VOLUME-V I ISSUE 4 I APRIL 2015 · TimesJobs.com survey 2 While majority of the surveyed organisations said they networked via talent communities, others said managing these was

VOLUME-V I ISSUE 4 I APRIL 2015 www.content.timesjobs.com

Find TimesJob.com’s career articles, expert advice and tips @www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, Jobs & Career section

Tapping

TALENT Communities

TimesJobs.com tracks how companies

are nurturing and engaging

with talent communities

Guest Column Chief learning officer, Wipro 04

INSID

EInterview HR director-India, Akamai Technologies06

Apeksha Kaushik, TimesJobs.com

THESE days, companies in India are abuzz with discussions regarding talent communities.

Engaging talent communities or passive talent requires planning, resources and tools that can ease the process and make it even more effective.

In the TimesJobs.com survey, 40 per cent of the organisations said they usually dipped into the active talent pool and did not make much effort to engage or reach out to passive candidates through such talent communities.

The reason behind this lack

of interest is not that they do not find talent communities useful. Close to 70 per cent of the respondents said the need to have a dedicated team or resources to manage the process and the turnaround time were a matter of concern for them.

VOLUME-V I ISSUE 4 I APRIL 2015www.content.timesjobs.com

Talent communities Next big thing in hiring

TimesJobs.com survey

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While majority of the surveyed organisations said they networked via talent communities, others said managing these was a challenge

What is a talent community? It is a group that collaborates and works together to solve problems. For organisations, it is like social recruiting - community members are engaged through various means to create a robust talent pipeline.

Do you engage with passive talent?

62% Yes

What are the challenges of managing and engaging talent communities?

Managing and sustaining talent communities is also a challenge for most organisations. The fact that too many ideas need to be channelised on a common platform amid varied interests, cultural and geographical variations puts a lot of pressure on organisations to nurture talent communities.

THE ADVANTAGESWhat are the benefits of hiring through talent communities?

The biggest advantage of a talent community is that it helps in creating a robust talent pipeline for the future and ensures better quality of candidates. Through talent communities an organisation can strengthen its brand since prospective candidates can see what the company is doing on a day-to-day basis. Of the 62 per cent organisations which are part of talent communities, almost 12 per cent say it has helped them in brand building against 2 per cent, including organisations that do not use communities and those that know about such communities, but haven’t tried.

THE TOOLSOnce you are into a talent community, the next and most crucial phase of the process is building relationships and engaging group members.

Regular communication is the key to sustainable communities. Besides, there are engagement tools that help organisations maintain the communication flow. The trick is to play keeping the interests of the community members in mind. Among these tools, discussion forums have been rated as the most effective by nearly 58 per cent of the organisations in the TimesJobs.com survey.

What are the tools used to engage talent communities?

This is followed by webinars, preferred by nearly 20 per cent of the surveyed organisations. Code contests are catching up too, even though they appeal to a niche community (tech talent) only. Nearly 13 per cent of the organisations voted for code contests. The preference for contests is high among IT companies. Over 20 per cent said they used such contests to engage talent communities.

THE PROCESSOnce you know the target audience, the tools and have the plan and objective in place, here’s how you can build a talent community.Platform: It can be your company’s career page or a closed peer group (such as Yammer). You can even choose to be part of an existing community (such as TechGig.com). According to the TimesJobs.com survey, nearly 51 per cent of the organisations said they preferred being part of an

existing talent community.Network: It is advisable to have smaller networks within the talent community to cater to the interests of a specific target audience.Engagement: Blogs, webinars, videos, code contests and discussion forums are some of the effective engagement tools available to organisations. An organisation can choose any of these based on their requirement and target audience. Whatever the method, continuous and regular flow of information has to be maintained.

How do you network with passive talent (talent community)?

THE OUTLOOKNearly 50 per cent of the surveyed organisations said that talent communities were going to be a crucial part of the hiring strategy in future. About 13 per cent said tapping communities can be a game-changer in the recruitment space. Nearly 60 per cent of the small and mid-sized companies, planning to revamp their talent sourcing strategy, feel that talent communities will be at the core of the recruitment plans in times ahead.

How do you see the potential of talent communities?

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33% 27% 40%

n Diversified interestn Geographical and cultural variationsn Channelising too many ideas

n Improve quality of applicantsn Attract passive candidates n Brand building n Cost saving n Create a robust talent pipeline

33% 27% 13% 32%

n Gamification n Code contests n Discussion forums n Webinars

9% 13% 58% 20%

49% 51%

n In-house (operated and managed by the organisation)n External (don’t manage it; it’s an existing community)

n Game changers in recruitment n Crucial part of hiring strategy n As a possible reference n Not of much significance

9% 49% 27% 11%

Abhijit Bhaduri TALENTED people are like magnets. They attract other talented people. These talented people have their own hangouts. The

Coffee House in Kolkata was a hangout for poets, artistes, literati and people from the world of art and culture. Filmmakers such as Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Aparna Sen used to hang out there. The writers and poets such as Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay used the coffee and cigarette smoke filled atmosphere to fire up their imagination through debates. The cafes of Paris have served to inspire many philosophers and intellectuals from Jean Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoire. These are still not talent communities.

When members of a group start collaborating and work together to solve problems and create something, it starts to become a talent community. Technology makes it possible to now go beyond the boundaries of geography to create talent communities that are truly global. The organisation’s boundaries are becoming porous. As they say, “no matter how smart your employees are there are always smarter people outside your company.”

Hiring and MoreWith 3.5 million users, GitHub

is a talent community where the hottest engineers are coming together to share their code. They share their fun projects and comment on each other’s work. Substandard skills get a ruthless dressing down and top coders have a rockstar-like status. It is a one-stop

shop for collaboration, code review and code management for open source and private projects. Tech recruiters love the opportunity to network with and hire someone whose code gets the thumbs up against sky-high standards. They also know that every talented coder will make it easy for them to hire more talent.

Design and InnovationGE offered a $7,000 prize to the

million plus designers and engineers at GrabCAD to design a bracket for a jet engine that would be lighter and yet take on greater load. The young Indonesian

engineer who won the prize had zero experience in aviation.

My Starbucks Idea encourages customers to submit ideas for better products, improving the customer experience and much more. Ideas for new coffee flavours are sourced from there. Customers suggest the music they wish to listen to at the store. The site has over 100,000 ideas without the company spending a penny. Bombardier used the YouRail community to rethink what trains of the future would be like.

Organisational CultureDeloitte’s Women in Tech talent is a

community leveraged to get people to have a dialogue with employees and build a pull for a potential hire. The idea is to give people a taste of the culture and use it to attract people with the right fit. Zappos also uses its unique culture as a differentiator in the talent market.

LearningsWipro has more than 50,000

employees on Yammer – its internal collaboration platform. There are 3,000 groups and more than 20,000 artifacts. The CEO’s weekly blog generates comments, suggestions and spawns many conversations. The L&D Group runs YamJams (that’s what they call a brainstorming session on Yammer) that covers discussions on ethnography to visualization techniques.

Using a talent community only as a candidate pool is under-utilising the potential of what a community can do. Organisations have to learn to leverage them for much more.

The author is the chief

learning officer of Wipro.

Talent communities must go beyond hiring


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Guest column: Engagement or hiring

TECHNOLOGY MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO GO BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF GEOGRAPHY TO CREATE TALENT COMMUNITIES THAT ARE TRULY GLOBAL

TimesJobs.com Bureau

FROM being technical plumbers to business enablers, chief information officers and chief technology officers have come a long

way. Along came challenges too - creating a middle order, adapting to new technologies before others, managing information security and transforming talent. To find solutions to these new challenges, TechGig.com hosted a roundtable on ‘The New Business Role of a CIO/CTO: Transforming Businesses Using Technology’ in Hyderabad on March 10, 2015.

The panelists were Anil Chalasani, director IT, OpenText; Girish Kulkarni, senior VP-business excellence, Cyient; Gopal Paripally, senior director-video end points engineering, Polycom India; Chandra Shekhar, senior director and practice head - customer experience management, Virtusa; Jebakumar Swvigaradoss, associate VP (global product & technology), ADP India; Sanket Atal, group VP, development, Oracle; and, Srinivas Gundimeda, VP, Broadridge Financial Solutions.

CIO vs CTOJebakumar of ADP said that as IT

organisations branch out, the CIO is needed in a service company and

the CTO in a product company. As per him, CTOs make the technology and CIOs drive them. However, both have to engineer systems to enable transformation in information security and talent.

Challenges of financial tech Srinivas of Broadridge Financial

Solutions said it is crucial to engage talent with niche technology skills to retain them. “We have crafted internal retention frameworks and special training modules to engage tech talent and keep their interest in the job.”

Business led by tech leadersToday, businesses led by IT and

technology leaders are at decision-making front, said Atal of Oracle. Tech leaders have to think about where they want to take their company with their technical decisions.

“Without the deep understanding of business, they cannot convince people on the board and will fail to engage employees to work on new technologies,” further added Atal.

IT as business partnerTo become profit centres, CIOs and

CTOs have to make sure the money left in the companies’ pockets comes from their offices, explained Atal. IT should be the strategic business partner to achieve

business excellence and IT strategy has to meet business strategy. Only then CIOs would become differentiators, bring innovativeness at workplace and deliver more than the expectations.

To this, Gopal of Polycom said that to adapt to the change and bring in innovation, tech leaders have to enable a mobile workforce by integrating cloud and social. Most importantly, in board meetings technology leaders should not come at the end but at the beginning.

Fundamentals remain sameChalsani of OpenText said that though

there might have been a paradigm shift in the roles of CIOs and CTOs, the fundamentals remain the same. “The job is to keep the system up and running. In terms of talent, the challenge is when techies face customers directly, for which they need to be cross skilled.”

Dealing with millennials The biggest challenge for technology

leaders lies in dealing with millennial as employees and customers, said Chandrashekhar of Virtusa.

As employees, tech leaders have to bring in employee collaboration, gamification and simplify processes and as customers, they have to track new technologies to deliver what Gen Y wants, added Chandrashekhar.

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‘IT should be strategic business partner’ TechGig.com Conversations, Hyderabad


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How do you use talent communities as an engagement and hiring tool?

At Akamai, we believe that talent is indispensable and we always strive to attract and nurture the best in the industry. For this, we have our own talent community page that we leverage through subscription and social media channels to keep a watch on potential employees. We have segregated our focus into three categories:n People who have signed up willingly n People we want to keep on our radarn People who have dropped out of our interview process at some point

Through our talent community, we make sure these three categories are on the receiving end of tailored communication that we push towards them. Our sourcing team is responsible for making sure the right candidates are active which means they make sure they weed out people who have signed up but are no0t a fit.

Our social and talent managers regularly promote exchange of ideas between members in the talent community and rope in conversations to create a buzz among the pool. We make sure our talent community is more than just posting jobs.

We add much more content and keep it up-to-date and fresh. Things like: “A day in the life”, upcoming new technologies, messages from senior leaders, promotions, events, industry news, etc. They also ensure the community is engaged through open Q&A sessions on these platforms so as to give the potential candidates a sneak peek into the culture and life at the company.

What are the advantages of a talent community?

We value innovation the most and new ideas are always welcome. Apart from job portals, professionals from our community show interest for

opportunities at Akamai Technologies. Our advantage is that we have been able to build a talent pool that can be leveraged for acquisition. Our regular efforts to nurture relationships have resulted in Akamai being one of the top of the mind recall organisation when these potential candidates think of new career avenues.

What are the challenges in using talent communities for hiring, employee engagement and attracting candidates?

A talent community doesn’t give control on who comes in and participates. This means it’s a random sample with a large percentage of aspirants and only a few are part of the top talent pool. Hence it is important to create a degree of personalisation with these potential employees while maintaining the engagement.

Messages essentially have to be targeted at precise groups or people

to attract potential candidates that an organisation would want to hire. Not targeting or ignoring them can result in unsuitable applications as well as alienating candidates who are good.

What tools do you use to engage users in talent communities?

We leverage all major social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Twitter where we have a wide range of people that interact with our brand. Our CRM tools capture vital information about these potential candidates which we either use to attract them during openings or in regularly engaging with community members.

Do you think talent hired via communities has better retention rate and productivity?

Talent communities definitely create high level of excitement and expectations to look forward to, which can result in better productivity. But as an organisation, it is always what you can offer them in terms of growth - personally and professionally - that will matter for better retention.

What difference do you see between internal and external talent communities?

We have our internal talent community where we post internal jobs along with archives of the annual Akamai Edge Conference. These are internalised and help us in our mission to guide our innovation and invent solutions to help make our customers’ visions a reality. We create internal engagement by showcasing the work of our employees in our quarterly ‘State of Internet Report’ and through ‘Wizards’ programme which provides the platform and opportunity for all employees to innovate in their respective or cross function areas.

(As told to Neha Singh Verma)

‘We use talent communities to nurture relationships’

Interview: Shiva Sundar HR director-India, Akamai Technologies

“OUR SOCIAL AND TALENT MANAGERS REGULARLY PROMOTE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS BETWEEN MEMBERS IN THE TALENT COMMUNITY”


7

TimesJobs.com Bureau HR Infotech Association, in

association with TimesJobs.com, organised a session for human resource professionals from the IT/ITeS industry in Mumbai on March 20, 2015.

The speaker was Dr Anil Khandelwal, former chairman of Bank of Baroda and Dena Bank.

Dr Khandelwal narrated how after taking over the role as the bank chairman, he focussed on intangibles such as culture and responsiveness. “As a leader, it is important to create a sense of purpose among the employees.”

He said his charter for the first 100 days was a set of stretching deliverables that he tracked diligently and which proved to be the turning point.

He also brought in stronger connect between senior leaders of his team and initiated the 60-minute mandatory morning sessions where all operational issues were addressed and new ideas were sought.

He explained how he also initiated an employee connect called Sampark and made sure any message for him on Sampark was attended to promptly. That instilled faith and trust in people, systems and processes.

The event was attended by over 120 HR professionals from different IT/ITeS companies.

Lessons for HR leaders in IT/ITeS

TimesJobs.com Bureau

BUSINESS leaders and HR heads came together for a national summit on ‘Make in India-The People Perspective’ in Mumbai

on March 27, 2015. National Institute of Personnel Management-Mumbai chapter (NIPM) organised the event.

In his keynote address, Rajen Mehrotra, a former ILO official, said that while one must focus on FDI, there was a need to ensure Indians have an ecosystem that would sustain development.

Manasi Kirloskar, executive director, Kirloskar Systems, said India had energy in abundance and the need was to convert this into tangible outcomes.

Prince Augustin, executive VP, group human capital & leadership development, Mahindra & Mahindra, said the focus should be on agriculture. “The ‘Make in India’ campaign must focus on automation and improved farm machinery to better the yield of crops in future.”

Vrijesh Upadhyay, All India General Secretary, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, and KM Naik, senior counsel, Bombay High Court, suggested ways to create more employment for the workforce.

Dr R Krishnamurthy, director, SR Mohandas Associates, said that

manufacturing of one car generated employment for 20 people.

KN Vaidyanathan, chief risk officer, Mahindra and Mahindra, said there was a need for minimum standards for organised as well as unorganised sectors, like in Germany.

Pramod Sardarjoshi, senior advisor, people & change management consulting, KPMG, said Gen Y was not asking what one could do for them but what else could be done for them.

Jayesh Pandey, managing director, talent & organisation, Accenture, said that with digitisation, hierarchies have

collapsed in emerging organisations and there is an open business model.

Parameshwaran Balakrishnan, VP-HR, supply chain, Flipkart, said the challenge was not in managing people but in managing their energies.

Sagorika Kantharia, chief people officer, Radio City, citing a research said women were better leaders than men due to their emotional quotient and efficiency at communication.

Adil Malia, group president-HR, Essar Services India, said HR had to develop analytical skills, evaluate appropriate skills for value creation and align short term and long term goals.

Bijay Sahoo, president-HR, Reliance Jio Infocom, said India needed to develop skills for the “next big thing”.

Need to reduce skill gap across sectors, say business leaders

‘Make In India’ summit, Mumbai

Disclaimer: Information provided in this newsletter shall not be reproduced, published, re-sold or otherwise distributed inany medium without the prior written permission of TimesJobs.com and a clear acknowledgement to TimesJobs.com.Contact: TJinsite, TimesJobs.com, Plot No 6, Sector 16A, Film City, Noida, 201301. Write in to [email protected]

Copyright ©2015 Times Business Solutions (A division of Times Internet Ltd). All rights reserved.

How should companies use talent communities as engagement and hiring tools? Talent communities are of great importance when it comes to engaging employees inside as well as outside the company. In every company, knowledge conversations happen but in smaller pockets and in an unorganised way. Talent communities are a good way to organise these conversations/discussions and derive knowledge from them. Though we don’t have a talent community yet, we are working towards creating one. We encourage our employees to be part of such communities (based on their function or role or skill) to share and get more knowledge and learn from one another.

What are the advantages of a talent community?The biggest advantage for companies is being able to engage with the right kind of people. Basically, you are engaging with people, making them aware about the company’s culture, brand values and are able to judge their fitment technically as well as culturally much before you hire

them. When they join via communities, they know what they are in for.

What tools are used to engage users in talent communities?Basically, people who join or are joining talent communities are interested in continuing the dialogue. They want to seed new ideas or are looking for one. It is of utmost importance that organisations have a dedicated person to work on this 24x7. We do webinars, coding contests and skill-based activities to engage with lateral as well as fresh talent in campuses.

What are the challenges in using talent communities for hiring, employee engagement and attracting candidates?The biggest challenge is to make sure you get the right kind of people to join the community. Companies have to ensure they are not just desperate to get a job but also keep the dialogue going and prevent right people from dropping out of the community. Another important thing is to ensure that the company’s confidential information doesn’t go into public domain.

Does talent hired via a community have better retention rate and productivity? Definitely they have better retention rate. As explained, they come into the company with their eyes open and know enough about the company’s culture and value system. It is just like referrals.

How do you use internal high performers to attract high performers from other companies?High performers share a great passion for work and when you use them to attract their counterparts from other companies, it happens effortlessly. Their positioning of the company as the best place to work has acceptance in their peer groups.

What difference do you see between internal and external talent communities?In an internal talent community, it is easier to manage people and drive your agenda in a controlled manner. But in an external talent community, it is difficult to get responses from a crowd of established names.

(As told to Neha Singh Verma)

‘Talent communities help companies engage with the right people’

Interview: Keyuri Singh VP-HR, Blue Star Infotech

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VOLUME-V I ISSUE 4 I APRIL 2015 · TimesJobs.com survey 2 While majority of the surveyed organisations said they networked via talent communities, others said managing these was