“Technology is our own brain child, why should we be shy about it. That’s why I always say that technology is never a challenge, but acceptability that this technology can make wonders is the challenge. I am sure people have started experiencing and understanding it”
A certified behavioural interviewer and job evaluator, Swapnakant Samal, has more than 18 years’ of extensive experience in designing and implementing HR policies and people practices across various industries. Currently as Head - Policy, Processes and Digitisation of Talent Acquisition Group (TAG) CoE, Reliance Industries Ltd, Swapnakant extensively works on recruiting system digitisation, recruiting process efficiency and policy development. In his free time, he loves to mentor young and bright management students. In an exclusive interview with Corporate Citizen, he talks about his career journey, HR practices and the future of human resource management
I started my journey with sales and marketing in Heinz India. Coming out of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, I joined Heinz as a management trainee. My stint in FMCG sales and marketing has shaped my today. While in Sales, I felt HR will be a more strategic job with better access to leadership. Thankfully, I found my feet in corporate HR. Since then, it’s been a long journey—I have worked over six organisations. Later, I moved to IT/ITES before trying a startup venture. I have also had an experimental move from corporate sector to a mid-sized law firm-a sector, which had very nascent HR practice. After establishing and growing the firm, I moved back to corporate sector, in Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL). Throughout, I have been involved in business partnering role of HR. Work at RIL is a new experience for me as I get to work in the digital side of HR.
The Talent Acquisition CoE is responsible for building internal and external hiring capability and ensures RIL policies and processes are fit for purpose; aligned with the changing requirements of the business; and communicated to the relevant stakeholders and audiences throughout the organisation. Large conglomerates like Reliance has to have very strong policies to attract and retain its people. This role involves policy development, managing processes and undertake change management activities as required to implement the vision for recruitment. In this role, I lead large-scale digitisation projects like implementing applicant tracking system, integrating it with social hiring solutions, digitising onboarding and continuously monitoring the system to make it robust and error free.
For example, today, people are socially connected and are networking with people who have similar profiles. During sourcing, a recruiter needs to view who this person is connected to professionally, this gives him/ her the lead to similar profiles. It all happens through your mobile device—you post a job requirement through your mobile device, you get the resumes through your mobile device and you immediately see the connections of that individual with his network, or with someone who is already in your organisation—this way you are highly empowered with lot more information. That information when it is put to use, it becomes the basis of your digital HR empowerment. Given the extensiveness of mobile technology coupled with ability to find and select talent, it’s no surprise that HR at many organisations is becoming increasingly digitised and empowered.
Let me give an example of how the organisation’s policy and feedback mechanism has changed. Today, employees are increasingly expecting anytime-anywhere easy access to organisation’s policies’-what was once available in hard book formats and has now moved to being digitally available in your mobilephone, along with ways to give feedback. When a new employee joins, there is a settling-in period. In large organisations a mobile app like ‘Mobile Buddy’ helps the new joiner from day one, on vast range of issues like finding people with common interest, ways to be successful in the organisation to more informal things like places for lunch, hobby clubs, and car pool etc. This is engaging-a great candidate experience in terms of the way you welcome them into the organisation and the way you make them comfortable on their first day. This creates a kind of stickiness with the employee and that is how we are creating the employee empowerment side.
Organisations are taking a design thinking approach in integrating employee needs and user experience. Mobile technology, information analytics and flexible processes are maximising the digital experience.
Interestingly, the most common job in the US market is of a goods transporter or a truck driver. But, with driverless technology coming big way, have you imagined what will happen to this profession in 10-15 years from now. It will become irrelevant. The bottom-line is, 65 per cent of jobs that you will be doing to earn your bread-and-butter in near future, are not existing today. If you don’t know what the future will look like, how you will acquire the right skills, which will make you ready for future-isn’t it a contradiction.
Digital disruption is here to stay, if you have to make a living, you have to make yourself relevant in digital world. Fortunately, a great deal of research says there are four skills which are timeless, to help us succeed in the ever changing world. They are critical thinking, which is about solution thinking—how to give a solution. Then comes design thinking—do you have that innovativeness to create something futuristic. Then comes effective communication and networking with people.
Digitisation is not technology, digitisation is not automation—digitisation starts with being able to imagine the superlative user experience.
A candidate, who comes in for an interview to a large campus, will have tremendous difficulty in locating which building he/she has to get into. So, how can digitisation help here? If you apply design thinking perspective, the solution lies in committing to good candidate experience. It starts with ease of commuting to interview location, hassle free entry into office and overall timely and smooth interview. Moreover, the candidate feels great to share feedback of his/her experience exactly the way it is done after a ride in Uber or Ola. To achieve this, the backend needs a lot of integration of multiple stakeholders, who commit to work towards overall candidate experience. They streamline respective processes in such a way that candidate uses just a handset to complete all interview related formalities.
The hotel and hospitality industry, they never would have imagined in their life that there would be a situation like Airbnb, where people will simply pack their bags and start staying in rented rooms without bothering about five star facilities available in the hotels. Things change very rapidly; it is almost futile to estimate what will be the kind of skill requirement in future. But, there are certain traits of employees, which are very important to acquire, to succeed in future.
So, what are the four-five things, which will help future employees to succeed? In my opinion the ability to think, ability to interact with lots of people, ability to critically evaluate the difficulties and solution designing in imaginative way are going to be key to success in future. Technology is our own brain child, why should we be shy about it. That’s why I always say that technology is never a challenge, but acceptability that this technology can make wonders is the challenge. I am sure people have started experiencing and understanding it.
“The HR job in the future, will be more refined, enjoyable and better. We are talking of AI and Robotics, but we need people to create it. HR leaders will be the facilitators to help scout such talent, build a culture, which will nurture the talent and can optimise relationship among the employees. For such skills, we may need new work model contracts"
A lot of things have changed-designations have become meaningless now. Carrying a decorative designation without being able to contribute is worthless. Leaders of future will be more hands on. Teams are becoming smaller with cross-functional expert. The concept of experience is getting challenged by ability to imagine and deliver. Workforce is becoming demanding and agile. I am seeing the young employees who possess a lot of energy, agility and superior knowledge of technology. They want to work on meaningful things to bring in changes. The hierarchy is dead-the work is happening in highly networked project clusters with multidiscipline teams and feedback is becoming more straight forward and acceptable.
Today if organisations are not transparent, people will reject the culture and express it in social media. Can organisations face it—you cannot say that people write because they were not happy. People write because they want to express it, and the organisation did not give them a chance to express it. People want the culture to change. Social, mobile and networked workforce wants these changes to happen fast.
Yes. Big data is all about information and insights. HR will become more strategic by the nature of its delivery by using these insights to attract, retain and nurture talent in the most appropriate way. To attract best talent, we need to use the business managers who are true representative of HR, who have lot of insights. In collaboration with HR these insights can be sorted, filtered and used to narrow down to manage talent.
The skills can be classified in pyramid structure with three parts. The bottom of the pyramid is called commoditised skills, the centre of the pyramid is called marketable skills, and the top of the pyramid is called niche skills. If you don’t have commoditised skills, you are as good as nothing and if you have lots of commoditised skills you are still as good as nothing. Marketable skills give you an upper hand but employees need to continuously reskill them to keep that strategic advantage.
Niche skill are used in specific jobs, which would demand people on a specific term basis, they will come work, turnaround the project and move on. Its demand-supply gap, which is shaping fix-term employment. I have recently read that in armed forces, they need scientists to code language for the drones. Now there would be hardly 200 people in the country, who have that skill. So, they are on high demand- till that skill moves from the top niche skill to the marketable skill you will see term based employment.
The HR job in the future, will be more refined, enjoyable and better. We are talking of AI and Robotics, but we need people to create it. HR leaders will be the facilitators to help scout such talent, build a culture, which will nurture the talent and can optimise relationship among the employees. For such skills, we may need new work model contracts. Who do you think will do these? These will be future HR expectations.
There are many don’ts in life and I suggest you focus on the dos. You should have lot of energy, which is not about how much energy you have, but the energy of how you can help others. The most important thing is being human, because being correct always is a gift; however, being kind is a choice that you make. These are the things you have to have in human resources management, so that organisation can nurture employees. Otherwise, it will be like a machine and end of the day human beings may be users of digital technology, but in true sense they are analogue.
By Rajesh Rao
