HR, Social Media and creating the organization of tomorrow

According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by McKinsey, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,” 

Over the last few years the external facing groups of companies have embraced (enthusiastically or in some cases- gingerly) social networks and online communities to connect with external stakeholders. Marketing, Customer Service and PR groups in organizations have leveraged it to build an army of fans and advocates.

However, many feel that getting an organization ready internally should be the first step to being a true "social business".  Social can scale only if employees are engaged and connected to each other and external stakeholders.

However, the reality in most organizations is that the budget of the external facing groups is much higher. Social there also shows more immediate benefits and benchmarking is easy (however can get misleading)

So if there is budget available and executive sponsorship then an organization should focus on getting internally ready and externally focused at the same time. However for the vast majority of organizations the "social competencies" would be learned by folks in marketing, sales, PR, customer support and then travel to the other parts of the organization.

This is not to advise HR and other people in organizations not to focus on social - far from it. But to recognize that once top management understands the value of social media they would expect that other groups then leverage the tools for their business ends.

However there are differences. Externally social media campaigns can be done again and again to get across to more and more customers/fans. However when launching a social initiative internally, it would need to be successful in a far smaller group and would need to be designed to succeed.

Often you'll hear Social Business (or Enterprise 2.0) enthusiasts say - like we said in the days of KM - "The key to success is people, process and technology"

And then followed by the statement - "Success is dependent 80/90 percent on people"

I believe that "people" issues have a whole lot of other issues that get hidden behind that word that companies might miss. I have mentioned "culture" in the title of the post which is itself like "people" a composite of many other things.

Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc) will not help you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.

Employee engagement is impacted by three factors:

• The engagement between the person's skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person's engagement level is unlikely to go up.

• The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with.

• Organizational culture 

Social tools can help a person do his/her work faster by making discovery of information and experts faster. However if any of the above three factors cause disengagement, it's unlikely that the employee would be using social tools - unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of "social glue" technologies is still early stage.

Factors that can help drive adoption of social technologies by employees

• Vision : Leaders and employees need to know why social technologies are being deployed and how do they link to the existing vision of the company. 

• Role Modeling: Leaders need to exemplify the sharing and collaboration behavior on social tools that they expect employees to display.

• Rewards and Recognition: Social tools have to be in the "flow of work" - but traditional reward systems that do not recognize and reward new behaviors would be a hindrance to widespread adoption.

• Linkage with goals: The team focusing on implementation needs to learn with each and every group in the organization to map how social technologies can help them achieve their goals - in a faster and better way. Without articulating that, the support of crucial group leaders and middle managers would be a pipedream.

• Finding and empowering employee advocates: Data shows that according to various studies that in most large workplaces the majority of the employees are not engaged or disengaged. Expecting them to adopt new tools without being clear of future value is going to be difficult at best. Organizations must map the actively engaged employees who are active creators and sharers of content and showcase how the platforms have helped them achieve their goals.

• Organizational values: These are the big ways in which shape the behavior of employees. Is dissent encouraged? What happens when people make mistakes? Can leaders be questioned and criticised openly? How do they respond to such questions? These are the "norms of behavior" which operate on the ground. Answers to such questions determine whether social, openness and transparency would thrive in the organization.

• Education and Training: Even though social tools seem to be intuitive to use – but the purpose and how of using would need to be communicated

Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement.

While companies come to terms with employee usage of social media and HR departments start working on “regulating” social media usage and come up with “policies” – I think they are missing one key point – leveraging social tools to make HR itself a social activity.

In a certain way, HR is ripe for social disruption. It impacts external perception (employer branding) and internal employee engagement unlike any other part of the organization save the CEO 

Let’s start with policies themselves. Using a social tool which leverages crowdsourcing ideas from employees can help HR in co-creating processes and policies – and raising acceptability when they are finally rolled out. Dell’s EmployeeStorm is a great example by which employees give ideas on everything in the company.

• Recruitment – Since it’s an external facing part of HR the Recruiting teams have been quick to leverage social media to “Broadcast” vacancies and several applications. However the next level would be actively creating and nurturing communities of practice shaped around skills where hiring managers can gauge level of skills of people and also develop them 

• Learning: Social technology can make learning more of a continuous process than the 2-3 day event it currently is. These tools can also be used by trainers to add more to the classroom and create a community of learners who can continue to share experiences and be a support group as they implement learnings in their workplace. Marcia Conner’s book “The New Social Learning” shows how various firms are using tools to augment employee training.

• Employee communication is often the most ignored aspect of HR initiatives without too much thought or resources being dedicated to it. HR people often forget that communication is a two way process. In my view it is critically important to listen to what employees are saying, and that is an aspect that is usually not done in organizations on a regular basis, apart from an annual or semi annual satisfaction surveys. Communication is the bedrock on which the success of change initiatives depend.

• More and more listening to employees. I foresee large organizations large organizations will soon start analyzing data on which employees are thought leaders, experts and influential amongst the workforce (like marketing does for external customers) and try and build them as employee advocates.

• Recognition : Companies like Rypple, Globoforce have started the concept of social peer recognition and it can be a powerful factor to excite employees than traditional reward and recognition.

• Knowledge Sharing: Forget the idea of databases acting as “repositories” of knowledge, internal social networks can capture employees work activity as social intranets connect deeper into business applications – and team members can follow what others are doing on their activity streams. Newer tools like Opzi and MindQuilt can also emerge as a enterprise version of Quora, the popular Q&A site.

As more and more younger workforce enter organizations, their expectations shaped by consumer social applications like facebook, twitter and blogging, they would want access to similar tools within the workforce

The next step would be mobile. For example many internal networks are already available as a mobile apps. This would be a key aspect for organizations with a large sales force who are distributed and need constant communication.

Communication would lead to collaboration – as more and more employees connect and communicate with each other, they would change work processes itself, making things work faster better and changing processes. Organizations have to continue being open and continue the trusting processes earlier.

Can employees and HR professionals and management folks together work together using social media - to do work that was only done by HR people?

Let's think about the aspects of HR work and what can be made "social"

The skills needed for HR people to become savvy socially

To manage online communities – HR people would need to become community managers. Community managers are online facilitators who understand how people connect and share online and understand what kind of discussions and content gets people to open up and share.

Community management is a subset of  roles incorporate various disciplines - and can best be described as Technopologists - a combination of marketing (or recruiting/HR), technologist and social anthropologist.

The focus of the online Community Managers would be to bring in members leveraging the weak ties between people - and providing content around the social object of the community - so that they help members develop strong ties. 

Communities and Learning

Talent communities are where people go to connect with fellow professionals and learn. Hence they are more “communities of practice” than anything else.

Talent communities are places one goes to find experts and also to build their own personal career brand.

Companies must engage in talent communities by letting their internal experts connect with and build their own networks.

The best Talent Community Facilitator would be an expert in the roles – not necessarily a recruiter.

The Talent community is a place to discuss, solve other's problems, share war stories and visions of the future, to look at where the field is headed and what are the skills needed tomorrow. 

The focus on jobs/recruiting has to be secondary to the above.

The skills a Talent Community Facilitator would be a combination of facilitation, teaching, guiding, triggering conversations, mapping the skills of community members and of course skills in the domain of the community.

How to Implementation an Internal Social Network

Create a Social Media Policy – This is a comprehensive document that spells out in detail the behavior expected from the people with access to the enterprise collaboration network. This would include the ways they can use access to the software and what kind of information they should share and also the kind of confidential information they should not share. It would also clarify that they have to be civil in their online discussions.

Social Network Needs Survey – Conduct a survey of the employees who to find the following:

• The challenges they face in information sharing and accessing expertise

• The level of openness in the organization

• Their comfort with using social tools to share information and engage with others

• The challenges in keeping track of changes to information and version control

• The challenges of managing email overload

• The familiarity of colleagues who are not in their immediate team

Leadership Readiness Survey – Identify areas in which the leadership can support the internal network. This survey would be administered to the department heads and other leaders identified. The survey would identify the following:

1. The goal what they want from this implementation.

2. The challenges they have in communicating with the employees.

3. Their own readiness to be role models in implementation and usage of the tool.

Survey Finding

The focus would be on the following:

1. The culture and processes that support the enterprise collaboration software

2. The needs of the organization where information sharing will have the immediate and most impact.

3. The strategy and planning for the implementation of the tool.

Implementation and Set-Up

Decide on: 

• Content to be prefilled on the software

• Access Controls

• Department Creation

• Project Creation

• People who would have administrative controls

The modules in the tools that need to be activated and which ones do not need to be. Who will have access to which content and module would also need to be decided. Other processes which need to be moved to the tool would also need to be decided and users trained on how to use the social technology to do that process. 

2. Ongoing Community cum Engagement Management

Choosing Community Managers and training them on community management is critical to adoption of the internal network. Designing communication plan (like a contest, internal campaign) before launch so that people are excited when it launches and sign up.

Launch internal social network by implementation of the designed Communication plan.

Use social recognition to incentivize desired sharing behaviors

Design a content plan for senior executives to share content like blogs, photos, updates on the enterprise network. 

The focus and objectives of these would be: Share company updates

Suggested Content Plan

1. Company Updates

2. Client wins 

3. Rewards & Recognition.

4. Ideas/Suggestion

5. Press Coverage of leadership/Company

Assess: On going assessment of employee engagement – and driving engagement by triggering conversations on a regular basis.

Outcomes: Survey of users after 6 months to find out if the network is helping them do their work better and faster. Do they:

• Know more about colleagues

• Know more about their company

• Join and engage in internal communities

Other outcomes could be:

1. Metrics like how much time has come down to turn around a document.

2. Tracking projects and assigning tasks are done on the network and not on emails

3. People create interest based communities on their own and share interesting content on them.

4. Employees give each other recognition and therefore raise motivation and engagement.

Implementing external online communities

Before implementing external communities organizations should conduct a “listening exercise” using third party tools (simple to complicated, free to paid all available) and find out if there are any conversations about it and if there are, what is the tonality of that conversation. 

Once a listening exercise has been conducted a purpose of external communities has to be articulated, why, which target group, and which channel. After that what content and conversations need to be created and therefore roles assigned to people either internally or to an outsourced partner. An escalation and response plan also needs to be in place, if questions and doubts are articulated.

In conclusion

In conclusion, social media can be used in a variety of ways, and it is not a question of if but when, all companies would need to respond and react to it. The ones that make the initial moves will be the winners over the laggards. HR has a critical role to play and also one of the critical functions that would be impacted by business being social. To be relevant HR needs to build its own capability in social as well as facilitate the change that organizations will go through.

(Originally written in 2013)

Preparing for Leadership

(Originally written in 2007)

One of the biggest challenges facing Indian organizations as they grow to take on the world, is the severe shortage of skilled leaders who can actually lead them on their journey of globalization.

In fact a recent Business Today story quoted Shailesh Haribhakti, an independent director on the boards of several companies was quoted as saying: "There is now talk in boardrooms of sustainability and how to keep the companies going."

Another article in the Hindustan Times said “In the next two years, India needs to find around 500 to 750 CEOs and another 10,000 functional leaders.”

K Sudarshan, managing partner at EMA Partners, an international CEO search firm, (who also provided the above estimates), says: "There is a huge gap between demand and supply for chief financial officers (CFOs) and human resources professionals—both leaders and professionals down the line."

According to an EMA Partners’ five year study conducted across 100 companies during 2001-06, reveals that 66% of the companies have had a change of CEO’s in the last five years. The industry with the fastest growth has the highest churn in the CEOs understandably due to the tempting offers oozing in for the CEO’s. IT- ITeS leads in the category at 88% followed by Banking Sector at 70% not leaving Pharma much behind at 67%. As we can see, the demand for leadership cuts across sectors and industries. In Leading the Way (a study of the top twenty companies for developing leaders), Marc Effron and Bob Gandossy show that companies who are great at developing leaders tend to achieve higher long-term profitability.

Of course, there are short term measures to solve such issues. In the short term this would mean hiring expatriates to fill the vacant positions, and also escalate a price war for leadership talent. According to Hewitt Associates India has been consistently having among the highest increases of pay in the Asia Pacific region in the last few years.

However Indian organizations have to get their act together if they have to think long term.

What is leadership?

Leadership is defined in many different ways. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard have defined leadership as "working with and through others to achieve objectives". Some people link leadership to charisma. It is deemed to be individual specific Words like visionary, someone who articulates the path for the future etc crop up pretty often. A sales director in one of my previous organizations used to define it as the presence of three things in an individual – Ideas, Influence and Initiative. In my view it is a social process. Others have to accept you as a leader. No matter what your designation, if people do not accept you as a leader, you probably won’t last.

How is leadership different from management?

For Marcus Buckingham, leadership is defined as tapping into the universal feelings of the group as different from management which is tapping into the unique strength of each individual. Management is also defined as “transactional leadership”. Warren Buffet defined a manager as one who does things right as opposed to a leader who does the right things.

What they have got to do is the following:

1. Build the bench strength for leadership – A company can never have a surfeit of leadership. You can have too many engineers, too many researchers, too many managers, too many support staff. However, you can never have too many leaders. The more leaders you have the better it will be for the business. When I talk about leadership here, it is not the designation on the visiting card that I am referring to, but the ability to lead. The more leaders a firm has, the more opportunities it creates to compete and perform. So how can an organization build this bench strength

1. Look at competencies for leadership – Leadership like other roles is a type of role. Of course, there are different types of leadership. We shall take a look at them later. For each of these roles of leadership competencies should be mapped and validated by senior executives. Competency mapping methods like Assessment Centers as well as interview techniques should be used to arrive at these competencies.

2. Look the future competencies and business changes – Competencies need to be continually looked at in the context of the organization and the changes in business strategy and markets. The competencies of the past will not dictate the course of future successes. Hence these competencies need to be continually reassessed for relevance.

3. Decide how many would be hired externally and how many internally – An organization needs to also hire people externally in leadership positions, so as get fresh perspective on business and culture. However, these hires must always be assessed against the agreed competency models. Often, external leadership hires tend to concentrate on one achievement like being a ‘turnaround’ expert or a ‘growth leader’. However sharper thought on how this new person will fit into the culture of the organization and how it impact the prevailing climate of the firm.

2. Build leadership development into the fabric of talent management. As we will see below, talent management processes which exist for all employees in the organization need to be the same systems that integrate leadership development needs.

3. Leadership development is not a standalone activity – Some firms try and focus leadership development by putting up a separate group. However such an approach cannot really succeed until this is tied up with other HR initiatives in Talent Management. Development of leaders is not just about ‘teaching, training or learning’. Sport As Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan wrote in Strategy+Business, September, 2004 issue “Leadership Is A Contact Sport” and cannot be taught in isolation. It needs engagement with live issues and people within the organization.

1. Companies need to always focus on leadership development, during the whole talent engagement employee life-cycle.

1. Attracting talent – Apart from assessing employees against the job competencies, they also have to be assessed for leadership positions and leadership competencies.

1. Does the person have qualities to influence a large number of people? How has he led people in the past? A proper due diligence by way of referral checks with past subordinates peers and supervisors needs to be taken to understand his/her strengths in the area of leadership.

2. It also needs to be understood that really good leadership is a function of both the leader and the market and his firm. Head hunting a leadership candidate without trying to figure out his/her actual contribution to the business’ success.

3. Reaching out to good leaders should also focus on what his real motivator is. Does the person have a life interest, as Waldroop and Butler call it, of enterprise influence? What is his/her career anchor (according to Edgar Schien)? What are his talents, according to Gallup?

2. Motivating talent – Depending on the leader’s motivational factors the role he or she would vary. How can the role be customized for capitalizing on the person’s natural talents as well as experience? Does the person get motivated by external goals like meeting targets or internal goals like creating intellectual property for the organization? How open is she/he to travel? What are the leader’s unique needs? How can the organization accommodate them? Has she/he been told what is specifically expected from her/him? How much support do such developing leaders have from the organization? These questions and their answers are not easy. However, only seeking such answers will lead to understanding what can motivate tomorrow’s leaders.

3. Promoting talent – How do you promote people is integral to developing leadership. Leaders always may not seek a management career. Specially in a specialized domain like technology, pharma or consulting. What are the ways you can expand and enrich their roles? If they love managing people can you pose them fresh challenges every year? How do you build T shaped skills? That refers to a deep level of expertise in one are and a broad knowledge of many other areas. What forms the basis for moving people from one level to another? Potential or past performance? Other data points can also be seen apart from traditional performance appraisal. A lot of firms use tools like Assessment Centres, 360 degrees, to help aspiring leaders to know other data about themselves that are more qualitative in nature, other than just performance data.

4. Compensating talent – How leadership is compensated should tie in both individual motivator factors as well as industry best practices. Future earnings and linkage to business results should be clearly shown for such people. If they are really the future of the business, compensation, both monetary as well as non-monetary rewards should be open. The chasm between their compensation and the actual leadership should not be too great.

4. Understand that leadership development is not the HR function’s responsibility

1. It needs to be the leadership’s mission – Unless the leadership of an organization wants to develop leaders really really badly, it will not come to fruition. In a lot of firms leadership is not groomed as present set of leaders are insecure about their roles and want to ‘hang on’ to their chairs for a long time. Such organizations never will succeed in growing leaders successfully. That is because the current leaders have to mentor and coach tomorrow’s leaders and yet leave them with enough freedom and autonomy to carve their own path.

2. Board members and function heads need to own leadership development in their domains. An organizational level leadership development program will not really succeed unless the various groups in the organization run their own leadership development programs.

3. To really be effective at identifying tomorrow’s leaders, the organization needs to define different kinds of leadership it needs. For example it could choose to identify the following kinds of leadership

1. Functional leadership – These are leaders who have a specifically designated role in the organization and might have to chart the future for their functions. They would need to have deep knowledge of their function, an overview of the whole business and be innovative enough to visualize the future.

2. Business leadership – Leaders with general management and innovative skills to help grow markets and products. A person who can think strategically as well as execute it. Someone who can satisfy both short term investors as well as build capabilities for the organization’s future.

3. Global leadership – Leaders with cross cultural sensitivity who can help the business expand in countries other than its place of origin.

5. A leader is not a superman. By reading about the competency requirements and expectations one can be forgiven to be mistaken that so is the case. However, a great leader is a normal human being, not an alien from the planet Krypton. What can make him or her successful is the support of the organization. An organization needs to help such a leader be self aware and help him with aspects of his/her personality which might come in the way of the success. It is specially the case if such an issue is with the aspiring leader’s personality, rather than with skills or knowledge. A shortfall in skills and knowledge can be solved by putting them through training or giving them specific assignments or projects. However an inability to deal with crises or a lack of focus on details are things that are not usually ‘trainable’. For such people taking away the leadership issue is not a solution. Specially since there is such a shortage of leadership talent. Organizations can do the following:

1. Backup leaders – They can create backup leaders, who are people with strengths to complement a leader’s shortcomings.

2. Two in a box – Two people together can share a leadership responsibility with a delineated responsibility.

So how would an ideal leadership development program look like?

Leaders who are to be developed would be chosen on the basis of the competencies of leadership. They would be then scrutinized to see what is trainable and what is not. For attitude issues, a backup person or a ‘2 in a box’ can be proposed.

Theoretical inputs would need to be alternated with real life projects where they would be assessed on how they are developing. Each person in this program would be attached to a board member as a mentee. The mentor’s jobs would be to guide them through the program and their performance would be a reflection of the performance of the board member themselves.

The program needs to also end with an assessment of how they have developed and for successful candidates it should result in an immediate change into a leadership role.

Any lip service to leadership development without it resulting in concrete action would be ignored.

About project managing, organizing and logistics

The leadership development needs to be project managed as it calls for a huge investment in matters of time from top management of the organization. They should keep their commitments sacrosanct and not pull out of them at the last minute. The person spearheading such a development effort also needs to be assertive with top management without being abrasive. He or she should be detail oriented and also understand human behaviour and learning to be successful in such a mammoth initiative. Having a network of supporters within the organization as well as outside would also help such a initiative.

Most important, the project manager of this initiative should also be a leader in the organization preferably from the business and should be assessed for this as a part of the annual role.

Musings on the future of Recruiting and Human Resources - written in 2007

A couple of days ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great salespeople was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying “Sales folks who have worked in the consumer-facing industry, which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!”. Talk about specialization.

As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.

HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, especially those skills of the Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed, Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset. An “internal service provider” mindset will only reinforce the current perspective of the function. A “partner” approach however, also needs internal strength to sometimes say “no” to a client, or to specify what one wants from them, to be successful. A lot of us have made successful transitions to that state, however, more as individuals than by any process.

Why is there such a need and challenge for HR and recruitment?

The people who are their raison d'etre, prospective employees as well as hiring managers, are getting more demanding. They demand more in less time. They demand better service and without the frills. Faster turnaround times.

Organizations and senior management want them to contain costs, track metrics regarding employee productivity, morale and come to conclusions as to what they need to change/ do better so that they can control not just the bottom line but also increase the top-line. They want better people to do the jobs recruited at less 'total cost of hiring', they want their best people to stay put and the bottom ones to leave with a minimum of fuss.

And increasingly, the organization's customers want to know about HR policies and how they impact quality of work, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose vendors.

What does HR in such a scenario [and these are getting more and more complex and demanding everyday] do? What path must it tread, what roles must it play, what skills must it gather to excel all these demands and satisfy them?

HR needs to structure itself differently, to move from the current functional silos of recruitment, compensation and performance management, training, employee and employee relations to a new paradigm of focusing on projects which are purposes. HR people no longer can make choices about whether they will be 'generalists' or 'specialists' in organizations. They have to be both.

HR's learning curve has to take into account not just today but tomorrow while keeping an eye on what yesterday has left behind. It has to focus on processes, customers, employees and discontinuous change. The question they constantly need to ask themselves is "what if all the knowledge and skills I hold becomes redundant tomorrow? What then?" and build a mindset in their organization where everybody asks this question about themselves.

HR has already been an reluctant adopter of technology and now it has to show how to leverage that technology, not just save time and money.

HR careers will soon become specialized and super specialized. HR vendors will need to offer services like "How to make an FMCG company which is focused on female products a learning organization"

Internally also Recruiting and HR will keep on specializing according to industry based knowledge.

Specialized HR people will work within organizations and yet will be part-free agents advising competition too, as they find a balance between what the job demands and what satisfies their inner strengths.

HR departments will lose many of the administrative work, as employees will take it into their hands and the corporate intranet rids them of standardized processes. They will soon be able to draft their own salary heads, leave structure and keep abreast of legal trends [all the work that HR does today!]

It's going to be an age of change and lots of HR professionals would themselves find the chasm a difficult one to cross.

Future skills for today’s HR professionals - written in 2012

Wrote this in 2012



Foretelling the future is always risky business, and in connection with HR doubly so. That is because HR’s field of expertise could be impacted by various things. Let’s take a look at what they are:




Competition and Globalization : While these are two different words, the impact they have on an organization is similar. Productivity needs to be increased and costs need to be optimized. HR is both an initiator of these changes and also stands to be impacted by these changes, which we shall see in detail later.


The “No Brands” movement: No Brand was the book written by Naomi Klein that focusses on how the big corporations’ “mass brands” concepts are being slowly rejected by the developed world. One way communication and branding is on the way out. Even in the developed world consumers are not seeing themselves as consumers but as co-producers of goods and services.


The Long Tail of production and distribution: taking off from point 2, the Long Tail was coined by Chris Anderson to describe the phenomenon of relatively tiny firms producing niche goods and services that get aggregated and sold using technology like Google, Amazon and eBay. This is giving rise to the workforce of Free Agents (coined by Dan Pink) and Fleas (as described by Charles Handy)


The Creative Age: As the knowledge age gives way to the age of right brain creativity, artistic, empathetic, a new class of professions will rise to prominence.

The skills that HR needs to have to meet the challenges:

The skills to translate HR deliverables into business metrics.

Too often HR people focus their deliverables in a way that does not make sense to line business. Let’s face it. The language of business is money, so if HR is only seen as a black hole for money, it will earn the sobriquet of a ‘cost centre’ and get delegated to the back benches. Hence the ability to talk in the language of finance is a critical skill for HR. Relevant people skills are the differentiating factor in most service companies. HR people must understand how to quantify those skills, how to keep track of them, how to measure them and how to upgrade them. Does a HR manager of a Consumer goods company understand what’s the difference between a great Brand Manager and an average Brand Manager? And how to measure them? Does he understand what the driving needs of the great Brand Manager are and how they are different from the average ones? And, does he understand if the policies of the organization support the needs of the average BM or the star BM?


The HR professional must not just be concerned with her internal customers but also with the external customers. The focus must be on the way they can together add value to the customer who keeps the organization in business. Only when HR professionals understand and demonstrate how they can add value to end customers will they be considered strategic partners of the business.

The Skills to facilitate change

All said and done, HR professionals mostly lack the skills to be effective ‘facilitators’ of change. Their own inability to not get involved in the content and exercise control on the process ensures that they are not accepted by the various parties as facilitators.


The focus is very rarely on the human effects of change. As we all know, any change causes heartburn and pain. Most often, either these are unacknowledged or brushed under the carpet by business leads and HR folks either collude with them. One of the foremost way to deal with change is to bring it out in the open – “the elephant in the room” way. Any attempt to wish it away or to deal with it in a secret/underhand way only makes us appear that way.

The Skills to understand communication and the changes in the processes underway.

HR needs to understand the processes of communication between organizations and how the era of one way communication is over. This has more implications than HR can realize. Newspapers in the west are seeing declining circulations and advertising. People are fed up being passive ‘consumers’ of news but are instead using free software and ubiquitous broadband connections to become ‘commentators’ on news. The culture of rip-burn-remix has spread from music to mainstream news, and organizations are struggling to grasp the reality. HR people have to understand how these generational shifts in how information is consumed impacts their business, both from the outside and from the inside.


The new way of learning: In line with the earlier point, the way how people learn is also changing. Gone are the days of the “chalk and talk” method and even the “guide by the side” method. Learners these days and in the future are the people who learn by “immersive” technologies. That will also have an impact on how they learn and perform in the organizations. It also has an impact on how the organizations’ solutions and products are used and experienced by the customers.

The age of the free agent and virtual teams

With the rise of the creative age, people are looking more at vocations rather than careers, and it is passion that drives them. These creative people will become more and more entrepreneurial and give up the comfort and the anonymity of large organizations to chart out recognition as independent consultants. HR needs to understand how to manage these people to enhance creative input and also needs to guide line managers. It needs to remember that for these folks, independence and eminence is the motivating force, and money is just a by-product. HR also needs to identify who are potential free agents in the organization and what to do to optimize their contribution.


As more and more work gets done in a globalized economy by groups of part-time, temp or independent consultants working along with full time employees in different cultures and time zones, creating a culture of inclusion and tolerance of diversity becomes an imperative for HR professionals. This would be a strategic differentiator for the business, because diversity if managed well, could give rise to ideas and innovation that the competition cannot come up with. HR needs to educate the business about the edge that diversity brings and that it’s not just a ‘nice to do’ kind of thing!




There are a lot of challenges facing us HR professionals, but nothing is unsurmountable if one maintains an open mind, surveys the business and technology landscape regularly and seeks a variety of mentors in various subject matter to build up expertise.

How to Build an Employer Brand That Attracts Top Talent

In today’s talent market, filling roles isn’t just about posting vacancies—it’s about telling a story that makes people want to work for you. Recruitment has become as much about marketing, storytelling, and data-driven engagement as it is about interviews and job descriptions.

An effective employer brand can make the difference between attracting top talent and losing them to the competition. But how do you craft one? And who’s responsible for making it happen?

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Who Owns Employer Branding?

The short answer: everyone.

Research shows that 60% of CEOs believe employer branding is their responsibility. Many HR leaders think it belongs to HR, while marketing departments have the tools to reach wide audiences. The truth is that the best employer brands are built collaboratively:

• Marketing brings the skills to target and engage audiences.

• HR understands the company culture and job seeker mindset.

• CEOs provide vision and credibility.

When these groups work together, employer branding stops being a departmental task and becomes a company-wide mission.

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Crafting Your Message

Your employer brand is the story you tell about your workplace.
Your talent brand is what employees and job seekers say about working there.

The most effective brands happen where the two overlap—when the company’s aspirations align with the authentic experiences of employees.

To get there, start by asking:

• What do job seekers really think about us?

• Why do employees stay?

• What’s our true value proposition as an employer?

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What Candidates Care About Most

A survey of job seekers in India revealed what truly connects them to an employer:

• Work that makes a positive impact – 38%

• Mission and values that align with theirs – 37%

• Diversity of opportunities – 33%

• Transparent, responsive recruiters – 32%

If you want to stand out, weave these themes into your employer brand story.

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Choosing the Right Channels

Once your message is clear, it’s time to share it in the right places:

• Career Site – Mobile-friendly, culture-rich, and easy to navigate.

• Social Media – Employee voices are more powerful than corporate press releases.

• Review Sites – Job seekers trust peer reviews.

• Targeted Ads – Ensure your message reaches the right talent.

Every channel should showcase not just what you do, but why you’re worth working for.

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The Power of Reviews

Job seekers behave like consumers—they research before they buy.
98% of candidates read reviews of a potential employer, and 54% do it before they even start job hunting.

Your approach should be:

• Be transparent from the start.

• Respond to reviews—both positive and negative—in a professional and honest manner.

• Share authentic stories from employees to balance the narrative.

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Measuring Success

Employer branding is not a “set it and forget it” exercise. To improve, you need to measure:

• Social Media: Views, likes, shares, reach.

• Career Site: Visitors, applications, conversions.

• Review Sites: Overall ratings, location-based feedback, competitor comparisons.

Consistent tracking lets you refine your message, invest in what’s working, and fix what isn’t.

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The Role of Candidate Personas

Marketing teams know their ideal customer. Recruitment teams should know their ideal candidate.

A candidate persona is a detailed profile of the type of person who would thrive in a specific role. To create one:

1. Study your top performers.

2. Use hiring and performance data.

3. Talk to hiring managers.

4. Ask your employees for insights.

5. Watch industry hiring trends.

With clear personas, you can tailor job descriptions, refine sourcing strategies, and target your messaging effectively.

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The Bottom Line

Thinking like a marketer doesn’t mean turning HR into a sales team—it means applying the same principles of audience understanding, message crafting, channel selection, and performance measurement to talent acquisition.

When employer branding is authentic, consistent, and data-driven, you don’t just fill roles—you attract people who genuinely want to be part of your journey.