On board the HRM Committee of Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry

I am extremely thrilled and honoured to be a member of the HRM Committee hosted by Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 

I'm thoroughly excited to work towards contributing innovative, cutting edge HR practices to enable organisations to enhance their success . Lots of learning opportunties on the way. Thanks to #BCCI

The Great Attrition is making hiring harder. Are you searching the right talent pools?

Recruitment has taken on a slightly different dimension over the past year or so. While it was never easy, it seemed as if we knew who to focus our hiring efforts on.

Here's a detailed article on the changing characteristics of the #talentpool of #candidates given the post pandemic environment, and what organizations could possibly do to hire people.

From the article: " if the economic picture worsens, many companies are likely to find that job openings will persist in crucial positions, a problem they can’t fix by simply reshuffling their current workforces."

Read the rest of the article here.

#hiringstrategy #employeevalueproposition #selectiondiscussion #culturematters #organizationculture #strengthsdecoder #strengthscoaching #performancecoach #performancecoaching #talentacquisition #talentattraction #employeeengagement

Action from The Selection Discussion - Finding the Right Fit

Just completed a customized two-day workshop on designing behavioural and competency behavioural questions for a logistics organization to sharpen and focus their hiring practice.  This is part of an overall change management initiative. The participants included the management team and a few direct reports in addition to HR.

They all participated fully by asking questions, sharing their viewpoints and taking part in the discussions that were designed.  Some topics covered were:

• Making the interview a positive experience
• Articulating the behaviours that indicate the culture
• Designing Competency based and Behavioural Event Interview Questions
• Improving the quality of hiring decisions

Here are some images from the action.

Plenary discussion of non negotiable behaviours that contravene organization culture norms.

Learnings from 2 days

I'm extremely grateful to the organization for the opportunity.  The workshop went well because of the active participation of the audience.

Please do contact me on +919820155778 or ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com if you want to have a conversation about such workshops for your organization.

Answering - Where do you see yourself in Five Years?

How to respond to the interview question - Where do you see yourself in Five Years?

It has been one of the most regularly asked interview questions for a very long time (and now outdated) ,so now it's quite ineffective for an interviewer to expect to make an informed hiring choice with this question.

Why? You might ask? 

You might even say - it shows me how the candidate plans for his future. In a linear world, this could be true. However, this is a valid but somewhat insufficient thought.  Terry Pratchett (one of my favourite authors), said it better than I could:

A similar thought was echoed by the creators of the Scrum Methodology.  You can find it in the Scrum Fieldbook.

What if the candidate asks you what your organization is doing to ensure that it will be around for the next five years?

Of course you can plan the future, you might say.

Reality says - sure, give it your best shot.  Show me the crystal ball you are using, and I will show you what happens when the time comes.

The point is - The world we live in is in constant flux, at a high speed, pulling and tempting us in multiple directions at once.  Changes in technology are happening so fast that yesterday's knowledge gets redundant faster.  What's worse, some of the things we once considered true and sacrosanct are now found to be inaccurate.

Another thing - we tend to base our plans on our past experiences.  While that's a fairly normal practice, that's extremely effective in a linear world, we don't realize that those past experiences occurred due to a multitude of factors, including situational factors beyond our control, our own stage of growth and maturity, and our reactions at that time.  This means that for our plans to be successful, we need to have the same set of factors occurring in the same degree, and we have to take those same steps.  This likelihood is really low.

Now, let's examine this question from the perspective of:

A Candidate, what could be a suitable response to this question?  Here's my suggestion - 

"I'm building my strengths and skills by undertaking diverse experiences and learning from them.  I supplement this with networking for knowledge, and working with a mentor.

I see myself applying my strengths in my future role of influencing or managing people to deliver great results in my chosen field of expertise for the organization, either mine or my employer's, leveraging suitable opportunities that come my way."

Please feel free modify the above so that it suits you, your profile  AND sounds like you, and not someone else.

I cover this and other aspects in my Interview Coaching sessions with both junior and senior clients.

An interviewer - my suggestion would be to modify the question as follows: 

"As you move ahead in your career, what do you see yourself doing five years from now?"

This could be followed up by - "What have you been doing so far to make this a reality?"

This helps move the interview into a detailed conversation where the candidate gets to share deeper information about themselves and you get more clarity on the candidate's potential capability.

I cover this and other aspects of Behavioural Event Interviewing in my specially designed workshop for organizations,  "The Selection Discussion".

Want support to know more? Write to me on +919820155778 or call +919820155778 to schedule a discussion.

Participant Feedback - The Selection Discussion (A Behavioural Event Interviewing Workshop)

Thrilled to share participant feedback and learning for one of my key workshops, "The Selection Discussion", which was conducted for an IT organization.

This program was conducted on Zoom for about 35 very enthusiastic and curious participants from HR Recruiters to Function Heads, who made the workshop more interesting by the participation and interesting questions. My workshop designs always focus on learning and application, not just learning or smiley sheets, and this was no exception. So, since recruitment is a sales role, we spent most of Day one identifying and articulating the selling points of the organization, and how to showcase them to prospective candidates. Day Two was spent in designing BEI questions, assessing responses, role plays,  

I used Zoom breakout rooms, Jamboard, and Mentimeter to increase the participant's engagement, and they really worked well, as you will see from the participants learning.

Please reach out to me on +919820155778 or ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com if you want to run a similar workshop for your organization.

What the research says about cultural alignment in hiring

We've heard the phrase "checking the cultural fit of a candidate" when hiring a candidate.  This is where all interviewers including HR professionals make errors in hiring at least once in their careers.

This fascinating article covers this in detail.

From the article: Research suggests it’s a lot easier to recruit and select for cultural alignment rather than socializing employees to match the values. That’s why including cultural alignment measurements in the hiring process can produce significant benefits.

Read the full article here

Employer Branding and the war for Talent.

A super read on the escalating need for #employerbranding in today's ever increasing #warfortalent

For me, #employerbrand is something that I spend time on during my #behaviouralinterviewing Workshop #selectiondiscussion

I cannot emphasize it's importance for short-term and long-term #hiring needs.

Click here to read the article.

Write to me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com or call me on +919820155778 to know how to do this for your organization.

#hiringstrategy #recruitment #strengthsdecoder

Finding Diamonds among Gems - The Career Gap Candidate

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels 

Career Breaks  or Career Gaps are more common than ever before.  The reasons will differ for each candidate, but it is essential that we don't take the easy way out and reject them on paper just because we recruiters and HR folk have a ton of resumes to go through.  That's an injustice to the candidate and your organization since you could be throwing away a diamond along with other gems.

This is what I did when I was in the corporate world:

1. Reviewed and shortlisted resumes based on the skill-job match alone.
2. Did not reject any candidate who was returning from a career break or gap of any sort if there was a match between the skill-job match, and call them for an interview.
3. Kept 2 or 3 questions to understand the nature and reasons for the gap in career during the interview.
4. Conducted the interview as fairly and as objectively as possible.
5. Rejected the candidate if I found them unsuitable for any role-related reason other than having a career gap.

Just like cutting a diamond from ore takes care and time, so too does this. Then why invest this time?

My reasoning:

• Such candidates can join faster since they don't have a notice period to serve.
• They are more willing to negotiate on compensation because they want to get back to work (doesn't mean we shortchange them on the CTC because they will find out sooner or later and then become disengaged).

For those recruiters / managers that think of this as time being wasted: 

• Remember that interviewing candidates is a key part of your role.
• You are anyway going to interview candidates, so it might as well be someone whose skills match the job, irrespective if there is a gap in service or not.

If shortlisted, explain this reasoning to the next interviewer, especially the skills - job match.

As you can see, any recruiter can do these things - it requires a little courage to not take the easy way out. 

The Selection Discussion

Hiring is the one HR activity that is on every organizations' radar.  However, few organizations invest in training their managers in conducting interviews.  Fewer still have clearly defined and articulated their Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition.

This workshop can help you focus only conducting Behavioural Event Interviews, or, we can co-create a recruitment strategy and solution over a period of 3-4 months in a specially customized intervention for you, followed by this workshop.

Interview order Does Matter

 Fascinating read on the idea that the #candidates place in the #interview lineup affects their #selection.

During my corporate stint, one manager pointed out the difficulty in remembering who was interviewed and suggested that we ask for a photograph that is attached to the resume to help them remember the candidate better.  It did help. 

Also it is hard to say that whoever gets selected would turn out to be the best or worst, due to the absence of functional crystal balls.

Read the article here

7 Must-haves to create Effective Recruitment Ads

With organizations closing and/or laying of staff over the past few years, there are many more candidates looking for jobs than before.  This means that there are more applicants for every job, including an increasing percentage of those who are "trying their luck" in desperation.  There is a constant refrain from the organization side about how there is a dearth of quality manpower, and the huge amount of time spent in shortlisting candidates who are not suitable.  Most times, the issue with these problems of quality manpower and unsuitable candidates has to do with the details and clarity of recruitment advertisement.

We know that the purpose of a recruitment advertisement is to convey the critical information of a job vacancy, so that relevant candidates may apply.

However, I've noticed that many hiring teams of organizations skip a few key items or ignore them altogether.  This doesn't show a professional corporate image to the world. This creates more problems for the organization than the applicant.

For the applicant - Its a waste of time to realize that the job they applied for, has a couple of unmentioned items that were non negotiable to them.  It could be location of the job, compensation, responsibilities or whatever their situation is at the time.

For the organization - 

1. You end up annoying quality and average candidates with an incomplete recruitment advertisement when they find out important criteria missing, simply because they're unsure if they should apply or not.
2. You wasted your time conversing with candidates who wrongly applied, who likely wouldn't have applied if you were explicit in your recruitment advertisement.
3. You hurt your organization's employment brand when you put out unprofessional recruitment advertisements. This makes your future hiring more difficult, because you will become known as "they don't know clearly what they want in a candidate".
4. When you spend so much time scheduling and interviewing irrelevant job applications to finally select someone, there are chances that you may rush through the interview process and make a wrong hire while trying to meet a hiring deadline.  
5. Because of the recency effect, a mediocre candidate may look better than he/she actually is and would again lead to a wrong hire.

In case you were wondering what a candidate looks for in a recruitment ad, here are the results of a LinkedIn Poll that I set up last week:

The results are quite interesting, given that one person gets only one vote. Here's my thoughts about this poll results:

• The highest votes went to Job Responsibilities, which tells us that candidates are totally keen to know what is the kind of work they will be required to do / be responsible for.  As recruiters, clarity is of utmost importance here.
• Conversely, the lowest votes went to Years of Experience.  I find this interesting since I've experienced quite a few occasions where candidates are applying for roles with more responsibilities, without having requisite experience.  I've noticed some job ads which mention responsibilities that are not commensurate with years or experience or even don't mention the years of experience.  The thought behind this action from a hiring perspective is that the organization won't have to pay for the experience of a senior person and still get the job done with some manageable (they hope) errors.
• Designation and location were equally important - almost.  The designation in particular, can be very appealing and attractive to some candidates.

I deliberately left out 'Compensation' because it could skew the voting, and 'Educational Qualifications' because people tend to end up in careers that aren't always related to their studies.  Of course, that doesn't mean these items can be left out in the recruitment advertisement. These items actually provide strong clarity for candidates.

So, to improve the quality of applicants, here are some of the 'Must - have' ingredients of a recruitment advertisement in no particular order of importance:

• Location - a candidate does need to decide if he/she is willing to travel to your office daily. With remote work becoming more prevalent, this may not be required.  A work from home mention is necessary.  However the candidate will need to know where his head / regional / local office is situated.
• Industry - Every industry has it's nuances in the way they execute their tasks.  If you are open to hiring from any industry, then please ensure that you check this in the interview thoroughly and provide the selected candidate sufficient time to perform after being hired. This also helps you develop a diverse workforce.
• Designation - Many candidates equate their professional and personal self-image to a designation.  So clarity in this will ensure that relevant candidates apply.
• Nature of qualifications required - I've seen really articulate ads mention that they want graduates from specific B-schools only or a full-time degree.  It is annoying to be told after you applied, that, while a person holding any degree may apply, it should be full-time course only.
• Role and responsibilities - Yes everything cannot be articulated in the advertisement, cos of the thinking - "what if it has to be changed  before the candidate is selected and joins".  That is no reason to be vague about these things.  The main critical responsibilities that a company will evaluate the candidate on in their performance assessment and bonus payout should be mentioned clearly.  If there is a ranking preference of importance in the number of responsibilities, please mention that too. If the role requires an individual contributor, please specify that so that those candidates with visions of managing teams don't apply.  I have noticed that there are organizations who really spend time to articulate these things, and I am sure they get more relevant applicants.
• Years of experience - Too many times, the years of experience mentioned is less than what the responsibilities entail.  Similarly, if there is a need of more experience in a specific responsibility, please mention that as well. When job description expectations are unreasonably high, you set up the selected candidate for failure and waste company resources in hiring and training such a candidate. This ends up damaging the employment brand to such a level that only the very desperate apply and end up either giving poor or average performance or just leaving after a few months.
• Compensation - Please do provide a range.  This ensures that candidates above the compensation or looking for higher salary packages think twice before applying and wasting yours and everyone else's time.

Bottom line - If you can be specific in your recruitment advertisement, it improves the quality of your candidate applications and ultimately the quality of hired candidates.  It positively reinforces your brand image so that your future hiring is that much easier. Of course, employer brand is also dependent on how employees are treated in the organization after they are hired, but that's for another article.

Want to know more? Call me on +919820155778 or write to me at ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com