Lessons in Failure in #HRTech and #SocialRecruiting

I somehow missed this news. Remember BranchOut, which was touted as the LinkedIn for Facebook?

Well looks like the company is dying (or is already dead). According to TechCrunch:

The company’s assets have been acquired by 1-Page, an HR software company based out of San Francisco but listed on the Australian stock exchange. Based on today’s stock price, 1-Page is paying around $5.4 million — $2 million in cash and 7.5 million in 1-Page shares.

The lesson? Don't build your product on someone's proprietary platform.

My friend Maren Hogan has a useful blog post for people who are too much in love with their HR Tech product the above being one point. It's useful if you are developing any product for any B2B market. One point that I resonate and see many startups who approach me is that they think "like a disgruntled customer" - now that might work in the B2C market but usually fails in the B2B product market, specially if you have never worked on the other side of the stakeholder equation.

As my friend and ex-colleague Dave Martin says "Recruitment is a multi-dimensional sell full of waste"

Lots of Indian HR/Recruitment startup examples too that have shut shop or have had to "pivot" to entirely new areas. 

Getting the Distinguished Alumnus award from XLRI

This month I was humbled and honored when my alma mater XLRI said they wanted to give me an award for being a Distinguished Alumnus - Young Achiever.

At first I thought someone was playing a joke on me. But after some digging around I found that the email was legit. The Director of XLRI, Fr. E. Abraham had actually emailed me.

So on 8th November I walked up to the stage of the Tata Auditorium at XLRI (where I last collected my MBA diploma)

Collecting the award from Rana Sinha, Fr. E. Abraham and Prof. Sharad Sarin

Lifetime Achievement award was given to B L Raina, CEO of Tinplate Company of India, David D’Costa, Founder of Pure Water House, Mario Lobo, Founder of Personnel Search Services.

Distinguished Alumnus Award was divided among the categories of Practicing Manager, Academician, Young Achiever, Entrepreneur, Public Service, Communication & performing Arts.

The recipients of this award in various categories were

• Madhukar Kamath MD of DDB Mudra 
• Rekha Menon Managing Director for Geographic Operations for ASEAN, India & APAC Delivery Centers at Accenture 
• Johnson Alexander irector, Human Resources and Quality,Health, Safety & Environment at Dulsco
• Dr. N S Rajan CHRO of the Tata Group
• S V Nathan, Director of Talent at Deloitte
• Sandeep Bakshi, MD and CEO of ICICI Prudential
• Ajay Kaul, CEO of Jubilant FoodWorks
• Dr. Girish Punj, Marketing Professor at University of Connecticut
• Kannan Srinivasan, Prof of Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University
• Sanjeev Kapoor, Chief Marketing Officer & Country Head - Customer Franchise Management at Citi
• Kumar Ankit, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Green Leaf Energy Pvt. Ltd
• Ronald D’Costa, ‎Owner, The Boulevard Hotel
• Vivek Das, Advertising Photographer
• Ashraf Patel, Founder of Pravah and the Youth Collective
• Vikram Misri (IFS), Currently the Ambassador to Kingdom of Spain
• Ankur Gupta(IAS)
• Ministhy Nair IAS
• Mohan Raman, Actor
• Akash Khurana, Actor and Screenwriter
• Gargi Banerji, Co-Founder of Pragya

It was fascinating to talk to the students and see how many things (student batch size, new courses, the institute logo and branding) have changed and yet the core values of the institute remain the same.

We had a semi structured interaction with the students on HR as a career and what is the future of the function. Dr, Jitu Singh brought up Ram Charan's article recently and a lively debate ensued. The increase in importance of Industrial Relations after incidents in NCR over the last few years was also discussed.



Some more pics from the event:

(Above pics are courtesy the XLRI Alumni Committee)

The Dichotomy of Silicon Valley

Two news items over the last day caught my attention. The startups in Silicon Valley, flush with VC funding and scrambling for talent are creating a new role, a person specially to look after "employee perks"! And I don't think it's an HR role.

Skeptics say the return on investment from bending over backward to meet employee demands and whims is mixed.
Workers enthralled by a blowout summer picnic might not be the ones a company most wants to keep, says Iwan Barankay, an associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who has been a corporate consultant on non-monetary workplace incentives.
In addition, “frustration can set in quickly” if freebies abound but the company won’t hand out raises, he says.
Another problem: At companies where pampering employees has always been part of the culture, it is hard to stop if business turns sour. Zynga Inc. shares have fallen more than 80% since 2012 as the game maker struggles to find a follow-up hit to “Farmville.” Before going public in 2011, Zynga began serving lunch and dinner daily to its employees, using specialty ingredients like Japanese Kewpie mayonnaise and pinecone syrup.

On the other hand there are Facebook shuttle bus drivers who get paid $18/hour and are unionizing to get more wages to live in one of the most expensive places in the world.

San Jose State University sociology professor Scott Myers-Lipton said he thinks the joining of a union by the 84 full- and part-time drivers could signal to other lower-wage workers that union representation may be a way to narrow the income gap in the Valley.
"Wages have remained stagnant while these top tech icons are booming and showing record profits," Myers-Lipton said. "Average Americans are saying that they just want to share in the growth that's going on around them, especially here in Silicon Valley."
For some activists, the shuttles that transport thousands of city workers each day to Silicon Valley have become a symbol of economic inequality, rising housing costs and evictions in San Francisco and they have targeted them while protesting gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So what does that say about "the market"? What could this huge disparity lead to? Your thoughts?

WittyParrot's list of top 100 HR influencers to follow on Twitter #socialHR

The folks at SaaS company brought up a list of top 100 HR influencers to follow on Twitter and I was fortunate to be ranked on with fellow HR friends from India along with Abhijit Bhaduri, Anand Pillai, Vivek Paranjpe,  Achal Khanna, Yashwant Mahadik, Kavi Arasu

Top 100 HR To Follow On Twitter from WittyParrot

Enterprise Social Networking - the focus on collaboration and driven by HR

So yesterday I gave a talk to 12 HR heads at Bangalore which was organized by Microsoft on my thoughts on enterprise social networking in organizations. I was surprised to discover that many HR leaders were looking at driving it for their organizations

Here are some points I made

• Enterprise Social helps to make implicit knowledge explicit
• Focusing on communities rather than networks is key
• Sharing within the enterprise is a test of vulnerability - and is dependent on community management and organizational culture and ecosystem
• Every organization will need to discover its own "use case" for enterprise networking
• Only when employees discover that it helps them get their work done better and faster that its adoption will skyrocket - so key skill of community manager is to help employees discover that
• Social recognition and adoption by leadership drives engagement and adoption
• Organizations need to listen and "discover" their experts that they don't even know they have

My friend Sheel shared how Microsoft used Yammer internally to have difficult conversations and the culture was key to having open conversations. I was also fascinated to learn about how United Breweries HR team led by my friend Suvro had spearheaded Yammer adoption (75% of employees including blue collar workers are on Yammer)- take a look at the video below :)

United Breweries Limited: Brewing up enterprise social success from Yammer on Vimeo.

Update from Suvro: "what we do is that we publish on behalf of our associates (workmen) anything worthy of publishing....but from an access level, it is only for white collared ones"