All Things Talent, the forum for HR professionals powered by iimjobs.com and hirist.com, came to the capital recently, when it hosted an HR event on June 23rd 2018 at the Ramada Gurugram Central, Delhi. The event aimed at providing an interactive experience on ‘Talent Retention’ for HR and recruitment professionals. The session was set to provide an opportunity for the audience to learn, hear and mingle with the experts from the field.
Delhi’s session began with a brief introduction by Prashant Sharma (Marketing at iimjobs.com) who began by introducing the topic of discussion to the audience, followed by highlighting the objectives of ‘All Things Talent’.
The event centered around, as is obvious from the name, the ideas of talent retention at the workplace, particularly about methods of the good work practices, plans and strategies, and employee engagement along with concepts of hiring and retaining.
The speakers for the event were :
1. Saswati Sinha – Head Human Resources at Cheil India, spoke about Recruiting Right.
2. Pranay Prakash – Senior Director, Human Resources at Delhivery, spoke on Engagement & Grievance.
3. Rajlakshmi Saikia – Assistant Vice President, Talent Development at Genpact spoke on Talent Development & Growth.
4. Anil Kumar Mishra – Chief Human Resources Officer at Magicbricks discussed Is Attrition sometimes good?
Sinha from Cheil India was the first to take the floor. She began with her presentation titled ‘Recruiting Right’. “We would have read so many articles and books about the topic, and yet, we tend the repeat the same mistakes”, she said whilst sharing mantras of her own to the audience. “Enable, not just support. Onboard, not just hire.”
Saswati expertly held the audience’s attention on a wide range of concepts – including client engagement, usage of the right skills, providing learning opportunities, etc., that would help improve recruitment at the workplace.
She also engaged the audience with multiple real life examples and talked about some of her own personal experiences, adding to the relativity factor for all.
Pranay Prakash spoke next. He talked about how important it is to celebrate even the tiniest of events at the workplace, and emphasised that through appreciation, others would look up to their peer achievements and use them as a motivational factor to learn. “Human brains function like that”, he said.
Pranay highlighted multiple techniques that could be applied at the workplace in order to function, learn and administrate at to the best. These included good performance, delivery, attendance, teamwork, empowerment, communication and much more. “You need to understand your work and your business and transition to something beyond that”, he said.
Rajlakshmi Saikia followed after Pranay, and spoke about the current ‘smartphone’ generation and how we, the learners, have become accustomed to ease of access for so many things. “It is because of the internet that more opportunities have opened up for more people”, she said. And therefore, it changes the expectations of learners when it come to the how, the what and the when of learning. “And this continues to evolve”, she added.
Rajlakshmi’s engaging session focused on the curation of learning, discussing the evolving framework in new age organisations. She also talked about how organizations influence learning and growth in this new age. “The question is not about how a learner learns, but it is about what they learn and whether that is relevant to the business and the individual”, she said.
Rajlakshmi emphasized on the well-understood culture of learning and how it empowers a learner to have the right conversations, access, growth and aspirations. “A lot of this will force us to look at basics of learning/ or the need for it and bring back the importance of a performance/ career discussion as the learner takes ownership of his/her learning. While a certain amount of directed learning continues to be relevant to business, almost 90% of learning can & does actually happen either on-the-job or in informal forums via social/ peer/ open sources”
Anil Kumar Misra took over after Rajlakshmi Saikia. According to Anil, there is no single solution that could to cure all of an organization’s worries, but there are multiple other ways to put them together and form a task force.
“Everyone can contribute into making through some way or the other, by virtue of their experiences, energy, excitement, so on and so forth”, he said. “It isn’t that easy work together as a cohesive work force, the trick is to identify flaws and diagnose them”, he added. He also spoke about the need to co-operate and work together, without conflicts. Continuing to ask the audience if attrition is sometimes good, Anil added “R&R: Resign and Renegotiation does not work at Magicbricks.”
The speakers’ enlightening session were followed by an equally illuminating panel discussion, where the experts discussed and answered the questions of the curious audience in a more informal setting. Questions on tackling leadership exits and engagement initiatives were some of the many that the audience put up to the speakers, to which the speakers had many integral, virtual and business solutions.
The enthusiastic audience also shared some personal experiences about learning of their own, which certainly added to an engaged and enriched discussion between the audience and the speakers being valuable to everybody.
As with all our sessions, we concluded with a luncheon. We thank both the speakers and the audience for making this event a grand success.
