Education: Your Children's Future!

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My question to best financial minds from ever rising Indian middle class parents with tons of cash flowing in to their pockets post liberalization era: Have you ever calculated how much money you have invested to ensure a luxurious present and a secured future for self against your children's education up until they finish class XII ?

Come on, I know you haven't!

Career Mistake, You Must Avoid!

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A couple of days ago, one of the candidates, who was offered a special package by one of my MNC clients, backed out at the last moment.

That's fine. If you have managed to get a better offer, there is nothing wrong in going ahead with the same. It's your career and you have every right to pick up the best option.

Stop Living Someone Else's Dream, Live Your Own!

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With a few dozen stage performances to my credit, even before reaching the age of 16, I had always wanted to be an actor. However, being slightly better than the average in studies, I became an Engineer -- fulfilling my parent's dream.

Yes, I ended up following my parent's decision and living their dream, not my own! But, I don't blame them, because, had I been in their place, I would have done the same.

I cried, I begged, but my Mom, being a Tiger Mother, remained focused on making me an Engineer which happened to be a golden career not so long ago.

Social Intelligence: Key to Success for HR Professionals

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He called up and desperately, requesting me to look for an immediate placement for him as he has already been serving the notice period. He is the same person whom I have been repeatedly calling up for past several months, but in vein. He never bothered to pick up my calls, neither called back. Simply put, he refused to maintain a decade old relationship while riding the success wave.

Another professional, who would always give me an appointment, but would refuse to meet at the last moment , not once but several times, demonstrates a weird behavior that needs detailed analysis to identify the root cause of such an irrational approach. Ideally, when you're not interested to meet someone, the best way is to let him know it outright instead of agreeing first and then aborting it at the last moment.

How to Land Your Dream Job: Befriend the Best Recruiters!

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Quite often the job seekers ask me about successfully creating a job information network.

They are keen to develop some professional relationships that would keep them informed about the availability of latest relevant opportunities in the market much ahead of others.

Talent Management: Why is HR Failing to be Proactive?

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Hey Recruiter, you must know that your priority will never match that of your clients; however, if something goes wrong, you would be held responsible for what you have no idea about.

That's what, is, perhaps the darker side of an amazing - love and hate - relationship between a recruiter and her clients.

How to Design A Recruiter Friendly Resume

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Most of the recruiters, who are hard pressed for time for delivering results to their internal and external clients, never look at any Resume for more than a couple of seconds to dig out the information relevant to the assignment under consideration.

So, while designing a Resume, the first and most important thing for you is to make relevant information visible to the recruiters and within those few seconds.

Being a recruiter for more than a decade and half, some of the strategies coming to my mind are:

Recruiters: Fishing from the Same Ponds!

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With the advent and epidemic spread of job portals, the business of Executive Search in Contingency vertical has now boiled down to a set of Recruiters fishing candidates from the same ponds.

The only difference from real life fishing, in this case, is, that most of the fishes are very smart and they would invariably respond very positively to every fisherman, never sharing if another fisherman has already contacted them for the same buyer, inspiring him to submit their details to prospective buyers.

3 Steps to Leadership Success

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One of my ex bosses, with whom I had worked for more than 4 years, achieved his target of making a turn around in less than a year against 3 years specified by the top management.

Conventionally, it was an impossible target, especially when the company was on the brink of getting blacklisted by most of the customers in view of major quality related issues.

However, he made it possible through a unique combination of 3 strategic and tactical initiatives. The key areas that he attacked first, and never retired until making them almost flawless, were:

Stop Selling Hopes!

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"Effective leaders are not born, they are built!"

Very few people dare disagree to this statement. But, having worked in corporate for a decade and half and running my own consulting firm for the same period -- which gave me the opportunity to meet and assess more than a few thousand professionals so far - I fail to agree.

I don't think you can make a lion out of a goat, even through imparting the best of behavioral trainings that you can ever think of designing and conducting for humans on earth. No way!

How He Ruined A Promising Career, Running After Money!

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Growth opportunities light up an unrelenting desire in humans to achieve more and more - in terms of money - at any cost, sometimes through unethical practices also. One such incident I witnessed recently, and with utter disbelief!

One of the candidates I have recently recruited at senior level for an MNC client, disappeared the day after joining. Several attempts to contact him through out the day didn't produce any result.

However, when, in the evening, I sent him a SMS threatening to share his foolishness with a few senior professionals from industry, he called up and tried to explain the reason for this funny act.

The Importance of Persistence And Pressure Bearing Ability

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Persistence and Pressure Bearing Ability are two important traits/qualities, apart from a few more, that define your success in both professional and personal life.

In personal life, riding through occasional tsunami of relationship misunderstandings, if you fail to demonstrate any of these qualities, I'm sure, sooner or later, you will find yourself in a mess.

Same applies to professional life as well. In fact, here the challenges are much bigger, because, unlike your personal life, the element of long term commitment is apparently missing. Ideally it shouldn't, but practically it is, in most of the cases. So, unless you're truly committed the results would never come.

5 Check Points for Successfully Running A Partnership Venture

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A couple of months ago, I met an old friend of mine, who had floated a new company in partnership with an interesting personality. We had an useful discussion about a possible business association - between both of us - for catering to a niche area of talent search business: Retained Executive Search.

They were doing well; so was I. However, to do something much better and also bigger, I thought, the best way would be to team up with a few more experts with diverse experience -- making up for the weaknesses, that all of us individually have.

professional Relationship: How to be Most Wanted in Job Market

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Earlier, I told you about the importance of joining a big player right at the start of your career if you want make it happen in the corporate world.

Well, that's only the tip of the iceberg. There are many more dimensions of the crystal 'Success' and your ultimate achievement depends on understanding the importance of all of them.

One of them is how you manage your Professional Relationship.

Corporates are very vigilant these days and before making an offer to any candidate they would normally go through extensive background checks.

So, even if you are sponsored by an external recruiter, sometime, even before calling you for an interview they would obtain as much information as possible regarding your functional and behavioral performance through every known source from your current and previous organisations.

Several times, during my decade-and-half executive search career, I have noticed that many good candidates who're more than matching the job requirements were sidelined at the last moment just because they failed to pass the referral checks.

It means, some of your current or ex-colleagues, known to the interviewers, must have responded with some negative remarks about you. Those could be valid to some extent, and invalid as well in case you didn't enjoy a good working relationship with them.

Unfortunately, in the corporate circle, lot of people mix-up between professional misunderstanding and personal differences to facilitate their own progress - or abort others' - by hook or by crook.

To be in the safer side, you must maintain a healthy relationship with people from your professional circles and that includes external connections also.

And that's possible, only if you take your job seriously and control your emotional outbursts event at the most provoking situation.

Company Culture: How to be Most Wanted in Job Market!

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With too many candidates looking for a better job and too few enjoying the unique privilege of having multiple offers in hand, how many of you, belonging to former category, are seriously looking into finding out the difference between two sides of the same coin?

Being into the business of "Executive Search and Recruitment" for more than a decade and half, I can safely assume: Very few.

Most of you are going by conventional wisdom and traditional methods of career advancement, without realizing how dramatically the corporate world has changed in last couple of years. One hand we have a high unemployment rate, and on the other hand a huge talent shortage.

Isn't it high time to do little home work and renovate your profile, so that instead of you desperately looking out for a better assignment a host of dream companies come running after you -- either directly, or through their recruitment agencies?

Does it make sense? If so, read further!

The following suggestion is applicable to only those, who're newcomers to the corporate world: From freshers to professionals having a few years of work experience.

Very few brands are built overnight, but through a well planned strategic and tactical initiatives. What you are today in your professional life, one of the important reasons could be the size and reputation of the companies you have worked so far. Size and reputation matter, at least in the corporate world.

So always make it a point to join a big and reputed company in the beginning of your career - or switch over as soon as possible, if you have joined a small company - and apply the same principle to your next couple of changes covering at least a decade of your professional life.

You might get much better opportunities from smaller and less reputed companies with a higher designation and more money, but don't give in to greed; don't run after money during those formative years.

As you know the importance of first few years of your life - in terms of quality of upbringing - to help you grow successful as a human; remember, the same applies to career development as well.

Learning about organizational dynamics - while working in a big and reputed company - could be an invaluable asset, that would always help you later to look at every professional conflicts with a wider and down-to-earth perspective.

After a decade of successful stints with a few big and reputed companies, you can certainly command an astonishing market price - if you truly deserve it - from smaller and less reputed organizations -- may be some good start-ups also.

The person that you're today, is the resultant of the quality of upbringing during first few years of your life; the professional that you're are likely to be tomorrow, would be governed mostly by what you have learned during the first few years of your career.

Personal or professional, success is mostly governed by the quality of upbringing! And in the corporate world, these days, both internal and external recruiters strictly go by this principle.

Talent Shortage: Myth, or Reality?

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"What's your salary expectation?" Asked HR manager of a company to a candidate sitting across the table who has already been approved by key decision makers including the Business Head.

"At least 40 percent hike over current take home salary," candidate replied, confidently.

HR Manager frowned and shoot back, "isn't it too high?"

"I don't think," candidate said. "Since this assignment requires relocating from another apart of the country, and also because I already have an offer in hand with 30 percent hike."

A blunt and to the point justification that didn't really make the other person happy at all, but he responded.

"Look, ours is a renowned company and we growing very fast. If you do well, you can grow as well."

"Also, if we give you the hike that you're demanding it'd completely disrupt our internal salary structure. So, we can offer you a maximum hike of 20 percent only. " He finished, bringing their discussion to an end.

"Is it the final offer?" candidate inquired, in an attempt to stretch it a bit further.

" Well, I'll try to take a special approval for another 5 percent, but that's maximum."

"Okay, let me think it over for a day and come back to you."

"Thanks," said HR manager, concluding their discussion inconclusively.

Nothing happened there after, and that candidate joined another organization with a 30 percent hike.

So all efforts to identify and recruit a candidate who would have made a lot of difference to the bottom line of the company went down the drain, just because existing structure couldn't  allow him to be in!

Above discussion, more or less, represents a typical negotiation process prevailing in most of the talent starving companies, clearly indicating that it's not a talent crunch but their inability to afford candidates with right skills at the market price is what makes them suffer most.

From HR perspective, as the HR manager explained during the above mentioned interview, recruiting someone with a much higher salary than what are other employees drawing at that level would certainly create a demotivational environment in the organization.

And I agree, it will. But then, what's the solution?

Please share your take on this issue, highlighting a few practical solutions to this problem. In the following post, I shall let you know about mine and that would be something revolutionary!

Innovation, A Must for Successful Hiring

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Despite running a talent sourcing firm, I've been struggling to identify and hire the best available candidates for my own company. And I'm sure, it's no different elsewhere: leadership from all industry verticals are facing acute talent shortage.

Much have been debated over this issue and all conventional methodologies are being implemented by organizations, not really producing desirable outcome though.

Hence, the need of the hour is to design a few  innovative and result-oriented strategies with a total commitment for their effective implementation.

Some of them, in my opinion, are:

1. Put in place a Dynamic Hiring Manager

For getting best results, you must assign the job to a dynamic Hiring Manager with excellent social intelligence skills and the ability to work under pressure.

With intense competition heating up the market for picking up best available candidates, even a small negative attitude demonstrated by your Hiring Manager may abort an otherwise successful deal.

I have seen it happening, and a number of times.

2. Create a magnetic work culture.

Potential candidates talk amongst themselves, and also take feed back from the market, about work culture of the organizations for which they are being approached. When you initiate a recruitment drive and start conducting interviews, they talk even more.

When you create a magnetic corporate culture, the news spreads like wild fire, and you automatically start attractive the best available candidates.

3. Hire a committed external Recruiter

This is an important strategy, but conveniently neglected by most of the organizations.

The role of a recruiter is not just identifying the talent from market but, through their knowledge based communication with the candidates, help organization build an impacting brand equity as one of the most sought after employers.

Most of the organizations, being in a hurry to fill-up the positions, always share same assignments with more than half a dozen recruiters - creating a chaos in the job market, there by spoiling their brand equity.

However, some of my clients, who have been successfully recruiting the right talents, are always offering exclusive rights - dividing the positions.- for a set assignments to their empaneled recruiters  This approach helps all involved.

It's high time for leadership to start innovating in hiring management for attracting the best available talents, because neither technology nor a killing idea fuels growth but quality of employees who are driving those through against stiff competition.

Talent Management: A True Story of Transformotive Recruitment

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Close to a decade ago, when Regional Sales Manager of a 200 Crore company approached me to help him building up a  senior level team for his organization, I was  a bit perplexed, unable to find out a link between his current responsibility and talent acquisition.

When he said that the MD of the company had entrusted him with the responsibility of identifying a recruiter who would not only dig-out the talents but also help building up brand equity of the company as an ideal employer for attracting the best professionals from target organization, I, sensing the challenge, immediately said yes to him.

The Brutal Killing of Professional Ethics!

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He joined a day before vanishing from our client's organization.

With no verbal or written communication to the concerned person in that company - except a text message saying that due to some unavoidable circumstances he had to leave - neither to us, the Search Firm that placed him there, he just disappeared.

Don't Misunderstand Recruiters, Planet's Most Stressed Species!

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The most uncertain business on planet Earth is 'Contingency Recruitment,' a model based on getting paid by the client only upon successful completion of the assignment - not even a rupee before!

Conventionally the same assignment would be shared with at least half a dozen agencies and, obviously, all but one - who finally pushes her candidate - would go back to square one having wasted their time and energy for earning absolutely nothing.