The Employer Brand Proposition - There yet?

For those late to the party, those two words up there might affect you in more ways than you know. Ah, not the 'There yet"....the other two.."Employer Brand". :) You are/need to be super involved - As an employer, as a job seeker & even as  a service provider to either of the two. Seemingly innocent, these two words could easily get lost among any other new age management jargon you could think of. But let me pick them out, set them separately on the table for you, while we learn why/how they're important to you today.

 So what is Employer Branding all about? Is it a new fad?:

Gone are the days when all that was spoken about company descriptions belonged in the 'About Us' section of a job description or just on the company website under 'Vision, Mission, Values, etcetera..' Job/career seekers seek more now. And this does not just refer just to the salaries on offer.

Organizations now understand that just like with other premium investments close to their hearts like expansion, sales & marketing, they also have to 'sell' to prospective employees in this day & age of the enlightened job seeker & the expectant employee. Talent is shrinking with the advent of hordes of entrepreneurs & businesses who hire everyday by dipping into the same pool. And since many of these companies are doing their fair bit in being 'Great Places to Work', sharing with the world - their culture, perks, flexi-work options, work life balance, & other interesting practices to keep their employees happy, others have to follow suit. Big brands, fat paychecks, now aren't the only tick marks on the checklist. I was talking to someone the other day who recently quit a high paying job with a bank to work with a startup who just 'had the thing nailed down to an art', basically shrugging off the shackles, & asking for more than humane conditions to work. Just like putting in efforts to attract+retain customers, companies now have to roll out a red carpet approach to prospective / current employees too. 

What is an Employer Brand?:

In layman terms, it is an employer's resumé for the applicant's review! And for employees already within the system, it is a company's scorecard, continually being assessed & adjudged by employees, just like employees are appraised regularly by their employers.

A walk-through of the indispensable merits employer branding brings to the table is a real eye opener. It shows that it attracts/retains talent with factors above & beyond salaries & HR benefits, & is much deeper than that, having a positive retaining/productive impact over very, many other areas in people strategy at work., & yes, it is a thesis of what the company has on offer as compared to a two line 'About Us' on their website or in a job description, why people choose to work with who they choose to work with.

Here to stay, Not a fad:

When Jack Welch made Six Sigma a fundamental part of G.E's functioning almost 2 decades ago, I'm sure he had the vision to see that it was indispensable  & not just a fashion statement/experiment. With the continuously evolving workforce, emigrating global cultures, unorthodox hiring practices, advent of millennials who look beyond just money - there is a sea change that is gearing towards age old HR/management practices. And no amount of trying to make Noah's ark to preserve the old will do any good. You need to surf the waves! And how. It needs to be made into a way of life, just like crash diets don't work.

No, thanks, we're good:

You think you're able to attract talent easily, & don't need this? Think again. As a company, you put thought, R & D, & whatnot into your products/services right? After sales, you even take the pain to keep customer service on their toes which deals with aggravated customers, gives them resolutions until they are 'happy customers' who will buy again/continue to buy from you. So even if you're able to attract talent, is that talent staying with you? Is your employer brand delivering on its promise? The employer brand proposition also needs ambassadors & executors, right from the CEO to the Manager. Employees join on a great brand promise, but leave due to poor/incapable managers. But you know that.

If I recently parted ways with a brand, having made a purchase that totally failed to deliver on it's promise, & was a bad judgement on my part, it reflects poor/exaggerated/vague/insufficient marketing/advertising on their part & they've lost a customer for life. The same applies to a company/employer brand. Are you sure you don't want to take the opportunity to communicate your brand value & might I add, keep delivering on that promise. Don't promise them Harleys & Gold bars if all you've got is a stocked pantry & a couch. :)

The changing talent acquisition curve:

The talent acquisition curve has been stuck on broken recruiting practices, with the managerial pool only executing the bare minimum laid out calculatedly by top management. But as markets get meaner, workforces (want to be) leaner, recruiting faux pas' a no brainer, hiring with the same mediocre propositions will stop getting you incredible talent.  A consciously maintained, healthy employer brand which is high on delivering on its brand promise, is the most effective talent attraction tool. It will get you the real rock stars who will define your company's success, other than retaining the high performers. In essence, reducing/eliminating the lead time taken in attracting/ getting prospects on board as they need no hand-holding & can self-induct by envisioning/scripting their role in the organization more clearly, the employer brand proposition is the secret sauce companies have been looking for.

Keep tuned in for my next post which will discuss:

1. The employer brand experience - Go big or go home
2. Employer brand offerings V/S expectations.
3. Success Stories

I would love to hear from you, just what exactly your experience of your employer's brand was pre joining & after. This could be talking about wins & fails both. Until then!

Putting the Value-ADD back into Recruiting.

...When King Leonidas of Sparta, asked his sentries to gather an army to march on Xerxes & take on anywhere between 70,000 to 300,000 of his Persian soldiers, there were two armies that arose after all their recruiting efforts.

Army I: 300 (made famous by the movie, eh) of thoroughbred, flawlessly trained, unsullied, war-ripe, strategically sound Spartan sentinels, trained of both - mind & body, warriors of the highest sophistication.

Army II: 10,000-12,000* (exact numbers may vary a bit) pseudo warriors with day jobs like painter, potter, sculptor, baker, chariot maker, etc. were assembled alongside the 300.

Cut to present day. Companies - Old & New, looking to scale, scale, scale, scale. Doing a million campus interviews, newspapers ads, recruitment drives, hiring by the hundreds & thousands, across geographies, mobilizing their modern day armies to get that prized lion's take of the market share.

But. Are they hiring Army I or Army II?

It IS just a number, isn't it?: As recruiting teams get to the task, the writing on the wall boldly reads "Numbers + Deadline". Job descriptions are a formality, interviews - brief, uninterested, heartless, unprepared for (even on part of the interviewer many a times), a thousand distractions & pressure situations later, even when 5 of 10 boxes are checked, sometimes a hire is made. "We will tweak as we go, firing non performers, & hiring for fallen soldiers...", is the official memo. In such cases, does top management peek in every now & then to see what kind of teams are being created? Or do they only find out when wrong/incompetent hires cost them the war?

HR, Business, please kiss & make up: As the war for talent & market share heats up, Business needs to join hands with HR, not just be co-operative BUT collaborative. HR should be seen as an enabler, a glue of sorts that binds the organization together & makes it war ready. Often more than not, Business & HR end up being like 2 wives living in the same house with their one husband. (I swear I'm trying to think of another analogy, but this one just hits the nail on the head.) Business needs to support HR & vice versa, like fingers of the same hand, to enable positive recruiting trends & best practices to put the Value BACK into recruitment. A collaborative effort that combines business acumen & recruiting precision to bring on board the best of talent, & brings up the over all responsibility of conscious hiring.

Weapons of Scaling

RecruitZing: Putting the Zing back into Recruiting. Overhauling old job descriptions, old school/obsolete recruiting methods, irrelevant interview panels, dicey referral policies, faulty bulk hiring, using of newer sourcing methods (sites/portals/recruitment startups/social recruiting),  rewarding fitment, renouncing shoddy hires, training all internal stakeholders & not just the recruiting team in using hiring software/following the brand new policies to a T., etc. It is the single most important function of a company & needs to be seen as that. With a lot of power, comes a lot of responsibility. But that needn't be sad, boring, humdrum & taxing. Get your recruiting teams to make it the awesome, exciting function it really is. An engaged recruiter will get you engaged/high fitment employees, EVEN while recruiting in large numbers.

Employer Branding: A much ignored, taken for granted all important tool, that can not only help you leverage your employer brand value proposition to get the right people, but also get your business - additional customers! Something I was discussing today with a professional acquaintance I'm consulting..& he concurred saying, "Yes, most of our customers are on Linkedin/Facebook/Twitter/New portal to advertise, etc." when I told him..."When you do employer branding, not only do you attract the right talent but also customer eyeballs. Dual benefit." But I digress. Coming back to the point: Decide what your company stands for as an employer brand, what are your values, how happy your employees REALLY are (initiatives like the Best Place to Work, etc. can easily find out if you're faking it & if actually your employees are superbly unhappy & looking to move out!) & what is your Employer Brand USP. Then highlight it, share it, advertise it, so if you're a young, exciting furniture/interiors startup which has a Green heart, & does it's bit for the environment / only deals in eco-friendly/green furniture, you may find yourself employees who relate specifically to you that very way & shall help you begin a lifelong romance, of perfect fitment to job roles, being super engaged in taking your business to new heights! Not actual romance, please. You guys know what I meant. Or maybe yes, if your company doesn't mind inter office romance? See.. you could put that as your employer branding USP. A dating/matrimonial services startup could actually use this one. :)People today look beyond a paycheck while job hunting. They look for culture, values, the impact they can make to your company & the world at large. Make sure yours is visible & attracting the kind of people you want!

No nonsense, no frills, no false advertising: While communicating the employment value adds to prospective applicants, pls ensure you paint a very true picture of your company offerings, goals, vision, growth prospects & culture. Sites like Glassdoor  have made the job market a lot more transparent as disgruntled employees don't waste time in telling the world what's behind the glass facade. You're living in the age of information sharing at the speed of light! So be legit, transparent, don't exaggerate, you will reach where you want to with success stories built on your persevering work! The Best place to work initiative highlights some of the best employers to work for based on those very success stories & these guys have no trouble getting the best talent to work with them. Who wouldn't want to work in a great place, huh?

And as Sun Tzu said, in the Art of War, "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win"; win the recruiting war & then Go to market. :)

Alice in Wanderland

(This post is for people who may want to be adventurous about looking at career choices, this helps with the how to)

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
Cheshire Cat: "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
Alice: "I don't much care where –"
Cheshire Cat: "Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”

.....except for a reserve few who know where they're heading & what their next stop would be, most of us drift with the current when we're on the look out for the next exciting assignment. Go where the wind blows sort of a thing. And that's ok too! If you don't necessarily bother yourself with defining the exact specifics of what you want, you may just go someplace more wonderful, too. The wisdom of the millennials, also known as the Peter Pan generation.

In some of my blog posts from a couple of years ago, I've definitely laid stress on 'knowing' what you apply for, understanding whether or not you fit the job description, doing career scripting to outline 10-20 companies that over the course of your career fit your vision / culture appetite / belonging-ness quotient (yet to be™'ed), risk profile, learning curve, & other parameters that decide where you should work.

But as we enter a brave, new world (resets every 5 years) we're thrown into a Crystal maze of a place where there is no saying which skills of yours would be tested & what new wins / learnings would you take home that day. Which changes quite a few parameters of 'How to choose a job/company/career'.

Some of my personal learnings/favourites outlined below:

Skill Mapping: Not leadership skills, not being a people's person, not 'My handwriting or my family are my strengths', :) by this I mean writing down on a piece of paper meant only for your eyes, things you not only excel at but are passionate about & can cause a serious impact with. You could be a finance guy with skills to get into HR, an architect that comes up with a mean copy for an ad agency (creative writing skills), an engineer who is brilliant at sales (yes, those I've seen many of. Tum log engineering kyun karte ho yaar?) :) etc & so on. With the advent of new age companies & last mile products/services there are millions of niches being created that can leverage both your skills & your passion. But if you don't know they exist or hone them, how would a prospective employer know? :)

Active Networking: I've always believed every employee in a company is an employer brand ambassador out in the market. An engaged employee will further the employer brand promise & invite great talent to join them. These days, it is not uncommon to see professionals from not only HR/Talent Acquisition but all other teams in companies..advertising career options available with the company. So engage with people working in areas that interest you & they may just reach out to you with an interesting opportunity! (although if you're an Arts major & want to get into Rocket Science, might I suggest a professional course before reaching out to a NASA employee) :)

Create your cave of treasures: After putting in the hours in your day job, if you moonlight as a career gypsy looking for the true meaning of a pay check & banking on your passion, you may want to create treasure troves of your passion / bankable skills. If you're a Social media business executive by day & a budding pastry chef by night (shout out to Riya Malik @ The Pink Truck!) pursuing your passion in one way or the other - having your own blog, YouTube channel, or Riya's case: Her own Zomato listing) will tremendously help you get the right attention from the right people. So go blog, photograph, bake, pin, create, do whatever you need to do to highlight your work, today. It takes time for these troves to fill with the right gems.)

Rostering the Randomness: Your career gypsy soul will have more of a chance to strike gold if you decide on a set number of alternate parameters/career choices you wish to pursue, only & only, to the advantage of being able to focus on those. So its great you've decided to give a platform to your passions but please don't let it get crowded & select a few that possibly compliment each other. I know nothing is impossible, but you cannot be a musician, a masseuse, a telemarketer, an extra on a soap opera, a surrogate, an investment banker, & an alternate healer. Only Phoebe Buffay can do that. Now go figure.

To conclude, knowing is great, but not knowing has its own advantages, which are beautifully captured in one of my all time favourite quotes by Gilda Radner (somehow comics always have a grip on the philosophical side of life);


"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”

Start-Up Recruiting - Hired, Wired or Tired?

These are interesting times in India.. with the Government pushing entrepreneurial talent to make it big, making it easier for foreign investors to invest here (ok, ok work in progress), talent from all over the world flocking to our shores for some sun, start ups & spirituality [oh cmon, its India :), can't leave out that 'S'], our brilliant minds churning out business ideas that disrupt, support & inspire us to build world class companies that shine.

And then as these success stories develop, comes this other 'S'... talked about mostly with high passion & tons of excitement, then possibly with some fear & foreboding... identified commonly as 'Scaling'.

As start ups clamber to reach the 'me first' finish line, recruiting falls in the hands of the founders, co-founders & even some well entrenched investors to conduct rounds of hiring that would bring on board some pretty potent core teams, dedicated support staff & basically 'A++' level talent that become the differentiators between getting there first, & getting there sometime later or even not getting there at all.

A slew of recruitment service providers claiming to be 'Start up Hiring Experts' (even if they've never hired for start ups - yes a disturbing trend among many), ineffectual or untrained in house hiring teams, pricey but incompetent retained top level search firms, disconnected campus outreach programs, a thousand job portals with duplicate profiles & some faulty recruitment software later...many start ups still find themselves shortchanged & people-less or worse - having hired the wrong fits.

As daunting as it may seem to be able to find the right talent, that has an entrepreneurial mindset, requisite technical skills & experience, staying power, ability to go the extra/last mile, loyalty (many start ups now have employees who build their own start ups while working with their current employers), an innovation rich approach, adaptability, passion x 1000 for building a game changing product/services company, & the general, overall right attitude to work for a start up, there are no short cuts & quick fixes to start up hiring success if you want to move from there to being a world class company.

Some learnings along the way that I believe are good contenders to be in your recruiting play book:

1> The One directional hiring strategy:

A start-up, being the ever changing/evolving, mercurial, amoeba-esque entity, is doomed to hiring hiccups/tunnel vision issues if it adopts a singular strategy for its hiring. For eg: If they go by a rule book that makes them only hire FMCG guys for their sales teams, or their Design guys need to be from XYZ Design institutes only, only particular B schools for their Marketing/HR/Strategy hiring, etc..they may possibly lose out on competent, engaged, interested talent which may come from other backgrounds & even be a better fit! Don't get me wrong, finding technical / cultural fits & hiring wins from specific schools & institutes is like a good marriage when it happens, but putting blinders on in this case could be severely damaging too. Like from one of my Disney favorites, Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau is said to have wisely said, "Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere."

2> Campus hiring - Are you doing it right?:

To reiterate on my earlier point, perfect campus picks are like a good marriage & efforts must be taken to identify first the company's core values/traits/skill requirements & see which campuses best reflect those (or have academic programs/activities of high relevance to the hiring mandate) & then deep dive into the selection process. What it cannot be, is an unplanned, last minute, ditzy plunge & picking up shoals of those schools of fish (pun intended) before anyone else does. A halo effect here, needs to be avoided on all costs.

3> Interview panels:

Google has had some very innovative hiring techniques. Of one of these, the applicant would be interviewed by a very holistic panel comprising of senior reporting heads, peers as well as subordinates! In India, we may call it unorthodox, but there's definitely something there. Coming to the point, it helps if the interview panels for various positions being hired for, are preplanned & strategized to ensure the most competent/in depth interview being taken. Plus is reduces interview stress/fatigue on the core interviewing team, which in turn ensures consciously selected applicants.

4> Tapping local talent:

Now although great talent can indeed come from anywhere, it helps to start off by tapping local talent for a lot of reasons like their longevity at the company, proximity to the core teams, leveraging their knowledge/ease of access to local businesses/networks, decreased cost from not having to bear cost of their moving, etc & many more. Most importantly the time & energy taken to onboard a lot of talent from other cities & towns across the country can be quite a bit. So if you can help it, think global but act local!

5> Hiring from competition:

Another major faux pas can be trying to hire in droves from competition. Not only is it not ethical, there's a major chance they come with baggage! Of course there many be many more opinions here supporting the other option, that feels easier & more lucrative, but may end up being only messier & harder. Plus unless your & your competitor's products are nearly identical, you'll need a very strong training team to make them see the difference amongst the two! So unless it is for some other reason (like the applicant is a total rock star & fits your company culture & profile perfectly & understands your value proposition & can resonate with it, just don't hire from competition.)
This conversation shall continue in Part II, until then, pls leave your inputs, thoughts, comments, & even challenges you've faced in getting great talent for your start up. Cheers!

Start Up Hiring - Psycho for Metrics?

India has seen an unprecedented spurt in entrepreneurial ventures in the e-commerce / Internet space these last 5 years & an almost doubling rate in the last 2-3 years. A country where wave after wave of generations have been passed down the wisdom of saving, being prudent, thrifty & security conscious, irrespective of their financial well being, who always were seekers of jobs with security, being cautiously risk averse & believers in the 9 to 5 hard working office hours (which often stretched to later hours & overtimes)., to keep those very jobs, have seen a massive sea change & paradigm shift when it comes to changing career choices.

Until almost 7-8 years ago, when I used to hire for my own Recruitment start up, all the perks & special benefits I gave, would still make it challenging for new blood to be eager to want to come work for us. When I see the change today, when people in well settled cushy jobs with even Fortune 100 companies are making a bee line to work for start ups (& trust me, my skeptics part of the reading audience, it ain't always about the money. I've got some of em jobs with no more than a 15% hike & they still took it up. Primal hunter/survivor instinct, eh?), it warms my heart, having been a start up myself almost a decade ago.

So, Times of India, had an article about Start ups going bat shit crazy [my words, not theirs :)] about firing all guns whilst hiring, & about how they're now jumping onto the psychometrics bandwagon with all bells & whistles blaring to ensure they don't subscribe to erroneous hiring that is challenging & time consuming to recover from, all in the short, fast paced timelines, start ups today compete in.


Original article here: Startups Install Hiring Alarms, Filters


My two cents?

Working with start ups, like working anywhere else really, is about fulfilling the end to which you're hired for. In short? Doing your job. (Yes there are a ton of other cool things, which if I mention now, I'd be digressing) I personally am miles away from subscribing to the psychometrics bit for now, not because I am a skeptic (I love Thomas Assessments, personally), but because a test result acing the class wouldn't budge me, if some main, unavoidable parameters aren't considered first.
Now what ARE the main parameters of hiring & pre-hiring that a start up needs to keep in mind? For now, lets break it down to:

Expectations, Reality, the Job description & the Personality test.

Expectations: I must confess, I've seen my fair bit of delusional or even mildly misplaced expectations from both, people applying for jobs & sometimes even of employers having extreme expectations from a hire. A start up is an unexplored Wonderland where an employee is just expected to know he/she will take various potions [also known as business feedback :)] & super size or shrink themselves according to the doors they need to walk through. So I definitely wouldn't tell Alice, she's entering a suburban household when she's actually stepping into a Start up. So before you make a potential hire do 15 psychometric tests, pls ask/tell them, the actual scenario at work & how they'd cope, the answers could be refreshingly honest most times, & in any other case, if you're a seasoned recruiter, you'll know BS when you see it. In a start up environment, if anything, the disillusionment of/with a particular hire doesn't always happen because of skill to job deficit but rather for most times - because of the expectation to reality deficit. [Possibly, because of a well structured hiring checklist I keep, the earlier deficit is anyway not a possibility but, just saying, since in most cases, the disillusionment of the employee/employer happens because Talent Acquisition is incommunicado on the real details.]

Reality: Since there IS no honeymoon period with a start up, & you're rolling up your sleeves & getting to work from the moment you hit the floor (I remember closing my first position on the 2nd day of joining, its that fast.), reality dawns faster & hits you harder if you didn't hear about what you're doing or even not doing in your job interview with a prospective employer.
Secondly, everyone, & I mean everyone, wears many, many hats, if the start up culture is true to its roots & vision. If this reality is too Utopian or too dystopian for you (depending which side of the fence you're on), you''ll either expect to do too much or too little, which in any case is a loss of balance for your future in the company. So unless you're an adaptive chameleon & roll with the punches, this reality may be unsettling for you. And even though your psychometric test spells out loud & clear you're highly adaptive & change embracing, if this hasn't been put into perspective at the hiring stages, you'll possibly be knocking on your bosses door, saying, ''This isn't what I signed up for.''

The job description & the Personality test: When sometimes a job is fairly attractive to you & you have those beer goggles on, the finer nuances of a job description or job profile related anxieties are sometimes conveniently discarded to the wayside, equivalent of the proverbial date looking more attractive when you're a couple of drinks down. This halo effect (not just applicable to applicants only, but also to jobs themselves, don't you agree?) is sometimes rescued by a psychometric assessment done of prospective hires, & its time the cop asks the intoxicated incumbent to walk a straight line to prove their worthiness & clarity. Now these are also the type of situations when an indepth psychometric assessment helps to gauge incidents, behaviours, skills that the interviewee may/may not possess or present to the interviewer which are extremely significant to the job role. So, yes, I am not averse to them, in fact if used well, they can become excellent partners to the recruiting process.

Having said that, in environments as dynamic & ever changing as Start ups, clear communication of expectations & realities needs to form the bedrock of the interviewing process, & skills can continue to be gauged in subsequent processes on how interviewees react to such scenarios with garnered experience & academic backgrounds if/when required.


After all, the magical Wonderland that a start up is, it is also a proven catalyst that turns type A to B with its magic potions..what will just the metrics do? :)

Why Employers Hate Hiring.

if you're an employer who loves hiring or is indifferent toward it at most, but doesn't really hate hiring yet & you've come to my post huffing & puffing, thinking.."I don't hate hiring, what the heck is this article about?" do still stay on to read my full post, you may not necessarily end up hating recruiting but my jokes might end up amusing you & doing the very opposite probably, leaving you a little refreshed & rejuvenated toward the whole hiring process but it is primarily aimed at the junta who hates hiring from Step 1 till joining day formalities. :)

Ok so for the rest of you, who're thinking, ''Why DO I hate Hiring?", "Why do I always approach this whole getting new employees thing with the fear & trepidation one reserves for the movie theater when going for a Horror movie?" Oh why o why can't it be light & breezy & only slightly irritating like watching Hannah Montana film? Ok I haven't watched Hannah Montana, so I won't further dissect it.

So lets go through the Hiring House of Horrors now, shall we? Buckle up.

1> Don't go there, its the House of Horrors!! Lets try dashing cars!!:

So you're having a tough time even deciding if you want to go there. "Why do we need a new employee? We have 6 in that team & they're doing a fabulous job. So what if one of them quit last month, we still have 5!! Haven't you heard of Lean teams?"

The classic Who moved my Employee state of denial. :)

2> Ok FINE. Lets get on that ride. But, I just ate, so...

 Finally you've come around to the constant pestering of the guys from THAT department which always has attrition (God knows why they can't hold on to their people!!) & you've decided you will go sit in that buggy after all, & it will take you for a lovely tour of the HHOH. [Hiring House of Horrors, catch up pls]. Now you may have already allocated 99.99% of the yearly Hiring budget to Marketing & Sales (ahem) & the figures don't add up & new approvals will be needed to even think of bringing a new employee onboard, which brings up your barf sensitivities right to the top. Get new approvals from the BOSS? Ugh..feel sick. 

Denial was SOOO much better. Ugh, Ugh, UGH.

3> Me, Scared?

So you're just entering the tunnel into the HHOH, & well NO ONE keeps the good stuff right at the beginning do they? And by good, I mean scary. So you're feeling a little smug sitting pretty in your little chair, how you could feature as the Hero in any daytime Horror soap & how in your mind you've already closed this position when BAM! Your higher up conveys, you have a hiring budget that would shame the guy applying for it to rethink why he even bothered investing any money into his fancy MBA course. You almost fell out the Buggy, didn't ya? 

My Boss definitely has a Sense of Humour, err Horror.

4> I am the Bruce Willis of Horror Movies.

So, you're the Bruce Willis of horror movies, & you shall go on further in. With a gun in your hand & yes, no one to watch your back. When you realise, "Dang, Am I by myself?!?! I thought there were 4 people in this Buggy!! Whatever man. Bruce Willis doesn't need backup, yo!" Except you're not Bruce Willis & you do need back up, yo. So your so called Talent Acquisition team has ditched your sorry ass even before you got on this mandate. Or was I imagining the team? Ugh.

Ugh times four. One for each one of my team members who ditched me.

5> Foyer ends. Enter the LIVING ROOM. 

Oh you thought you're almost out to the other end? You hadn't even entered! Cmon...that's like HHOH 101. Ok so you made the job descriptions, reached out to some candidates, flipped through job portals, & its the SSDD. [Same shit Different Day]. No one RELEVANT has replied to your job posts & now your inbox is full of irrelevant cvs. Suddenly, the biggest, bloodiest zombie you could ever imagine almost falls on you, giving you an almost cardiac arrest. The Training department has decided to have 3 days of Soft skills training bang in the middle of the month. And you were supposed to close this position before the week ended. As you heartbeat returns to normal (& you suspect it won't be normal for a long time), you start thinking about juggling the laws of time travel & if indeed you could be in two places at the same time...Hmmm..if they think I can close this position in 5 days, miracles CAN happen, no?

Back to the Future, could happen.

6> Carnage time:

So turns out, you DO have to attend the training, all 3 days worth. And just to add salt to your wounds, they make you sit with your team that ditched you in the first place. Heh, you will be friends for these 3 days now, cmon. So the ordeal over, you return to your desk after these 3 days, & instead of seeing cvs you see emails from your Training Head, asking you to collate your team's post training feedback & have it at his/her desk by/before 9 am the next day as he needs to show it to your BOSS. That leaves you with ONE day to source, interview & close the position.

Positive affirmation: Rome WAS built in a day.

7> HHOHH. The extra H=Hangover.

Say it with me, Hiring House of Horrors Hangover. 
Hiring-House-of-Horrors-Hangover. Hiring-House-of-Horrors-Hangover. Hiring-House-of-Horrors-Hangover. Hiring-House-of-Horrors-Hangover. We're on the last leg of the journey now, final day of reckoning. There is a fantastic way out. Sick leave. After all, you DO have a hangover.

New Opening in the HR Department? :P Just kidding. They wouldn't last a day without you.

Happy Hiring!

Neha Asthana
Email: neha.asthana@hr-interface.com

Most Common Reasons for Interview Rejection & How to Avoid Them

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