people it can turn that nobody's business is people- chandra from ibm #nhrd11
7 hours ago

what it means to be human? We are the only species who can imagine and reflect. We have 2 needs, to relate & to express- PM Kumar #nhrd11
8 hours ago

Sri Sri Ravishankar "Krishna was the first HR manager - for Arjun " - Gita the 1st HR manual? :-) #nhrd11
22 hours ago

"In India we have 19th century mindset, 20th century processes and 21st century needs" Sam Piroda #nhrd11
23 hours ago

"Self esteem is fragile in India. hard to build teams without self esteem. Criticising your work is seen as criticising you"Pitroda #nhrd11
23 hours ago

"right people at right time at right place make things happen. Domain expertise, leadership skills, is what I look for" Sam Pitroda #nhrd11
23 hours ago

Sam Pitroda via telecon addressing #nhrd11 - Vinita bali introducing him as the architect of telecom revolution in India
23 hours ago

Vinita Bali "what can business learn from art, theater, creativity - from excellence from other fields" #nhrd11 Sam Pitroda next speaker
23 hours ago

"Quality of people and how they work together is the differentiator that separates winners from leaders" Vinita Bali #nhrd11
23 hours ago

Vinita bali addressing the conference - "It is not a HR conf. Its a people conference. Its a conference for all business leaders" #nhrd11
23 hours ago

@mullyspeak here http://bit.ly/stcSOe Code of Conduct #nhrd11
23 hours ago

#nhrd11 SY Siddiqui says National HRD Network has crossed membership of 12,000
23 hours ago

SY Siddiqui says "Bangalore is an apt city for "Live and Breathe the Change" theme" #nhrd11
23 hours ago

The halls at #nhrd11 are named after the stalwarts of HR and OD in India - Dharni Sinha, Ranjan Acharya, Pulin Garg,
23 hours ago

C Mahalingam (Mali) read out the code of conduct for the HR professionals at #nhrd11 - now the lamp lighting ceremony
17 Nov

Agenda of Business and HR is the same says @abhijitbhaduri kicking off #nhrd11 Sam Pitroda, TV Rao, Vinita Bali
17 Nov

RT @Ester_Matters: Org effectiviness (as new hr) will report to ceo and Traditional hr will report to the coo #edlawler #nhrd11
17 Nov

Whose business is People? Liveblogging #nhrd11

Note: Liveblogging the National HRD Conference - excuse the typos please :)

Members of the panel: Santrupt Mishra (CEO Carbon Black, group Head of HR for Aditya Birla Group) , PM Kumar (Business Chairman - Group Corporate Development - GMR ), Vijay Chandok (President -International Banking and SME- ICICI Bank) , Bijou Kurien (President and CEO-Lifestyle, Reliance Retail), Dr. C Sripada (Head HR - IBM India & South Asia), and moderator Anand Shankar (MD - Aon Hewitt India)

Anand Shankar - sets context - who's responsibility is it to engage employees?

Santrupt Mishra - On a lighter note: The headhunter's business is people. The individualist says it's a person's business. If the focus is paternalistic or collective then they would say it is the business of everybody. We need to segment what is the area we are talking about.

PM Kumar - We need to understand what it means to be human. We are the only species who can imagine and reflect. We have two needs, to relate and to express oneself. Anyone who deals with people need to remember that.

Vijay Chandok - First I thought it is obviously the business of the line manager. But the analogy of the F1 driver, focusing on the critical aspect of the pit-stop. Who is responsible for winning the race? A delay in a few seconds can impact the result. The Line Manager is significantly partnered in the same way by HR.

Bijou Kurian - 85% of our employees are in the frontline. People don't aspire for this role. Attrition is in 3 digits sometimes in the retail business. We need to attract and engage them. It cannot be delegated to a department. Typically we use people as a denominator. In a P&L we focus on topline and bottomline. How do we measure "Return on People"?

Chandra - The first answer that popped into my mind is "My business is people, as the HR head". Then it is responsibility of anyone who impacts it.

Santrupt - The leadership rests with HR but delivered by line managers - therefore its a partnership.

PM Kumar - The line manager can handle toolkits - HR people overrate their needs.

Use cases for Talent Communities

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeHave had some interesting conversations with HR and Recruiting folks on how they can use BraveNewTalent's Talent Communities. There are three major use cases that have emerged.

1. A person who's interested in a role with a company visits the careers page of a website. He/She finds no suitable current opening - and the company loses a chance to engage that person in a relationship.
2. A company is looking for a person for an job opening and finds there are 3 people who are equally suitable for the job. It makes an offer to the best of the three and loses the ability to engage the other two  almost for ever.
3. A company goes to an engineering college and selects Trainees who would join it after 6-7 months. Usually connecting and keeping such campus recruits engaged  is tough. There is always the scare that another employer can approach them a week later and get them to join them for a couple of thousands more.

In all these cases candidates become passive resumes stored in ATSs or other databases. Recruiters are too busy with current openings to focus on keeping a relationship alive with the above three constituents. And even if they make the effort, once a candidate moves around you lose contact.

So the solution is to connect such candidates via a talent community. They are sorted based on the group they belong and other attributes and the organization can share updates, news and specific job openings as and when they open up. The candidates connect via social network ids and therefore 

To ask how you can do so, send me an email :-) at gautam @ BraveNewTalent . com

National HRD Network's Annual Conference - Are you going to be there?

Looking forward to meeting many HR colleagues and friends at the NHRD Network's Annual Conference from 16-19 November

It's going to be great event with people like Sam Pitroda, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Dave Ulrich (who will be speaking on Securing the future of the HR profession & the HR professional), Ed Lawler, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Dr Santrupt Misha, TV Mohandas Pai scheduled to address 1500 HR professionals (full speaker list here )

You can also attend one of these amazing pre-conference workshops on the 16th and 17th 

Another exciting aspect is the HR Showcase - to find out what innovations HR professionals are doing - 50 chosen HR initiatives that added business benefits would be showcased by the respective companies 

The uniqueness of the Conference would also be the Large Scale Interactive Process "Co-Creation" - where every participant will play a part!

Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0 #e20 at NASSCOM Product Conclave

Image via CrunchBaseNovember is going to be a month of conferences. On the 10th of November I would be in a panel discussion with Vivek Paul (ex-CEO of Wipro and Founder of KineticGlue), Sumeet Anand of Kreeo, and Vijay Doddavaram of Texas Instruments at the NASSCOM Product Conclave at Bangalore.

If you're interested in Social Business, Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 I suggest you attend the same :-)

More details here. If you have inputs on the session you can leave your queries, comments here

Am also excited because I would finally get to meet Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations, one of the first books on business blogging) who's been an online friend for so many years! Shel would be conducting a workshop for startup entrepreneurs on how to make a great business pitch. Details here

Why and How of external talent communities

Kevin Wheeler has a great post on Talent Pools vs. Communities. You should go read it here.

As I am meeting prospective clients I am facing similar statements

• Why should I build a talent community?
• Our company already has a Facebook page, Twitter account - why manage another platform?
• We are using Linkedin to recruit - our internal recruiters have more than 15,000 Linkedin connections - so we're already doing social recruiting.

If you have the same questions/ doubts - here are the reasons:

• Companies that engage with prospective candidates and build a relationship with them- sharing their culture and details. As Tony Hsieh says "Your culture is your brand"
• On Facebook and Twitter all your updates go out to all the people following your liking your account. And yet engagement is notoriously difficult on Facebook and ephemeral on Twitter. The other fact is that  the focus of these accounts is not talent/jobs/careers but customers/communication/marketing. As Shiv Singh says - you are competing for attention (on Facebook) with 30 billion other things !!
• The focus of platforms like BraveNewTalent is the ability to segment and communicate with specific groups of your followers - you cannot do that on generic social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook where brands focus on "broadcasting" and chasing non-useful metrics like number of fans/followers
• Platforms like BraveNewTalent become "social media hubs" pulling in tweets, YouTube videos and Job openings on to one platform. People who follow you see all your content in one place
• Great that you have social media rockstars on your recruiting team and are leveraging their networks. However, ever thought what would happen when they are poached by the competition? They take their network with them. Does the organization really have the time and resources necessary to pursue lawsuits?
• Talent communities are not job-boards. Organizations have to attract and engage the workforce they want to hire. And they have to also develop the ones who are following them. Unless a talent engages with them, they cannot "spam" a job seeker.
• Yes it takes time and effort to create and engage a community. It's a network of relationships. Relationships take time and effort. But the benefits can be immense. You decide if you want a job-seeker (in the normal way of business) or an advocate (by building a community). Read this post by my blogging-buddy Luis Suarez on what is a community.

So are you ready to be an innovator in the Talent industry? Reach out to me - mail me at gautam @ bravenewtalent dot com or call me at +91-97422-39954

It would be my honor to enable you for success.

Steve Jobs on Work and Love #RIPSteveJobs

Image by marcopako  via FlickrFrom the Standford university address:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

And here are some memorable quotes:

• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
• “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” 
• “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” 
• “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about.” 
• “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
• “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.” 
• “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” 
• “Innovation … comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” 

Skills The Social Recruiter Needs to Build

Recruiting has traditionally been of three types.

One is typified by the Old Boys Club persona. These are typically the ones working on retained searches, placing CEOs, COOs and whatever are the other CXOs. I met one of them a couple of years ago and when he heard that I was working in the intersection of HR and Social raised a distasteful eyebrow and said "I don't need social media. I am exclusive. Most of the leaders of India Inc. would give an arm to reach me." They command usually high fees (to the tune of 33% of candidate's salary - and take usually 11% before the search is commissioned, 11% when the shortlist is given and the remaining when the candidate is selected)

Then there are the third party recruiters working on contingent searches - trying to be the first one to push that CV that they have sourced, talked to the candidate (and sometimes not even that!) to the corporate recruiter before a rival does. Always yearning to reach the standard of the earlier described Recruiters on a retainer. They typically get lower commissions (8.33% in lean times to 12.5-20% in better times) and only when the search is complete.

And then there is the corporate recruiter. Some focusing on middle and top level recruiting. Others on entry level and campus recruiting. They juggle the third party recruiters and headhunters on one hand and the hiring manager within the company on the other. They also have to manage their own performance measures like being under-budget, tracking metrics (time to hire being the easiest) and chasing line managers (for things like job description, to taking interviews)

Insert into this ecosystem something as disruptive as "Talent Communities & Social Recruiting" - moving from transactions to relationship, from secrecy to transparency - and then one realises the skills that need to be built by the Social Recruiter:

1. Community Building and Facilitation: This is critical and encompasses a whole lot of skills that focus on putting the needs of the community paramount and recognizing the various social roles in the community and supporting each of them appropriately
2. Content Creation and encouraging others to do the same: Recognizing which kind of content is most compelling for the community and adds most value to the members. And encouraging such content from them by ask questions.
3. Storytelling: Had posted about it earlier - and now its the turn of stories to be "trans-media" from videos to text to mobile to real world.

What other skills would you add?

On the 10,000 social media jobs in India

Yesterday there was a small storm in the Twitter teacup when Economic Times published this article : 10,000+ social media experts required as UB Group, LG Electronics, Canon, Future Group and others plan aggressive hiring

On digging into the article I noticed two things. One, they have got the numbers wrong at least when it comes to Dell. The article reports "Computer maker Dell made headlines last December when it launched the Social Media Listening Command Center in the US where it monitors more than 22,000 Dell-related topic posts in social media sites. The Centre has a dedicated team of more than 5,000 social media specialists who track the company, engage with consumers and even undertake customer service. And now, Dell plans to expand such centres."

I don't think that's right. Dell certifies its own employees on using social media for responding to social web issues. So in all probability these 5000 people (even if true) are not social media specialists - but specialists in tech support, customer service, marketing and communication. Take a look at this article that says the Asia listening center would have a full time strength of 10 and then you realise how mistaken is the TOI report.

Now to focus on the 10,000 number by 2012 - its given by the head of Ma Foi - and I urge people to take it with a pinch of salt. The big number that is stated there is by 24/7 Customer who have social media executives who update social profiles of clients. Even then a growth of 1000 to 5000 such profiles in one year sounds improbable. Even if there is going to be that kind of growth - I think that will not be pure "social media" profiles but lots of BPO, SEO and analytics profiles who will be augmenting social into their work

Compare this to the LA times article which quotes Monster.com's Kathy O'Reilly saying the openings in US are about 155 a month.

Talent Communities and Social Recruiting

This is the presentation I made during my webinar today

Do connect if you'd like to know more :-)

Talent Communities and Social Recruiting

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh

Conducting a Webinar on using Social Media for Recruitment - Social Hiring #socialrecruiting

Image via WikipediaHi, if you are a Senior Executive and have an hour available next Wednesday - would love you to join me and Ranjan Sinha on the "Social Hiring - What every Executive Needs to Stay Competitive" webinar being organized by PeopleMatters, India's leading Leadership and People related content provider.

The details are here, so go register

It's for an hour
It's FREE




It's at 11 am (India time) 
Audience: If you are a business leader, HR leader or Manager - This is focused on what you need to know
Only 100 people can attend the webinar, so register soon and be online next Wednesday 30 mins before the start time


While Ranjan would talk on leveraging social networks for referral hiring, I would be speaking on building Talent Communities to find job seekers relevant and interested to work for you and the focus on using external talent to build your employment brand

There will be 15 min Q&A too.. so looking forward to connecting with you at the webinar!

Facebook Subscribe Button and its Use for Employment Branding

Yesterday I posted about why employers should encourage transparency between who its employees are and what they do to external talent

So when I was reading about Facebook's new feature - the subscribe button - I started thinking "Why can't employers use this?"

The Facebook subscribe button enables a person to "follow" (like twitter or Google+) a person's public updates. You can subscribe to my public posts here.

This feature is a great way for external talent to get to know who are the kind of people working in your organization and what is on their minds.

This is not a brand new idea. It's something similar to how Zappos lists all the employees who tweet on their site and also their updates.

We all know that there are a lot more people on Facebook (btw, employers in India did you know that India has the 3rd most people on Facebook at 35 million) than Twitter (which is around 10% of Facebook's users)

Of course, employees would have privacy concerns - and many use Facebook only for personal networking. Therefore the choice must be made entirely by the employee whether he/she would like to be the "employment brand ambassador" on the website/career site/social networking sites for the employer.

What Recruiting Needs to Learn from Social Media Marketing

I have long believed that HR and Marketing are different sides of the same coin - which have not learned much from each other :)

Where recruiting can learn from Social Media Marketing is to start building talent communities to engage in conversation with people interested in their firm. Take a look at the following diagram

In traditional recruiting the focus has been to chase the orange circle – and spam them. Even in the current model of “social recruiting” these remain the focus. However, in a talent community the organization actually focuses on first attracting the blue circle, and then identify the overlap in the two groups to focus on the people who are really relevant as well as pre-disposed positively towards the company. Hence the way an organization would build its Talent Community would be very similar to its Social Media Marketing efforts.

It would consist of

1. Identify and Attract – Organizations have two approaches to build this – firstly rely on their own databases to ask candidates to join their talent community. They can leverage email, careers website, twitter updates and Facebook page updates to do so. Then they can use campaigns on search advertising and social advertising to attract new talent to their community 
2. Content – Companies are publishing a lot of content, from blog posts, to Press Releases to video uploads, to tweets and job postings. On a talent community platform (that BraveNewTalent provides) it is possible to integrate all this content to present a wholistic view of the organization) 
3. Community Engagement and Facilitation – This would consist of building conversations between external talent and internal experts, answering questions of talent and triggering discussions. 
4. Development – The focus of the engagement should not be just to focus on the people in the talent community who have the skills, but to build the overall skill levels of all people in the talent community, by sharing resources with them as well as helping them learn from each other and from subject matter experts in the organization. 

The prerequisites for making Talent Communities a success

1. To really benefit from Talent Communities they have to be sponsored by the business leadership of the organization that is innovative and willing to be open and transparent. 
2. The role of recruitment needs to be focused on attraction of talent and building a relationship with them rather than being reactive and chasing candidates. 
3. The organization has got to be willing to lift the firewall and letting real employees connect with job-seekers without trying to control the conversation. 
4. A willingness to be vulnerable and deal with tough questions and not be defensive. If a company is willing to try these, they will move the conversation to things that really matter like the work, culture and nature of the job from the one large aspect that is currently the focus these days – the salary.

Update: Based on a conversation with my colleague James Mayes - I came up with this diagram to explain talent communities

Related articles

• Some thoughts on Talent Communities (gautamblogs.com)

The Not-So-Secret Sauce for Social Business - People

Social Business is now cutting through most functional silos in a company. It might have started with Marketing and Communication, but is slowly being embedded and therefore reshaping business processes from CRM to Supply Chain, to BPM to HR.

Companies can spend a lot of money buying the next shiny object that will reinvent their business, make them closer to their customers, as well as involving consultants, creating new roles (social strategists, community managers, anyone?) or to outsource them, however all these efforts will count to nought if the current employees are not excited about the products they are building, the service they are delivering and the place and people they work with.

Because all said and done, social brings human relationships and conversations to the fore. Yes, there are analytical tools and automation tools that will measure and maybe also fill out activity streams, add conversations to relevant systems of records - but until we make Hal (or IBM's Watson gets more mainstream) the focus will squarely be on people.

Ray Wang keeps saying that business is not B2B or B2C anymore, it's P2P - and the launch of the Social Business Index by the Dachis Group also reiterates that the signals employees send out will have an impact on how "social" companies are seen as.

As I tweeted today, if ERP was an articulation of business processes, then social business is an articulation of business relationships (and the ability to discover new relationships and change behavior based on feedback from those relationships)

So yes invest in tools, services and technologies that will make you more "social" - but more than all that invest in culture, training, education, listen to your employees.

Technologies will not make your company more social or better products, services - your people will. Since it is all about relationships - there will be missteps, failures, even embarassment - because really, what relationships are without those?

Related articles

• Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business (fastcompany.com)
• Social Business Index: Bringing the Left Brain into Social Business (beingpeterkim.com)

Can you learn from the Internet

Image by surojitbasak2007 via FlickrYesterday was Teachers' Day in India. It's in honor of President S Radhakrishnan who was a teacher. I remember 5th September being the day we would wait in school as we could get to be Teachers and our normally strict teachers would smile and joke and (gasp!) actually seem human ;-)

Yesterday, reminiscing about who all have taught me I thought about my parents, school teachers, teachers from college, bosses, colleagues, friends who had taught be not just knowledge but the difficult lessons too - of self reflection, introspection and the value of finding the answers by myself.

But over the last few years, my circle of teachers has expanded - to include people who are often strangers - sharing their own journeys and showing perspectives for me to learn from. Yes, you guessed it right - I have a plethora of teachers that is ever expanding thanks to the internet

So the question of whether one can learn from the internet - is yes, provided you do it with focus and dedication.

Here's what has worked for me:

1. Finding out the communities where people share knowledge relevant for me. This does not usually mean Facebook - where friends share personal photos and thoughts - but specific industry content places.
2. Finding out experts - these are not just folks like Tom Peters, but new emerging voices who will be the thought leaders of the future like Nilofer Merchant and Umair Haque
3. Discovering peers with shared interesting (from point 1)
4. Sharing one's own experience and articulating my own learning can trigger others to share their opinions and learning.
5. Discover your own learning preference. Do you learn better by reading models or experiences. Do you like to listen (to podcasts) or to see (diagrams, animation and video) or by playing (simulation, games, quizzes) ?

So yes, you can learn from the internet, if you find great people at the other end. Discovering these people would be a skill many would have to learn

CEO going undercover - can it be more than just good TV?

Image via WikipediaOne day flipping channels I managed to stumble across BBC Entertainment's show "Undercover Boss - USA" - It showed the CEO of Lucky Strike doing himself up in a disguise and working in four aspects of his business with frontline employees who had no idea they were working along with their CEO.

Doing this he learned about the professional and personal challenges faced by those employees and the systems and processes that need to be fixed. Working alongside employees who are told that they are filmed for a show about entry level jobs, the show allows the CEO to secretly interact with blue collar unions of their organisation before the big announcement.

 At the end of the week, the CEO revealed his identity and rewarded the four employees. The show works on the dual premise of showing the top cadre of management what their junior-most employees go through on a daily basis. The genuine astonishment of the employees themselves when finally confronted with the reality is both touching and somewhat comical, and makes for great reality television.

 The show is emotionally entertaining but with its own shortcomings. While the concept of the CEO going undercover and working among his employees to gauge both employee satisfaction levels and the perception about the company among the internal stakeholders is interesting, it lacks momentum to be translated into the real world. As an HR policy, it would be very difficult for the leader of any company to be able to roam around in the lower echelons incognito.

Such a practice if ever followed can only happen at the most once or twice and then made redundant. Also while most employees are hard working and sincere, their perspective and point of view would always have biases which would not reflect the whole picture for the CEO to take back as any value add for employee practices. But then again, it is a piece of feel good television. The fun part is seeing the boss try out various odd jobs within the company. So, if you ever felt that wealthy CEO's are out of touch with reality, you might be pleasantly surprised. All in all an interesting and entertaining show.

However, what the take home for CEOs can be from the show is the concept started by Bill and Dave of "Hewlett-Packard" fame - that to really know the innards of the business you need to be focused on "Management by Walking Around" and if you are authentic you do not really need to go in disguise to find out how your employees think, feel and act.

HR and that question again

On Twitter and on email I have had a couple of students of HR write to me, asking if they have done the correct thing by choosing to do a HR course/Specialization in their post-grad program.

Their doubts are fueled by their family members, and friends who tell them that career-wise HR is a dead-end job, how all employees hate it, that you never make enough money compared to other functions, etc. etc.

There are no easy answers to such questions.

My fundamental belief is that HR is one of the most impactful functions within an organizations. If done well, and if leveraged well (by progressive leaders) it can become the real competitive differentation between organizations.

However, it is easier said than done. And there are various reasons for that - here are the reasons:

1. There are few organizations that understand the importance of HR - and therefore the vast majority of HR jobs that are available are clerical, administrative and mind-numbing
2. Due to point 1. the much better talent choose to go to external facing roles like Sales or more strategic roles like Finance
3. The quality of HR faculty in B Schools - with a few exceptions - is quite dismal. The quality of curriculum is worse, if its possible.
4. The number of HR openings is low - because its a support function - and students think they would have a better chance of getting a job in Sales

All these factors contribute to a vicious cycle that needs to be broken, and it can be broken by two different approaches. The growth of the HR industry and a revamp in the understanding what HR means - as well as an innovative HR leader who will act as a role model. 

Earlier post:

Thoughts on the future of Human Resources

What do you think?

Blog posts on my joining BraveNewTalent

Here are a couple of blog posts on my joining BraveNewTalent

The first one is by Dheeraj Prasad, MD of BraveNewTalent India who writes:

Gautam is very passionate about Talent Communities. Very evident in some of his blog posts here , here , here and here. Gautam would be leveraging  his strengths to Head the User Marketing and Product Evangelism at BraveNewTalent India. Here is why Gautam joined us!
Look for Gautam’s blog on BraveNewTalent going forward to help connect and have a dialog with the User Community as we build value for businesses in the area of Talent Leadership. 

 The other is a post on AlooTechie which says:

UK-based BraveNewTalent.com, a career social network that allows talents and employers to connect, has appointed Gautam Ghosh as Head, User Marketing and Product Evangelism in India. Gautam is the company’s second key hire in India after Dheeraj Prasad, ex-director and head, Education Business, Microsoft, joined the company as India Managing Director in March 2011. The company is building its operations in India. At the start of 2011, BraveNewTalent secured venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures and two angels – Pierce Casey and Mike Bourne, and has used this capital to fund its entry into the US and Indian marketplaces.
BraveNewTalent is a professional networking site that lets members follow employers, including Google, Tesco and Allen & Overy, with the option to receive alerts of their news on Facebook, without the employer becoming a Facebook contact. BraveNewTalent enables visitors to see employers' professional and social networking profiles and Twitter feeds.

Related articles

• Am Joining BraveNewTalent.com (gautamblogs.com)