Too soon?

Phew !

Reading about stuff like this always convinces me that I was born ten-eleven years too soon :-)

Yahoo HotJobs enters the social networking realm

In a tribute to both Jobster and Linkedin, one of the biggest jobsites in the world, Yahoo HotJobs is moving to link social networking with job hunting.

If you go to the main HotJobs page, you will see Yahoo Answers which focus on job search and careers featured on the site.

I'd be interested to see if these would later be built into a person's profile as Linkedin does to showcase expertise, or whether they would go the Jobster way to aggregate how people feel about a certain firm or job.

Get the latest Internet recruiting scoop at Cheezhead.

My Media sources

Nimmy tagged me with this media tag meme that's been going around in the KM circles. Hmm, trust KM people to want to know how people keep themselves informed, heh, right?

So here goes...

• Books: I am always ready to devour a book. Any book. I was brought up on a diet of fiction from childhood and it always is great to get lost in imaginary worlds created by others. Recently at a second hand book exhibition I got some great Le Carre novels at throwaway prices, and the Dubliners by James Joyce. In the recent past I've mostly read fiction by Indian authors like Amitav Ghosh (his Circle of Reason is my all time favorite), Jhumpa Lahiri (both the Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake were amazing). I got hooked on to IWE (Indian Writing in English) after reading Midnight's Children in 1995 :-). It is also great to read a book that is about a place you know by someone you can call a friend too. On the non-fiction front I stick to the classical management books. Drucker, Tom Peters, Ram Charan. A recent buy has been Ram Charan's "Know-How", am still to read that :-) On KM, Nonaka's classic "The Knowledge Creating Company" has been a big influence. As well as Intellectual Capital by Tom Stewart. Other great books that have been big influences has been The Tao of Physics by Capra, Chaos by Gleick, Sensemaking by Weick, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Genome. Oh before I forget, I guess graphic novels have to go in this section. I loved "The Dark Knight Returns" by Frank Miller ...am a big Batman fan :-)
  
• Communication: My preferred mode of communication is by email. I do not like the intrusiveness of the phone unless it is by people close to me. I am not a big IM user too. Can't really express myself with clarity and with dodgy internet connections. SMS texting is a good compromise between the phone and IM. But my vote goes for the email anyday over the others. Hey, but that's just me.
  
• TV: I am a eclectic TV watcher. Mostly ESPN-Star Sports, CNN-IBN, NDTV, CNBC-TV18. Love Storyboard when I get the chance on what's happening in the advertising and media industry. Also like to catch the gadgets and tech programs on the channels even though I can't buy anything :-) Love "No Reservations" on Travel and Living. Always wanted a job where I could go around eating in exotic countries and get paid for it :-)
  
• Films. Am hooked to predominantly Hindi movies. The whole spectrum, from Nagesh Kukunoor to Aditya Chopra. Though I'll gladly miss a Barjatya movie anyday :-) Am looking forward to the Namesake's movie release (there's even a blog about it). In English movies I like the action movies with some kind of plot. No Vin Diesel for me. I'd rather see a Denzel Washington thriller. Haven't seen too much of the world cinema, though I loved the trilogy of Kieslowski's called Red, White and Blue
  
• Magazines - I read magazines when I am travelling. Outlook, India Today, Business Today, Time are my airport buys. Also keep a tab on what Training and T+D are saying.
  
• Music - Am not a big music buff. 1980s English music stuff. And Kishore Kumar.
  
• Radio - Only get to hear the FM when I am driving. Radio City is the cure for bad traffic in Hyderabad.
  
• The Web - Google search. Bloglines. Blogger.com. Ryze. Linkedin. Orkut. Recruiting.com. Google Reader. Flickr. Wikipedia. Wikimapia. The web is my virtual location. I keep reading most from here. This is where I respond and react to my various media stimuli.
  

So in turn I am tagging these folks (also to check if they really read this blog ;-) :

• Anuradha
• Bill Ives
• Michael Keleman
• Dina Mehta
• Sucharith Menon

Hey, anyone who reads it can take this meme forward too !!

MBA personal interview perspectives

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I faced three interviewers for my personal interview round before I got admitted to do my MBA.

So it was a different kind of deja vu when I crossed the line and became an interviewer for a B School as they had requested me (amongst others) as they considered me a "well wisher".

After a day of interviewing 12 MBA aspirants these are the thoughts I was left with:

1. A majority of the people were engineers with 2-4 years of experience. Most of them were from the IT services industry and of them 3-4 people were people who did software testing and quality kind of roles.
2. Interestingly a lot of these people talked about turning entrepreneur after 3-4 years of working.
3. Most people wanted to specialise in Finance but when asked why, they could not articulate the reason, except for a couple of them. If you have zoned on one, the panel will ask why you want to pursue that and therefore you should be prepared
4. The question "Why do you want to do an MBA" is a sure question, and yet very few people said anything that showed they were ready with a clear and crisp answer to that.
5. For budding business managers, awareness of things like the recently released Union Budget and its impact on individuals and organizations should be clear to some extent. That was sorely lacking.
6. It's great to have a big grand goal, but show that you can plan the intermediate steps to that goal as well. It doesn't have to be perfect or correct, but I would look for thoroughness in thought.
7. On the other hand just thinking of the job you'd like to do a couple of years after graduating from an MBA and not having a larger vision for your career makes it seem that you are in it only for the money :-)

On the panel was a software product person who quizzed the engineers on the kind of work they that done and there was a professor from the business school who had an eagle eye on the academic record of the students.

Recruitment Advertisements

Post contributed by guest contributor R Karthik.

I was hauling and hurling the newspapers strewn all over in my shelf when last week's edition of Times Ascent caught my eye.

Much as I always love to do, I leafed through its pages and something very interesting featured on the main page's story- Pink Slip Awards for Creative Excellence in Recruitment Advertising!

Times Group instituted this award blanket a year or two ago.

There are several categories (ad/campaign/headline and so on) in which individuals and companies lodge their entries vying for "The Best...Award"

I have wanted to (though I still haven't done) research on classification of recruitment ads-on what bases they can be classified, no. of and what types.

Let's think of some ads we have come across and see if we can observe patterns/commonalities and arrive on at least 2 bases for classification.

Makes for a very interesting student project; doesn't it?? (I wonder why I did not take up this as a project theme when I was a student)

Now, we have seen this common-place ad which carries an introductory paragraph about the organization's business interests and delineates the specifications for all open positions.

Then there is the employee testimonial ad; a guy/girl-next-door screams out of his portrait "my company is the best place to work for….."

Euphemistically though, they go on to state "I've been with ………for 8 years now; at……..we…"

None of us can have missed the 'Infoscions' who are featured as "meet the know-it-all face of new India/meet the challenges-are-fun face of new India"!

Why….they own the bottom half of every week's edition of job opportunities supplement of widely-read newspapers!

And then there is the ad done the other way around! Employer singing his associate's praise in a very subtle and intriguing way-

But these ones are a little rare; I have seen only Google's ad carrying a story/incident and profile of an employee, how he/she joined the organization and what is so special about the individual.

This was more of a campaign and did not talk about open positions at all.

Yet it is worthy of being counted in our list because the employee's childhood image or photograph is featured and that gives the ad a collage kind of appeal that comes with the tweaked photograph with edges cut unevenly and a scribbling or something else. Probably this also belongs to the previous clan of ads only. (Photograph and annotations used)

Next is the genre of ads in which a visual and a headline does all the talking or luring rather!

Provocative statements or rhetoric or an unanswered question will just do as much to make us sit up and scratch our nose.

Interested people surf or head to the directed space or web link to know more and explore.

The co. has a crystal clear profile of its prospects' (who it wants to attack and bring aboard) persona!

Something is said in the ad to that effect which will appeal to the senses of such individuals and those guys beat a path themselves to the co.s front office enquiring.

A brilliant ad by Saatchi brothers posting open positions in proof-readers/editors and Copy editors; a small 5 line paragraph with the 1 ^st or last syllable of every word jumbled.

Though spelt wrong the reader can make out what the right word is….

"fi oyu fnid sometignh worng abuot evrye wrod in tish wohel passeag it maens we'ev fonud teh rihtg preson in oyu; at Staachi & Staachi we'er hrinig"

The above is not the exact version of the ad which I only palely remember (why the damn didn't I treasure it when I first saw it?)

Anyway! I hope I have conveyed the essence of it.

Intrigued by such ads I too once thought of an interesting headline for an ad I was to co-create.

To invite applications from Sales & BD Professionals for a co.'s nutrition biz I inserted a quotation at the header of the quarter-page print ad.

"He that takes nutrition and ignores medicine; wastes the skill of a physician"-A Chinese Proverb

In the over-communicated pages of any newspaper's appointments section, your ad if it has to stand out (despite the constraints of your dimensions and colors) will have to catch the imagination of readers.

Teasers though uncommon in recruitment advertising also elicit sufficient hype and finally manage to reach the audience intended for.

There are employer branding ads which besides calling for applications to a not-much-elaborated function/technology/domain also does communicate the boast-worthy aspects of the organization as a workplace.

We have seen automobile companies or manufacturing co.s come up with ad campaigns/series (not stand-alone ads) that carry info on their CSR initiatives, awards bagged, stand taken on larger issues of the world/country. However one insight here is that embarking on such campaigns makes sense only for those organizations that have a pre-defined employer branding agenda and objectives.

Well, think I have exhausted all that I have personally seen and managed to recall.

Now let's summarize the different bases for classification;

1).Content-based

(factual- no. of positions open, JDs/JSs, walk-in venue details- descriptive- less factual and more descriptive of desired candidate competencies and many more)

2). Communication objectives- based

(employer branding-employee/employer testimonials

Fun-at-work/culture

Benefits

Diversity at work

Articulation of stand taken towards issue/commitment to a larger social cause etc)

3). Target/prospect locked

(Age-group- e.g calling on freshers/octogenarians

Niche skill- Media professionals/RJs/VJs

Freelance opportunities-language tutors/part-time faculty)

Beyond and above all these, every excellent piece of creative ad communication crafted brings forth a newer genre.

It goes unsaid-there is much much more to recruitment ads that what has been deliberated about.

I wish to end this passage with this note- it could be that not all the bases of classification I have discussed here are mutually exclusive; nor is the above classification collectively exhaustive.

Pls. do add your own perspectives to this.

Wish you a colourful holi

On the occasion of the spring festival of colours, Holi, here's wishing everybody a vibrant, colourful and joyful Holi !

Blogging therefore will be light :-)

Have a great Holi-filled weekend !

Risks of Corporate Blogging

Patrix pointed me to this article yesterday and Praneeth to this one today. Synchronicity, I tell you :-) !

I agree with most of the points in both the articles.

As I told a journalist who asked me what my advice would be for corporates to utilise blogging:

"Organizations must answer these questions before they undertake blogging or any social media initiative: Can they be authentic? Can they embrace the conversation rather than dictate? Can they shift the mindset of "markets as a battlefield" to "markets are conversations"? Being honest and upfront is the only way to be.

Trying to manipulate or trick blog readers is not a good idea. It might lead to more blowback than gain. The purpose of the blog has to be crystal clear in the organizations mind. It should be a tool to generate conversation and influence. Mixing that with a sales pitch is a lack of integrity.

To anyone who wants to blog, you have to understand the philosophy behind it. Not the tool. Writing skills are very important. Ditching the corporate jargon will be a necessity. People have to be clear and humble. No matter if you are the CEO of a major corporation or the neighborhood barber. It's the age of the attention economy and being engaging is not a "nice to have" skill but a necessary one. Learn to connect. That's the currency of being successful in this medium "

Blog Readers

I thought you might enjoy this map (courtesy Google Analytics) of where the readers of this blog come from :-) Seems like the biggest "market" for this blog is India (obviously) and US along with Canada. Europe and UK have a few visits too.

Yes, language still determines the reach of the content. I wish online translation and search translation tools become more popular.

By the way, you can interact and know fellow blog readers by joining the community at MyBlogLog.

US job satisfaction levels going down

Sudhanshu points to an interesting report that states that younger American workers are least satisfied with their jobs.

Satisfaction is important, but I believe that the higher thing to aspire for is engagement with the job.

Satisfaction focusses too much on the external factors that an organization can tinker with. The pay, the benefits, the overtime, the job titles. I am not saying that these are not important, but focusing on these factors takes away the energy from focusing on the really important bit: the work and the innate talent of the person.

Once HR professionals and managers start to get that alignment right - because it can't be "templated" it is not an easy approach - external factors remaining the same, satisfaction will go up.

If you are an employee, you can help your manager to take that decision. Reflect. Look at what you do well, and what you don't. Think about the roles where you can really make a difference and which excites you. Communicate that as your career goal to your organization.

Your career growth is your onus. You need to steer it rather than waiting for your managers and HR professionals to guide you.

Decisions

A business school wants me to sit on its student selection panel.

I'm confused. It's on a Sunday.

And I dread to think that I could decide, nay, even influence on who gets to be in an MBA class and who does not. It's scary.

What do you suggest? Should I take it up?

Oh, another thing, keep an eye out on some Indian business mags in the near future. You'll probably find my ugly mug on one of the pages talking about business blogging ;-)