July 2008 - Posts - On The Job

July 2008 - Posts

So the guy who sits next to me sends me an email...

Posted by S. Mitra Kalita at 
Did the headline on today's Careers story describe your life, maybe even just your morning? (Reminder: It asked, "Drowning in email?") It certainly did mine. I am trying harder to delete, to respond, to move into folders -- but somehow I still feel I am always 10 e-mails behind where I need to be. And while I converted to Gmail overjoyed...

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Are you a comfy expat... or a miserable one?

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
Life as an expat in Delhi has its charm, but I realized pretty early on why 30 year-olds still live with their parents here. I cried on the phone once with Airtel, after they shut off my mobile for the fourth time. When I tried to open my first Indian bank account, they asked me for another bank statement to prove where I lived. I called a plumber to...

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Of cities and living

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
May be now we have some explanation to why friends, acquaintances and some colleagues including me are complaining about rising bills more than folks in Mumbai. The only plausible reason that came to my mind was the parwaah nahi attitude of Mumbai professionals. People in Mumbai whine less, I told myself. But that’s not the case it seems. Living in...

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US report: 'guru' and 'disciple' have switched places

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
Can U.S. companies learn something from their Indian technology vendors? According to a report released today by Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa and the Kauffman Foundation , the answer is a 24-case-study-backed yes. In a somewhat expected, and somewhat ironic, twist, Wadhwa finds that, since Indian companies have had to invest so much in training...

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International schools boards gaining ground?

Posted by Aparna Kalra at 
University of Cambridge International Examinations, an international school board that tests 14 to 19-year-olds, said it has added three schools to the over 200 schools in India affiliated to this board. Two of the new schools on its list are in Mumbai, the Sanjivani International School in Navi Mumbai and Billabong High School in Juhu, while a third...

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Company exits - gruesome or humane?

Posted by Poornima Mohandas at 
Only a small fragment of the Indian corporate world practices outplacement. The rest don’t even know of it! The concept is so rare that when I brought it up with a recruiter, she asked me candidly, “What is outplacement? Is it when we place a candidate abroad?” (Outplacement is the service by which a company that retrenches employees helps them find...

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Trust on skills!

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
Shortage of skills is what human resource managers are most rueful about. Last year, at a prestigious HR conference, an HR head of a real estate company was talking about how difficult it was for his team to find masons, carpenters etc let alone find enough civil engineers for a new project that the company has undertaken. Somebody in the audience asked...

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Webinar on interview skills

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
Suddenly, companies have become very selective about who they are hiring even at the entry level. This is not so much because of change in recruitment strategy but largely because firms are going easy on adding people in these tough times. Obviously, companies are spending more time getting the right person on board since they are not in a hurry. Secondly...

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taxpayers and training

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
The Associated Press reported today on the status of a push by United States business groups to boost the number of students that go into science, math and engineering fields. If India has the problem of not enough quality seats for the students that want to go into them, the U.S. faces the inverse scenario of great institutes and not enough students...

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A 9 to 5 job….what a joke?

Posted by Poornima Mohandas at 
This was how a recently held, work-life integration workshop, aimed at HR managers in the technology space, started in Bangalore, “We all know that a 9 to 5 job is not a 9 to 5 job...” I mean what ‘integration’ are we talking about here if you start such a workshop under the pretext that your employees shouldn’t have any time to themselves to lead a...

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IBM locks horns with engineering colleges

Posted by Poornima Mohandas at 
IBM has really cheesed off a number of engineering colleges in India with their latest campus hiring "policies". They gave offer letters to several students in November-December 2007 after a rigorous round of tests, group discussions and interviews. In early June 2008 they went back to the same campuses to subject the selected students to...

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Gender review

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
Sure, there has been a paradigm shift in companies- from viewing diversity as a nice-to-have feature to need-to-have factor . As businesses wake up to the imperative of tapping this huge talent pool, they are increasingly looking at promoting a diverse and inclusive culture at workplace. Still, the proportion of women in the workforce is under representative...

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coffee with hr directors

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
Lectures are out; conversations are in. That's the attitude training firm Par Excellence is trying to capitalize on with its new round of conferences, or conclaves, called HR Cafe. Rather than a series of speeches, presentations, and powerpoint slides, the sessions are meant to get human resources professionals in India talking to each other about...

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