Xinternationale

HR Summit

XIMAHR- the HR Association of XIMB in collaboration with the Placement Committee organized an HR Summit on ‘Emerging Trends in Talent Acquisition’ on 11th August 2012.

The Summit aimed to start a dialogue among Senior HR professionals, Industry Leaders and Stakeholders of today’s dynamic organizations on current HR issues and also provided an opportunity to understand the relatively new concept of talent acquisition and various issues related to it.Here is a summary of the speakers and their views.

Kanchana Manyam

AdditionalGeneral Manager - Human Resources at Shapoorji Pallonji & Co. Ltd. 

Ms. Kanchana underlined the four trends in talent acquisition namely employment trends, recruitment trends, selection challenge and role of recruitment. She mentioned that apart from IT and ITeS sector, sectors like Pharma (17%), Real Estate and Construction (13%) etc are experiencing double digit growth. As a result, there is a pressing need for redefining the source of talent pool and employability.

She also touched up on the fact that with the advent of technology, recruitment process has become a scalable process

Dilep Misra

President & Head Group HR at JK Group

Mr. Dilep, Head, Group Human resource has worked as HR Head of various companies and has exposure to HR practices of most business verticals. He is an XIMB (PGDM (HR)) alumnus of batch of 1993-1995.

He during his course of discussion highlighted the fact that his organization paid due emphasis on retaining employees and that is the reason; the attrition rate of their company is in single digit. He further said that his organization adopted CCl model and practiced job rotation of employees to improve their efficiency.

On further elaborating about the recruitment policies of his company he said that they hire people at top level through social media like twitter and LinkedIn whereas for the frontline job they go for direct recruitment.

Saurabh Nigam

Vice President — HR, IT & Admin

Mr. Saurabh Nigam spoke on attracting and retaining the Gen Y – The new age employee.The Gen Y is characterized by their self direction and put more weight age on non-financial incentives than financial incentives.He emphasized on nurturing a corporate culture, creating challenging work environment, provide job flexibility and building recognition and intrapreneurship programs. Gen Y being ambitious and outgoing, look for freedom, explicit career path and clear roadmap to success.

Bijay Sahoo

President - H R, Retail & 4G Infotel at Reliance Industries ltd

Mr. Bijay Sahoo gave valuable insights on the strategies and challenges faced by him during his 23 years of work experience in HR strategies, processes, technology, change management and leadership development across sectors.

He opined that colleges provide the pool of talent that can be groomed for taking future leadership role. He pointed that the importance of recruiting through employee referral, social media et al and how the technology has changed over time, starting from the job portals in 1990’s to social media in 2006-07 and now the mobile platform applications. He talked about HR Kalpavriksha that entails all aspects of Talent management like Planning, Recruiting, Training, Retaining, Sustaining etc.

“Intelligence + Humility=Successful Individual”  

Anish Singh HR Director,

Reckitt Benckiser

Mr. Anish Singh has over 13 years of experience in HR and has worked in reputed organizations like HUL, ITC, ICICI Prudential, Essar.

He emphasized that there is no war for talent; talent has already won this war. He observed that in today’s scenario employer branding is very important and it plays a very vital role in attracting the right talent. He highlighted some facts about his company mainly that his company is in touch with Gen Y and is a global company with global mindset.

He also observed that poaching of talent does not help any organization in the long run. In his organization they put a lot of importance on ‘diversity’, in terms of gender, nationality, and region.

Conclusion

Talent acquisition takes a long term view of not only filling positions of today, but also identifying talent for future openings. Talent acquisition professionals need to be skilled not only in sourcing tactics, candidate assessment, compliance and hiring standards, but also in employment branding practices. Also, talent retention (an important aspect of talent acquisition) assumes importance to build a succession model in place.

In an emerging market like ours, where labor capital is fast moving, talent acquisition and retention seems to be one of the biggest problems that plague the country today so talent acquisition is not just a fancy term, it is here to stay in this 21st century.