All Things Talent, the forum for HR professionals powered by iimjobs.com and hirist.com conducted another one of its popular HR events on June 3rd, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Chennai. The event was aimed at providing an interactive experience on ‘Talent Retention’ for HR and Recruitment Professionals. This session provided the audience an opportunity to learn, hear and intermingle with the field’s experts.
Chennai’s session started off with a quick introduction by Prashant Sharma (Marketing at iimjobs.com & hirist.com) who bought in the topic of discussion and also elaborated on the objectives of All Things Talent.
While the event discussed ideas of Talent Retention at the work place, they also focused on few of the best practices, plans and strategies of employee engagements, right hiring and better retaining.
The speakers included:
- Narayanan Ramachandran – Head of Talent Acquisition at DXC Technology
- Subhashree Pradeep – Head of Human Resources (TN, Kerala, Pondicherry & Tada
- Ratheesh Krishnan N.D. – Chef du Adventures at SPI Cinemas Pvt. Ltd. who spoke along with his diverse HR team
- Vasudevan Rajagopalan – Head of Talent Acquisition (India) at Tata Consultancy Services
Narayanan Ramachandran began the session with his presentation, where he discussed multiple hiring methods and gave examples from our everyday lives centered around talent retention. Narayanan also explained the different ways of talent recruitment – what must be said, how it must be said, and why it is important to be said. “It is important to find the right talent and then telling them what and why they need to do for us,” he said.
He went on to describe the various processes around enrolling the right-talented employees and several methods of retaining them. He highlighted the fact that recruiting adds value to the organization.
Narayanan’s talk was followed by Ratheesh Krishnan. Filled with humour and joy, Mr. Ratheesh emphasized on the concept of Human design thinking.
“Hiring somebody can change lives”, he said. “Hiring someone from a certain background and ensuring that they bring dynamism on board is what’s important”, he added. He certainly walks the talk. Ratheesh had brought with him a fairly diverse and inclusive HR team that he works with.
He talked about his own methods of building dynamism that’d work in the long run, like hiring people with different abilities is highly efficient. He also gave multiple every day examples and compared difficult topics with simple instances.
Talking about his organisation SPI Cinemas, Ratheesh talked about how they questioned themselves over “how can the simple act of hiring be transformative for somebody on the other end? We were very early in the market to understand that hiring can change lives”. He went on to discuss the multiple initiatives his organisation executed for retaining talent – including hiring with diversity & inclusion in mind!
Vasudevan Rajagopalan spoke next. He interacted with the audience, posing relevant questions of talent engagement in an organization. “Talent engagement is the single most important raw material in a business”, he said. “And we better learn how identify it and value it”, he added. He also spoke in a light vein about the challenges the IT sector faces on this front – “In the IT Business that we are, we always say everyday our assets walk out of the company, and we all should be praying that they’ll come in, because only then we can do business.
Vasudevan engaged the audience with some of his personal experiences which led him to believe that being passionate about your work is what pays off eventually. “Everything as an experience complements to something else in life in life”, he said. “If you diversify yourself into your HR experience, it pays very very well in terms of how well you become as a professional.”
Vasudevan went on to enlighten the audience on how they could become better talent recruiters and add value to their organisations. “If you start thinking from an outcome perspective, then the process gains much more relevance.”
Subhashree Pradeep was the next speaker. Pleased with the passionate full-house audience, Subhashree Pradeep focused on reaching out to people through social networking and social media in the corporate world. She also spoke about important concepts that she learnt from her personal experiences and shared them with the audience.
She also discussed various challenges that traditional and non-traditional organizations tend to face during recruitments, and provided solutions. “Unless the HR team [in an organisation] is diverse, it will not be able to understand the new employees and also retain the old employees.”
Subhashree felt that if everyone in an organization understood each other’s opinions and worked together, there’d exist a smooth flow in the system. “It is the HR team’s responsibility to make them understand each other,” she added.
The presentations were followed by an interactive panel discussion, where the experts invited and answered the questions of a fairly curious and an enthusiastic audience.
The audience also shared personal experiences, making it an enriched discussion that turned out to be a valuable one to everybody.
The session ended with a luncheon. We thank all the speakers and the amazing audience for making this event a grand success!
