VOLUME-V I ISSUE 4 I APRIL 2015 www.content.timesjobs.com
TimesJobs.com
tracks how
companies
are nurturing
and engaging
with talent
communities
Tapping
TALENT
Communities
INSIDE
04
Guest Column
Chief learning
officer, Wipro
06
Interview
HR director-India,
Akamai Technologies
Find TimesJob.com’s career articles, expert advice and tips @www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, Jobs & Career section
2
TimesJobs.com survey
Talent communities
Next big thing in hiring
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.
Apeksha Kaushik,
TimesJobs.com
HESE 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
T
Do you engage with
passive talent?
62
Yes
%
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.
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3
What are the challenges of
managing and engaging
talent communities?
33%
27%
40%
n Diversified interest
n Geographical and cultural variations
n Channelising too many ideas
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.
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?
9% 13%
58%
20%
THE ADVANTAGES
n Gamification
n Code contests
n Discussion forums
n Webinars
n Improve quality of applicants
n Attract passive candidates
n Brand building
n Cost saving
n Create a robust talent pipeline
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.
What are the benefits of
hiring through talent
communities?
33%
27% 13% 32%
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 TOOLS
Once you are into a talent community,
the next and most crucial phase of
the process is building relationships
and engaging group members.
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)?
49%
51%
n In-house (operated and managed by
the organisation)
n External (don’t manage it; it’s an
existing community)
THE OUTLOOK
THE PROCESS
Once 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
Nearly 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?
9%
49%
27% 11%
n Game changers in recruitment
n Crucial part of hiring strategy
n As a possible reference
n Not of much significance
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4
Guest column: Engagement or hiring
Talent communities must go
beyond hiring
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 More
With 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
TECHNOLOGY MAKES IT
POSSIBLE TO GO BEYOND
THE BOUNDARIES OF
GEOGRAPHY TO CREATE
TALENT COMMUNITIES
THAT ARE TRULY GLOBAL
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 Innovation
GE 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 Culture
Deloitte’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.
Learnings
Wipro 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.
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5
TechGig.com Conversations, Hyderabad
‘IT should be strategic business partner’
F
TimesJobs.com Bureau
ROM 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 CTO
Jebakumar 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 leaders
Today, businesses led by IT and
technology leaders are at decisionmaking 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 partner
To 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 same
Chalsani 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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6
Interview: Shiva Sundar
HR director-India, Akamai Technologies
‘We use talent communities to
nurture relationships’
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 radar
n 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
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?
“OUR SOCIAL AND TALENT
MANAGERS REGULARLY
PROMOTE EXCHANGE
OF IDEAS BETWEEN
MEMBERS IN THE TALENT
COMMUNITY”
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
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)
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7
‘Make In India’ summit, Mumbai
Need to reduce skill gap across
sectors, say business leaders
B
TimesJobs.com Bureau
USINESS 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.
manufacturing of one car generated
employment for 20 people.
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.
collapsed in emerging organisations
and there is an open business model.
Parameshwaran Balakrishnan, VPHR, 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”.
Dr R Krishnamurthy, director, SR
Mohandas Associates, said that
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
Lessons for HR
leaders in IT/ITeS
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.
VOLUME-V I ISSUE 4 I APRIL 2015
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Interview: Keyuri Singh
VP-HR, Blue Star Infotech
‘Talent communities help companies
engage with the right people’
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)
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