Cultural Fit

 
Most HR professionals today recognize the importance of Cultural Fit. What is Cultural Fit? It becomes useful to first explore the broader concept of fit and the reasons why culture fit is particularly important.
Fit is typically defined in two ways:
• Job fit
• Organization fit.
Job fit refers to the degree to which the candidate’s skills and experience arerelevant to the job and the degree to which the candidate finds the role’s activities and responsibilities satisfying.
Organizational fit refers to the candidate’s compatibility with the organization’s values and mode of operation.
While organization fit covers a range of organizational attributes the most common and frequently cited element centers on the congruence between individual and organizational values. This is referred to as culture fit.
Research over the years has shown that individuals selected on the basis of culture fit will contribute faster, perform better and stay longer. In today’s business scenario knowledge, intellectual capital, individual and organizational qualities represent the competitive value proposition for most companies.
Culture fit cannot be developed in any individual. Provided someone fits into the organization, and demonstrates the ability to grow and develop, their knowledge and skills will change and grow over time. Values and motivations on the other hand are almost impossible to change.
Though most of the HR Managers understand the significance of Culture Fit, but the tight labor market often leads them to make decisions quickly and choose individuals who may not be right. Internally, they cite time pressures; lack of available tools, skills and resources as the reasons for not assessing cultural fit.
Assessing cultural fit is not as difficult as many would think. It requires establishing strong processes and tools that are understood and effectively practiced by all managers.
The first step is to secure the Top Management buying. This starts with demonstrating a sound return on investment.
The next step is to put in place sound and efficient processes that support the assessment of culture fit. This is where the HR function plays a critical role.
Finally, the individual’s rankings are compared with the organization profiles to identify areas of alignment and potential mismatch. This information is often carried forward to first or second interviews.
Recruiting for cultural fit is very important. Organizational culture today is being threatened by hiring processes. What is encouraging though is the recognition that the issue of culture fit is an important one. The HR function needs to take a strategic stance on the same.

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Socially Responsible Recruitment

 
A society is likely to be prosperous when business firms are innovative, competitive, productive, profit and socially responsible. Therefore, the business community is continuously challenged to inculcate all these characteristics.
Today, issues like environmental damage, unsafe working environment, and faulty products leading to customers’ inconvenience are getting attention. Customers are becoming conscious about the social image of the companies from which they buy their goods and services. This requires organizations to operate in an economically, socially and environmentally friendly manner.
With the introduction of the concept that there is something called “common good” or the general welfare of the society, the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged. The basic premise of the concept of CSR is the claim that business is also a social institution.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility can be defined as a concept that requires companies to integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis. Companies have a number of stakeholders like employees, suppliers, customers, creditors, shareholders, key government agencies, etc.
It also highlights that company’s need to answer two aspects of their operations:
• The quality of their management
• The nature and quantity of their impact on society in various areas.
“Corporate Social Responsibility is the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large.”
CSR and Human Resources
Organizations are currently highlighting their focus on safety, health and training and development of their employees.
Telewest, a company of the UK declares, “We invest in the development and training of our people encouraging them to focus their learning around business needs and to pursue appropriate development opportunities. Telewest is committed to ensure that the safety of our customers and staff remains a top priority. It is paramount that safe working practices linked with a safe working environment are maintained at all times to protect the health, safety and welfare of all those affected by our activities.”
Recruitment – Social Implications
According to Edward Flippo recruitment is the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organizations. He views recruitment as a positive activity of hiring because it increases the number of applicants per job opening. This is valid for corporate jobs in India too.
According to the literature on human resources, the aim of an effective recruitment program is to attract the best people for the job and aid the recruiter by making a wide choice available. Thus, at the time of recruitment, companies have to make attempts to attract as many applicants as possible so that it can hire the best people. If the recruitment effort is not effective, there is a possibility that the company may employ persons with less caliber even when persons with more caliber are willing to work in the company at the salary or wage levels that the company is paying. Hence, human resources professionals are suggested to utilize all possible channels to inform potential candidates regarding their requirement for employment.
At the recruitment stage, HR professionals should try to inform the public at large through all possible channels regarding their requirement of employees with specific competence potential. Such an open policy will encourage many candidates to develop their competence to higher levels so that they can get better jobs. When persons in a society develop their competencies to a higher level, the society will benefit due to the increased productivity, even though the concerned persons do not get a job with higher responsibility and higher pay immediately. This is because improvement in competence gets reflected in the present job also.
Today, companies are narrowing the choice to a group of persons based on religion, caste, region or educational institutes.
Hence, it is proposed that HR departments articulate a recruitment policy that aims at informing as large a number of persons as possible about the manpower requirements of the company and a selection process that is fair to all persons with competencies required for a vacancy in a corporate concern in the interest of the society.

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Cisco – Innovative Recruitment Methods

 
In 1995, Cisco, found that despite hiring an average of 1,000 people every three months during the year, the company still had hundreds of openings. The recruitment pressure further increased the following year, when Cisco hired more than 1,000 employees every quarter. When Cisco’s sales soared, the company planned to double its workforce.
The management realized that it had to adopt innovative recruitment practices to bring in the best people. They adopted the first of its kind online recruitment called the ‘Friends program’. Cisco recruiters also began to target passive job seekers. These were the people who were content and successful in their existing jobs.
Background
Cisco was founded in 1984 by a group of computer scientists at Stanford, who designed operating software called IOS (Internet Operating System).
In 1985, the company started a customer support site from where customers could download software. In 1990, Cisco installed a bug report database in its site. The database contained information about potential software problems to help customers and developers.
By 1991, Cisco’s support center was receiving around 3,000 calls a month which increased to 12,000 by 1992. In 1993, Cisco installed an Internet-based system for large multinational corporate customers. In 1994, Cisco launched Cisco Information Online, a public website which offered company and product information. By 1995, it introduced applications for selling products or services on its website. This was done mainly to transfer paper, fax, e-mails and CD-ROM distribution of technical documentations and training materials to the web to save time for employees, customers and trading partners, besides broadening Cisco’s market reach.
In 1996, the company introduced a new Internet initiative, ‘Networked Strategy’ to leverage its enterprise network to foster interactive relationships with prospective customers, partners, suppliers and employees. In early 2000, Cisco introduced the Integrated Commerce Solution (ICS), which provided a dedicated server fully integrated into the customers’ or resellers’ intranet and back-end ERP systems.
In mid-2000, Cisco entered into a distribution agreement with FedEx to manage orders and maintain inventory levels in a cost-effective way. ‘The Cisco City’ in San Jose, emerged as one of the biggest Internet economy industrial parks with around 13,000 employees.
Cisco believed it required the best people in the industry to remain the Leader.
Recruitment
The company followed a policy of hiring ‘top 10-15%’ people in the networking industry. This was a mechanism to remain the industry leader.
Its vision statement was, “Attracting, growing and retaining great talent is critical to sustaining Cisco’s competitive advantage.”
The company began to use newer techniques like the ‘build-the-buzz’ strategy, which was centered on the primary market for its products, i.e., the Internet.
Cisco’s recruiting team identified the candidates whom they felt the company ‘should hire,’ and then figured out the way those potential candidates did their job hunting and designed hiring processes to attract them to the company. The recruiters targeted even passive job seekers–people who were happy and successful in their current jobs.
Cisco changed the way it wanted advertisements in newspapers. It listed specific job openings and featured its Internet address in its ads and invited prospective candidates to apply. This helped in directing all job seekers to its website where it could inexpensively post hundreds of openings and provides information regarding them.
Since most people visited Cisco’s website from their jobs, the company could identify their place of work. The company attracted happily employed people through focus groups. These focus groups targeted senior engineers and marketing professionals in other companies and found out how they spent their free time. These insights helped the recruiters.
The website also offered features through which applicants could fill their resumes online or create one with the help of Cisco’s resume builder.
The focus group’s exercise ensured that a candidate would approach the company if he had been informed by a friend about better opportunities at Cisco. This led to the launch of the friends program in April 1996. Cisco also organized art fairs, beer festivals and certain annual events in which people from Silicon Valley participated. These places proved to be very ‘fruitful hunting venues’ as they attracted young achievers from various successful infotech companies. Cisco recruiters mingled with the crowd, collected business cards from prospective candidates and spoke to them informally about their careers.
More than 1,000 Cisco employees volunteered for the Friends program, attracted by the referral fee, which started at $500 and a lottery ticket for a free trip to Hawaii for each prospect they befriended and who was ultimately hired.
In this program, Cisco employees were matched up with people who approached the company as prospects and who shared similar backgrounds and skills. The Cisco employees then called the prospects to inform them in their own words about life at the company.
Cisco also found that applicants and recruiters were not totally comfortable with, the time-consuming recruiting process. To speed up the process, Cisco hired in house headhunters to identify qualified candidates for managers.
It encouraged internal referrals for recruitment through a program called ‘Amazing People.’ This facilitated the employees to refer their friends’ and acquaintances for positions within Cisco. Employees earned a referral bonus if the company hired the person they referred. After streamlining its recruitment policies in 1996, Cisco conducted an Employee survey to find out how the new recruits felt on their first day at work.
This exercise stemmed from the company’s belief that new employees typically treated the first day as ‘the most important eight hours in the world.’ Cisco launched Fast Start, an employee orientation initiative. It installed software, which tracked the hiring process and alerted the team about the new recruit’s arrival. As a result, every new recruit started with a fully functional workspace and a whole day of training in desktop tools.
Fast Start not only eliminated all problems but it also enabled new recruits to know about ‘life inside the company.’ Every new recruit was assigned a ‘buddy’ who clarified all doubts and answered questions about Cisco. New recruits also had a two-day course called the ‘Cisco Business Essentials,’ which covered company’s history and business units. The managers of the new recruits received an automatically generated e-mail two weeks after their new recruit arrival. It reminded them to review their departmental initiatives and personal goals.
Reaping the Benefits
Cisco believed that its new recruitment philosophy should also be made a part of the overall corporate culture. Cisco’s job site was recording around 500,000 hits per month. The company generated a stream of reports about who visited the site. Cisco’s hiring cycle also came down to 45 days. The recruitment costs were also below the industry average. Referral rates at Cisco were twice the industry norm. The retention rate of the Company had also increased.
Analysts claimed that Cisco’s innovative and aggressive recruiting initiatives were to a large extent responsible for the company’s expansion at 40% per year and recruiting 250 employees every week.
Industry observers feel that other players should also modify their recruitment policies to take advantage, like Cisco did.

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Psychometric Testing

The use of personality tests and aptitude tests to select both executive and staff level employees is quite popular. It is necessary to have reliable and valid tools that are able to discriminate between the most potentially-effective employee and the one who will not fit the job. Business Minds, Criterion Partnership, The Morrisby Organisation, Oxford Psychologists Press, Psytech International, SHL Group are the one of the best companies in Psychometric Testing. Many of the test companies offer ability tests, personality test, aptitude test which assess the specific tasks necessary in particular jobs. In India companies today use psychometrics for hiring junior management and middle management. In India this approach is mostly made use of by companies such as Bharti Airtel, ICICI Bank, i-flex Solutions, Raymonds, Ericsson and Thermax.

Psychometric assessment is an objective and scientific tool that is able to contribute to the validity and successful outcome of the recruitment, selection and development process. The Psychometric tests are developed for specific role. There are tests for MBA aspirations which assess verbal and numerical checking skills, for the clerical jobs there are test which is designed to check the verbal, numerical, office vocabulary, and the ability to plan and organise. The companies also have tests for technical jobs such as technical checking and faultfinding, knowledge of electronics, and the ability to comprehend diagrams. The other global firms in the field of Psychometric Testing are ASE, Development Strategy and Assessment, Knight Chapman Psychological, worldwide, Selby Millsmith, The Test Agency.

In the current recruitment scenario where attracting and retaining the right talent has become the biggest challenge, HR Executives are constantly on the look out for innovative methods to achieve their objectives. Psychometrics is the science of objective assessment of employees. It is one method mostly being employed by many Indian companies today to retain talent.

The key to Telecommuting

Telecommuting, e-commuting, e-work, telework, working at home (WAH), or working from home is a work arrangement in which employees enjoy flexibility in working locations and hours.
Many work from home, while others do that occasionally also referred to as nomad workers or web commuters. This lot utilizes mobile telecommunications technology to work from other locations.

Telework is a broader term, referring to substituting telecommunications for any form of work-related travel, thereby eliminating the distance restrictions of telecommuting. All telecommuters are teleworkers but not all teleworkers are telecommuters. Teleworking has numerous benefits. Some of which include increased productivity, retention and morale. A telework program can lead to problems if not executed correctly.

A formal telework program has a framework in place where organizations have thought of the various benefits and risks. Most companies don’t like taking any risks and prefer to supply the equipment, as it is easier to enforce the policy decisions on corporate equipment. If a teleworker is working three-plus days from a home office or other remote location, then the company should pay for everything. The equipments would include – the laptop, the printer, and the phone line as well.

IT support would also be required to be looked into. Occasional teleworkers can bring their laptop back to the office for IT support, but then they should also be provided with an appropriate level of remote IT support. Employers should put together policy guidelines and rules of practice about what they’re going to cover and not cover. They should also take care of another issue which is updating software and hardware.

Published by: http://hrcases.wordpress.com/ July 28, 2008

Google – Brain Drain

Google Inc. is an American public corporation. It earns revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, web-based e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies.
The company was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Bring while they were students at Stanford University. Its initial public offering made it worth US$23 billion.

Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy, and positive employee relations have been important tenets during Google’s growth, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work.

In recent times, Google has witnessed a loss of high profile departures, including Sheryl Sandburg who moved to Facebook and Doug Merrill who joined EMI. Earlier, executives such as Ethan Beard and Chris Sacca also moved away from the Organization. However, over all Google still continues to suck talent with more than 6,000 employees joining it last year.

The company is now witnessing a drain of some of its entrepreneurial energy that drove its early growth. Some former Google Executives believe that the company has lost two vital ingredients of its culture: the anything-goes approach of a start-up environment and the chance to strike it rich. Thus, the fading of its start-up culture poses threat for Google’s ability to attract and retain the right sort of talent.

Published at http://hrcases.wordpress.com/ on August 5, 2008 by hrcases

Reliance Capital appoints Sanjay Jain as Chief Marketing Officer

Sanjay Jain has been appointed as the Chief Marketing Officer of the Anil Ambani group firm Reliance Capital. Sanjay will work closely with all Reliance Capital companies and lead marketing team in brand building, marketing strategies and corporate communication to create a strong identity and bond with customers.

Jain has 17 years of experience. In his earlier stints, he has worked in diverse sectors and companies like Times Of India Group, Ogilvy and Coca-Cola Co. Sanjay Jain before joining Reliance Capital was associated with Bajaj Allianz where he was responsible for creating a strong visible identity for brands Bajaj Allianz & Allianz.

Reliance Capital, is part of the Reliance – Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group company. It is one of India’s leading and fastest growing private sector financial services companies, and ranks among the top 3 private sector financial services and banking groups, in terms of net worth. Reliance Capital has interests in asset management and mutual funds, life and general insurance, private equity and proprietary investments, stock broking, depository services, distribution of financial products, consumer finance and other activities in financial services.

Religare Appoints Vikas Agnihotri as CEO

Religare Macquarie Wealth Management Limited is a 50:50 joint venture between Religare Wealth Management Services and Macquarie Banking and Financial Services Group.

Religare Macquarie Wealth Management appointed Vikas Agnihotri as its Chief Executive Officer. He will be reporting to the six member Religare Macquarie Wealth Management Limited board which has an equal representation from both Religare and Macquarie

Vivek Agnihotri will oversee the business operations based out of its head office in Mumbai and shall be responsible for taking decision on designing strategies and implementations. He will also review the operations management and ensure that the company is represented with integrity before institutions, analysts and investors.

Vivek Agnihotri joins Religare Macquarie Wealth Management Limited from Deutsche Bank where he was in the capacity of Commercial Director Private and Business clients. He has worked for almost two decades in the financial market of the country. Prior to Deutsche, he was working with Standard Chartered bank in various senior leadership positions such as sales director–consumer banking, head of service consumer, regional head branch banking–west and national manager of channel development & projects.

Apollo Tyres appoints CFO and CRT

Apollo Tyres was started in 1975. Apollo Tyres commissioned its first plant in Perambra, Cochin, Kerala. In 2006 the company acquired Dunlop Tyres International of South Africa. The company now has four manufacturing units in India, two in South Africa and two in Zimbabwe. In early 2008, the company announced plans to open a manufacturing plant in Hungary.

Apollo Tyres has aggressive growth plans. Apollo Tyres to achieve it aggressive target has created two new positions. These two posts were created recently as part of expansion plans in the domestic and global markets. Apollo Tyres has appointed Salil Gupta as the Chief Financial Officer and Peter Becker as Chief of Research & Technology of the company.

Peter Becker based out of Germany who brings with him rich product technology experience would be responsible for establishing an R&D facility there keeping in mind the mobility needs of the European customers.

Salil Gupta brings with him knowledge of managing diverse businesses. Gupta would be overseeing the finance, taxation and accounts functions. Earlier, Mr Salil Gupta served at Dentsu India at a similar position and has also worked with KPMG as Director, Tax and Regulatory Services.

Three Executive Directors promoted as bank heads

Executive Directors of three leading public-sector banks were elevated as heads of state-owned banks on Saturday.

• Union Bank of India’s Executive Director, R S Reddy has been named as CMD of Andhra Bank.
• Central Bank of India’s Executive Director, Albert Tauro has been appointed as the CMD of Vijaya Bank.
• Bank of India’s Executive Director, K R Kamath has been appointed as the Chairman & Managing Director of Allahabad Bank.

Beginning of the Banks in news:

Union Bank of India was inaugurated by Mahatama Gandhi and the Bank commenced its operations in 1920.
Allahabad Bank is the oldest public sector bank in India. It was set up in 1865 by a group of Europeans with a seed capital of Rs 2 lakhs. In 2007, Bank’s business crossed Rs.1,00,000 crores mark.
Bank of India was founded on September 7, 1906 by a group of eminent businessmen from Mumbai. In July 1969 Bank of India was nationalized along with 13 other banks.
Central Bank of India was established in 1911 by Sir Sorabji Pochkhanawala. It was the first Indian commercial bank, which was wholly owned and managed by Indians. Sir Pherozeshah Mehta was the first Chairman of the Bank. In 1969, Central Bank of India was nationalized along with 13 other banks.
Vijaya Bank, was established on 23rd October 1931 by late Shri A.B.Shetty and other enterprising farmers in Mangalore, Karnataka. The objective behind establishment of the Bank was essentially to promote banking habit, thrift and enterpreneurship among the farming community of Dakshina Kannada district in Karnataka State. The bank became a scheduled bank in 1958.
Andhra Bank was founded by Dr.Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya. The bank commenced business on 28th November 1923 with a paid up capital of Rs 1 lakh and an authorised capital of Rs 10 lakh.

Reference: The Hindu, www.hinduonnet.com, Sunday, August 3, 2008