Gautam Ghosh

So I was interviewed by Mid-Day's journalist Yoshita on how I was hired by Gaurav Mishra into 2020 Social. Also was quoted on the growing trend of social media profiles acting as proxy resumes.

You can read the article here:

According to Ghosh, the HR/jobs market follows the path of the marketing market. Marketing has moved from a transaction mode to building relations and it is a similar case with the HR/jobs market. "Companies are realising the declining value of job portals. All a person on such sites needs to do is to tick a profile and send it to thousands of companies. Some of the CVs, which do turn out to be suitable, are kept in the database of the company but when firms try to get in touch with the applicants, their contact details are no longer current," Ghosh explains. Social media, he says, is much more alive, updated and immediate.

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A lot of times people ask me why I blog, tweet, share stuff online. They think I am wasting my time. But its is because of such sharing that I have discovered and learned more than other people who look forward to learning as a formal "event" that they or their employer has to pay for.

Online sharing of ideas and opinions are like a dialog and often helps in helping you think about an issue in more clarity after the discussion than you had before. Connecting around learning online also leads you to discover content in various types from text, to documents, to slides and videos.

Hyperlinking makes online content dependent on what the user needs rather than what an author or trainer wants to convey. It gives the adult learners an option of going deep into a subject or to keep it at a surface level.

When you share your skill you also ensure that others look at you as an authority, if they find your content compelling. People can vote with their feet and leave when the value of that content falls, when better people start sharing their content too!

My colleague Charlie has shared a detailed list of 8 reasons to participate in Skill Communities at the BraveNewTalent Blog. Go read it, too

My latest posts on the Social Business News site is whether the time is right for Social HR? What do you think, folks?

On the Social Samosa site I deconstruct that thing called Enterprise Social Software (aka Enterprise 2.0)

Happy reading, folks and feel free to share, like, tweet and +1 the posts :D

Would love your comments too, either here or there :)

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I'll be speaking at the World HRD Congress at Mumbai on 17th February on "Social Media and Recruitment". The venue is Taj Lands End, Bandra.

And I'll be there the whole duration of the conference from 16th to 18th. If you're there, do connect and say Hi :-) Even if you're not at the conference, but are based in Mumbai and want to meet, let me know!

Looking forward to listen and meet (for the first time) Dave Mendoza. And to reconnect with people like Ester Martinez, NS Rajan, SV Nathan, Judhajit Das and to meet lots of new people.  

This is a video of the talk that Lucian Tarnowski (CEO of BraveNewTalent) gave at the DLD Conference in January 2012, covering the skills gap and the role for organizations to leverage online communities to bridge that gap.
Hope you enjoy the video :)

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Last year I blogged about how I believe Talent Communities are online spaces where people connect around a shared skill/practice areas to learn.

Last week my employer BraveNewTalent launched new features that enable creation of skill communities.

So now not only do Companies get people to follow them and their updates (and communicate directly with them) they can also enable their experts to engage in these skill communities and share their knowledge with community members.

The skills communities are of different types - from technical skills like PHP to softer skills like community management to HR Skills

So come on explore the skills communities you'd like to contribute to as well as learn in.

I recently presented to an executive search firm (one of the biggest in the world) on how Social Media is impacting the Recruiting process

So here's the presentation for your use too - feel free to download it and share it with friends and colleagues :)

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I tweeted this WSJ article "No More Résumés, Say Some Firms" and got some interesting responses from folks. Yes for some jobs your "web presence" is becoming more and more important. And others require you to do online quizzes and solve problems before you can apply (therefore weeding out people who don't meet some requirement for the job)

One recruitment consultant replied that two of her clients ask her to send candidates' social network URLs to them. And one of them, a startup IT firm, insists that all the candidates should have tech blogs. (this is in India!)

However, the death of the resume is greatly exaggerated.For one, such roles and organizations are miniscule. The processes and systems of traditional organizations with its armies of sourcers and recruiters and technology like Applicant Tracking Systems understands the resume better. And while you might be fortunate to get interviewed by a company that can make a decision about your expertise using your social web presence -that will continue to be in the edge as that method is not scalable yet for large to medium organizations where the number of applicants per job vacancy go from 10 to 25.
 
 However, for key skills in certain roles focusing on social web presence is critical as external people often trust a regular employee over a financial or technical analyst and the CEO according to the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2012. So we will continue to see services like re.vu (you can find mine here) who aim to turn your resume into a visual story too. Looks kinda pretty, doesn't it? Then there's About.me (mine) and Flavors.me (mine) who all try to get to unify your social web presence.

Not to forget the 800 pound gorillas fighting to own your digital identity - Google (my Google profile is now Google+) and Facebook and Twitter (which adds a rel="me" tag to the URL you add to your website there)

So the moral of the story, keep your resume polished and keep the same information in the big profile pages too. And start writing a blog (specially if you're in technology!)

Fortune put out its list of 100 best companies to work for. But it also put up another list on which of the top 100 are leveraging social media and networks both externally and internally. I loved the list and thought I'd share some examples here:

Marriott : The longtime face of Marriott International, Bill Marriott, has operated a blog since 2007, and the company uses mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter extensively. the company ventures into new ground with its My Marriott Hotel social game. The game allows users to manage different elements of a Marriott hotel. Even with languages such as Arabic and Mandarin supported, it might come as a surprise that the city with the most players is Cairo, according to the company.Associates can post ideas for corporate changes to the "Did You Think of This" internal website, and several hundred entered a video contest submission through Marriott's jobs and careers pages on Facebook. The company also periodically has its officers hold question and answers sessions online, such as a human resources executive providing insight into the job search.

Google:Social media used: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Google , Google+, Google Groups, Magnet (internal tool), internal and external blog
Google also uses social media heavily in its recruiting operation. In addition to a Google students page, the company posts live streams of Google+ Hangouts on Google provide applicants with feedback on the hiring process, such as what code languages to know at interviews.

SAS Institute:SAS offers substantial training in social media for its employees: its new education program, "Social Studies," provides workshops and training modules, while an optional responsible-use course had several thousand participants last year.

Intuit:Internally, Intuit has a news portal, SNAP, within its proprietary intranet. Employees can share news stories, discuss them, and even send pieces to friends and family. Internal blogs and Yammer also keep Intuit workers connected, through Yammer groups such as one for members of a "high potential" leadership program to connect outside their hands-on training.

Image by Esthr via Flickr

An interesting meeting I remember with an executive search firm was "We don't need to go social. Our ability to charge a higher search fee is based on senior exec people not being available"

Another exec search firm (one of the biggest in the world) has asked me to address their "researchers" in their Knowledge center.

So what do you think? Is the Exec Search firm a fundamentally different one that they inhabit?

If yes, how does it impact the profitability ?

From left: Lucian Tarnowski, Madan Padaki, Pratik Kumar and Krishna Prasad

As you know we had planned a gathering of business and HR folks in Bangalore on 6th January to have a conversation about Talent and Technology and specifically about the Future of Talent in India.

There were some fascinating points and experiences shared about what employability means, the future of training and teaching and how technology is transforming organizations.

Read the full report here

Members of the audience

Photos via Dheeraj Prasad

Image by Cristiano Betta via Flickr

On the social business news blog Michael Brito posted about the SHRM survey that finds that HR would play an increasingly important role in Social Business.

However the crux of that involvement focuses on "creating and enforcing a social media policy"

To me that sounds like policing - not acting as the enabler and empowering the energy of the employees to be the organizations' advocates on social media.

To do that the focus has to be on building an empowering and trusting culture within the organization and then following that with education and training on the dos and donts of social media. Governance, while it is critical,  cannot be purely on the basis of publishing a policy.

A company cannot be asocial inside and social outside.

HR has to evolve to catch up with the rest of the organization to embrace social.

No the employment brand does not exist in advertisements or what you tell your marketing agency.

Your company's employment brand is shaped by conversations that are triggered by questions like this on social web these days.
Your employment brand is built and shaped now by such conversations. It is what your employees say to their friends and what their friends reply to questions like the above.

In short, if you want to really impact the employment brand - start with the culture of your organization. Because that is the brand that people actually care about.

Start with being authentic. Open. Upfront. Both externally and inside. Listen. Talk less. Do more.

If you are authentic about the kind of culture your organization has - conservative, experimental, edgy or whatever it is - you will attract people who would be comfortable with that culture.

Sure culture is a messy thing. Not usually articulated easily. It is not the "values espoused" but demonstrated by the "values in action" and hence open to perception and biases.

Culture is also defined in various contexts. If you're a bank then you have a certain kind of culture, right. Not really. Because if you're the bank's BPO or IT center in India then the culture would be either subtly or radically different. If you're in another country the national culture would also shape it.

So how do you showcase your myriad cultures to the myriad applicants who apply to you or the people you want to hire?

Do share what has worked for you.

The HRExaminer brought out its version 5 of the Online Influencers in Recruiting - this time moving away from Traackr to using HRMarketer's SocialEars to "assess influence"

Surprisingly I am number 6 on the Recruiting list with high scores in the areas of "Social Recruiting" "Recruiting" "Staffing" and "Recruitment Advertising" (strangely, I don't remember having posted/shared anything about Recruitment advertising)

You can see the full list here, and how they scored

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Communities have always existed and people have given them different names for it. In ancient times the community was about a place. Every village was a community. Every tribe a different community.

As civilisation took root, the ideas of a community became more and more complex. We had communities based on regions, nations (all based on place) , communities based on professionas (what we do - which was taken to an extreme in India - with caste)

The interesting thing to note is that one's community becomes one's network - you get access to a certain world view, specialised skills and knowledge - and are better equipped to deal with certain opportunities.

Then came modern education and training and it lowered the barriers to access but not substantially so. If you could afford it you could be anything.

And then came the online world - which lowered the access to resources and therefore skills.

You could have been a Chartered Accountant's child, or a Doctor's but you could become a writer, artist, photographer, programmer.

Now with ubiquitous access to the net and cheap access devices like the Akash tablet we are bound to see the barriers come crashing down even more, with anyone who wants to getting access to the best teachers and resources to learn skills one wants to learn.

The online world also has communities. Communities of people learning something (skill or talent communities), communities of people interested in solving problems (activist communities, support communities) or communities of interests (lifestyle communities, brand communities).

Earlier communities were the source of your identity.

Now, you can choose your identity and join your community.

So will you choose your identity based on who you are or who you want to be?

As 2012 kicks off I am glad to announce that BraveNewTalent is launching a global series of talks - the first of it being in Namma Bengaluru - focused on the Challenges regarding Talent in India.

It will focus on the critical business issues relating to talent and insights around how demographic changes are coming up, new models of education like peer to peer learning, and using digital and social media in the talent space.

If you're a CEO / HR head / Academician interested in these issues, register for it here. Limited seats available :-) 

I recently came across reference to George Anders' book "The Rare Find" first by a video talk my friend Gaurav Mishra shared on Facebook and then coming across the review of the book on HRExaminer and an interview of George by Daniel Pink. I then discovered that George was following me on Twitter too :-)

I decided to put together a list of posts of 2011 that had maximum views

Here they are:

• Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0
• What Recruiting needs to learn from Social Media Marketing
• Are you going for National HRD Network's conference?
• 7 reasons why Google+ won't be enterprise social yet
• How people used Social Media during #mumbaiblasts
• Thoughts on Talent Communities

Your thoughts?

Image by zachstern via Flickr

I get a lot of email from HR students via this blog asking "Should I take HR as a career? My friends/siblings say that only losers go to HR"

Then when they join organizations "I am unable to contribute to this organization. Nobody listens to me. I don't get budgets"

While it is never easy to read such letters - maybe they are the minority. Maybe most HR professionals - the ones who don't write to me - presumably do feel valued at their workplace. Maybe I am coming to conclusion only by listening to the exceptions.

That thought was triggered by this news I came across about UK's HR professionals.

Almost nine in ten (86 per cent) HR professionals believe their work is key to the overall success of their employer, according to a survey of almost 2,200 office workers by recruitment specialists Robert Walters. This is considerably more than the other roles in the survey, risk professionals (69 per cent), bankers (68 per cent), lawyers (65 per cent) and accountants (66 per cent). 

I wonder what would be the percentage if such a survey was conducted in India? Any thoughts?

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My latest post on Social Samosa is for young job seekers who are looking for a career in "social media"

So, you’ve recently graduated from college or you’ve been working in a company for a while. You love hanging out on social media platforms like Facebook, and have even got a Twitter account, and maybe a Google+ account too (you really are a geek, aren’t you?)And then you read this news item in the newspaper. How companies are hiring people to Facebook and Tweet for them.“Damn, that is an easy job. Even I can do that!” you think to yourself. What could be easier? And you’ll be getting paid to do it!Uh-oh.Interacting with friends and updating your status on a regular basis is not the same thing as doing it for a firm (either in-house or in a social media agency) 

Here are the things you have to understand

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I had reviewed Rypple earlier in the year and am excited for them as they are disrupting the HR software market by building a true social HR product.

Still, the news of them being acquired by Salesforce.com is quite unexpected !

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is one of the champions of "The Social Enterprise" buying firms like social media monitoring tool Radian6 and now Rypple. With Rypple Salesforce.com makes its biggest move to becoming something more than just Sales. Using Salesforce's Chatter (which is similar to Yammer) employees can already connect and share information and now with Rypple their clients will do Talent Management socially, for managing goals, giving feedback and socially rewarding people.


The fact that this has happened barely two weeks after SAP acquired SuccessFactors (which itself was acquiring some social firms) and it is clear that cloud and social HR are critical to the large ERP players.

Perhaps because their users are more bothered about HR than they were in 2000?

The other thought that crossed my mind is that Salesforce.com now competes directly with the social business players like Jive (which just had a good IPO) and Lithium. Rypple is available on the Jive App Market. I wonder what happens now? (Update: Constellation analyst Alan Lepofsky shares that they will continue as usual, which is good news)

Exciting times ahead, folks!

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Vikram Shah, President of NetApp India where he shared the focus NetApp India (and worldwide) places on building culture and developing their people (they are in the top 10 Great Places to Work in various countries – including India). I met him on the sidelines of a NetApp training session called T.O.A.S.T. (which stands for Training On All Special Things !) – where all the 800 people who had been recruited over the last year came together and interacted with the company’s worldwide leaders who had flown in from all around the world. 

That was something special – not many companies fly down their top leaders including the worldwide head  to interact with ALL new joinees once a year. Typically such trainings/interactions are restricted to handpicked “high potential” employees. A word about NetApp – they are in the computer storage and data management business, competing against the likes of EMC and Seagate as well as the storage businesses of IBM and HP. NetApp India has been growing exponentially almost doubling this year to 1900 employees from last year’s 1100.

When I asked Vikram how does he hire so many people in such a niche industry, he shared that 45% of their hires come via referrals from existing employees. And they come from allied industries like chips and networking – spurred by their friends’ sharing of the culture at NetApp.

Vikram shared that values are the bedrock of NetApp and employees commit to it every day and at every opportunity. When I asked him to explain what he meant by values, he shared that it meant adding value to employees, customers, partners and society as a whole. He said that ethical behavior is critical and he addresses all new joinees in the first month stressing the fact that they have to behave ethically and legally. In the interview stage if they suspect a great performer hadn’t achieved his success in an ethical manner they would rather not hire the person.

"Employee engagement is a key focus. Be it in terms of contests , soliciting feedback on issues like talent development or initiatives that they would like to either steer themselves or make a recommendation – there are different forums that they can utilize.We have an effective Intranet where employees can brainstorm an idea, discuss an issue, post videos, upload pictures etc. NetApp encourages a healthy dialogue within employees as that promotes a collaborative culture."

How does NetApp ensure that managers and supervisors also focus on values and ethics, I asked Vikram. He shared there are various interventions like Brown Bags, Manager’s Round Table to surface issues.  "To recognize and celebrate our employees' dedication to delivering outstanding results, we have Living Our Values Awards. The Living Our Values Awards are given to NetApp employees or teams around the globe who are inspiring examples of living the NetApp values and who "go beyond" for our constituent groups. Nominations for the awards are submitted by employees for a peer/colleague whom they perceive to be the embodiment of NetApp Values. Employees share the stories of the people they work with who demonstrate immense enthusiasm, passion and commitment in whatever they task they undertake."

On being asked why the focus on culture and values, Vikram shared that it impacts the bottom-line of the business in the long term. It helps to open the doors of clients and the constant feedback that customers give is that NetApp employees are easy to work with. "Our engineers and product managers regularly interact with the customers to understand what business challenges they face and their future needs. Such interaction helps us work towards customer-focused product engineering; customer delight is very important to us."

It all sounded hunky dory so I asked what happens when an employee is struggling due to work, how does NetApp support him/her?

Vikram shared an amazing practice. He said every day, he sends a list of such employees to the Vice-Chairman of the firm who makes a call to all such employees, giving a word of encouragement and support! Vikram shared that it often acted as a huge source of inspiration for people stuck in a tough situation at work. The Vice – Chairman calls up employees who have been “caught doing the right thing” to appreciate their efforts towards making NetApp a Great Place to Work. In India, NetApp understands the importance of family to the employee – hence whenever a new employee joins the company, Vikram sends a a personally signed letter to the spouse (if married) or the parents (if not married). In fact, they once gave annual gifts to all the employees’ spouses saying “Thanks for supporting your spouse for their work at NetApp” I can imagine that impacting the attrition rates at a company :-). Vikram will be sending out personally signed New Year Greetings cards to the families of employees this December

 NetApp in keeping with its value of positively impacting society gives 5 paid days off for employees to do volunteering work via the CSR program called ‘VTO on the GO!’ ( Voluntary Time Off). Leaders and employees come together to offer their time to a community service. "In December we will be having an Executive Chef Day where the leadership team will take over the cafeteria and will be serving lunch to employees. The proceeds from lunch will go towards sponsoring the ILP educational visit and the ‘Habitat for Humanity Magic Build’ for December 2011." shared Vikram

(Disclaimer: I was reached out to by NetApp's communication team. However I was not compensated by cash or kind in any way for this post. The only thing NetApp team did was send me a car to navigate the insane Bangalore traffic to reach the venue :-))

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Today morning a person on twitter posted "hey HR how about you give us some time to use the 3 day trainings you've asked us to attend this month?"

Then I tweeted back "Looks like they are looking to exhaust their training budgets for this year"

Then she replied "Yeah, only wish they had employee learning more important than merely checking in the box"

That's when it suddenly struck me - most organizations are only focused on checking the boxes. That's their strategic priority! It's about doing what my boss expects me of doing and not something that discomforts the organization.

So instead of thinking of increasing the customer and employee experience/ satisfaction managers focus on building their budgets and checking the boxes.

So how can we focus more people in the organization to focus on customers and employees instead of sub standard metrics?