Mint Water Cooler
Home
Strategy Muse
Mint Water Cooler
Play Things
OneWayTicket
Pinch Hitter
Mappings
Down South
Lab Rats
A Big Write Off
Incubator

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...

More>>

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...

More>>

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...

More>>

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...

More>>

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...

More>>

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...

More>>

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...

More>>

Truth and beauty

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
One of the early proverbs that I picked up from my father included handsome is that handsome does, cleanliness is next to godliness, god helps those who help themselves and several others. As I tried to learn and grasp their meaning, my impressionable mind almost led me to believe that handsome is that handsome does until my best friend in college preferred...

More>>

learning in the break room?

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
Companies are investing crores of rupees in training programs for their employees—soft skills, hard skills, management skills—all taught either by a formal instructor, or by a software substitute. But how much of it is really useful? According to Narrendiran P, a public relations manager at the training firm Expertus , not that much. Formal training...

More>>

Of surveys and other such stuff

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
I was about to delete the mail as I read the first sentence: information technology companies continue to enjoy the best reputation among corporates in India for the second consecutive year. Don't we all know it? Thanks to numerous surveys revealing the positive perception that technology companies enjoy in India. However, the third annual study...

More>>

Background score

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
Fake resumes have been a bane for human resource managers for a long time now. The enormity of the issue, however, came to the light two years ago when technology companies Wipro Ltd and Infosys Technologies Ltd reportedly fired employees due to discrepancies found in the information provided by them. Since then, companies have been investing time and...

More>>

The hunt for India's next Jaideep Sahni (she might be in Bundelkhand)

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
Calling all showbiz hounds: Think you can be part of the next Salim-Javed duo? The Network 18 group's buzz18.com is giving you a shot. The website just launched a contest searching for Bollywood's next top writer. Building on past contests and pushing its way deeper into India, Buzz 18 is trying to get out of the top cities and find talent hidden...

More>>

difficult co-workers

Posted by Aruna Viswanatha at 
On today's Careers Page, check out tips on surviving your first day of work , and dealing with difficult co-workers. In India's new corporate offices, workers are still dealing with the same old problems. Cliques, gossip, backstabbing...sounds a bit like high school all over again? An Infogain employee describes an instance when a colleague...

More>>

Camping in Web 2.0 world

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
Finally, we have a desi version of the BarCamp (for the uninitiated, BarCamp is a global network of open, participatory workshops/events on topics such as early-stage web applications and open source technologies. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto three years ago and has since then been organized in several cities around the globe). The Indian...

More>>

White Elephant or fine race horse?

Posted by Rajeshwari Sharma at 
Few subjects have perhaps elicited the kind of attention executive compensation has in the last several years. There has been intense debate on why a chief executive has to be lured with nine figure pay packets even when the organization might not be performing so well. The criticism seems understandable given that average pay packets of CEOs in the...

More>>

More Posts Next page »