"That is my advice to young mothers who want to pursue a career, do not hesitate to ask for help or hire help even if you have to shell out 50% of your salary. In the end, the choice is between being your complete self as a professional woman or leaving a part of you behind if you quit. There is always a way out if you really want it."
1.Tell us about your background, journey, and upbringing.
I come from a traditional Indian family with deep-rooted family values of hard work, saving for the future, planning ahead, and paying attention to what is important. My father always asked m to focus on important things (studies then) and keep lesser worries aside. He taught me to focus and persevere.
Those are aspects that I still follow and while it sounds extremely basic for new age career professionals – Hard Work, Focus, and Perseverance are three things that have always helped me achieve what I aimed for. The other thing that defines me as an individual and a professional is that I am a working mother of two wonderful fast-growing-up daughters.
I had my kids in the era when maternity leave was 3 months and you were practically expected to return to work full-fledged from the 4th or 5th month onwards. The one thing that helped me immensely to manage motherhood and professional life is to outsource practically everything at home front apart from what is essential for kids' growth and health.
And to date, the only thing I do at home is ensuring that kids get the right nutrition and values from us for a holistic upbringing. Everything else is outsourced.
That is my advice to young mothers who want to pursue a career, do not hesitate to ask for help or hire help even if you have to shell out 50% of your salary. In the end, the choice is between being your complete self as a professional woman or leaving a part of you behind if you quit. There is always a way out if you really want it.
2. How did you narrow down on this profession?
Doing an MBA outside the city was a big deal for my family and neighborhood in Kanpur, most of my parent's acquaintances opposed the decision when I got through SCMHRD in Pune.
As destiny had it, after post-graduation in Pune, my first job was in Chennai, 2nd job back in Pune, and 3rd in Gurgaon. Have traveled across Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Ahmadabad, Pilani, Chandigarh, Kharagpur in India for work and to Israel, New York, London, Scotland, Warrington, Singapore for international assignments or training.
I used to write articles and case studies on human behavior, mindset, and potential in class 12th for Kanpur Times and had an interest in psychology. Human Resources was therefore a very obvious choice of major subject in my MBA, and there was no looking back from then.
3. It seems onboarding, even in 2021 is a long-drawn-out process behind the scenes. How do you envision this changing in the future?
We are moving fast to a digitally enabled era in an industry with Banks and financial services now fully web or mobile app-enabled transactions in their operations inside out.
A similar impact of digitization is seen in Human Resources function particularly in startups – and with covid, this change has accelerated many folds with employees, clients, contractors – literally everyone working from home and enabling services delivered from home.
I had shared a piece on digitally-enabled HR systems that we have leveraged well in ETMONEY in 2020 – a SLACK communication platform for all our internal communication, AMBER Chatbot for employee pulse, Mettl for resume screening, Darwinbox for Performance Management to name a few.
Complete blog here -linkedin
2020 necessitated us to move away from physical onboarding to 100% virtual onboarding – all pre-joining connects and interactions, post joining training sessions, buddy interaction, manager connects, HR induction on policies and processes, IT onboarding was done completely virtually with laptops and other IT hardware assets delivered to the employee’s doorstep.
Over the last 1 year of onboarding employees virtually, it is apparent that people miss the human connection and broad understanding of our culture in remote onboarding. Bonds between colleagues and team members need to be nurtured and it is a natural phenomenon in the office with informal interactions, breaks that colleagues that together, team engagement, and parties.
However, for a new person where there is no bond to start with, a digital setting makes it even harder for any organization to enable that connect and strengthen the bond. We have a robust onboarding plan for every new person who joins our teams and a buddy who enables digital, process, and team induction, however, the significance of the physical workplace cannot be undermined.
We eventually want to go back to work from the office when it is completely safe for our people to join back. And I am eager to meet people we have hired in the last 1 year for chit-chat over a cup of tea in the office cafeteria.
4. What’s one thing you would like to change in how Background Verification is done in India?
Background Verification is an extremely critical process particularly for a Fintech organization like ours as we need to adhere to multiple regulations from SEBI, RBI, IRDA, AMFI, and other financial regulators as a part of our business processes.
Anyone who joins in ETMONEY across Legal, Finance, HR Sales, Ops, Support, Marketing, or Tech/Prod/Design goes through a rigorous background verification that covers education, residential, professional, and civil verification.
Background verification is standard practice for most organizations today, it is an important BAU process. There is certainly a need to make this process more efficient and consistent for the industry as a whole so that less time is invested in background verification and we are more confident of BGV status when we offer candidates.
The way I would want BGV to change is for a central industry body like NASSCOM to conduct background verification of all candidates in the job market centrally and shared it with companies who tie-up with them for this information. This would remove the redundancies and duplications we have today with multiple companies doing end-to-end BGV separately for 1 candidate with various job changes.
Companies, in turn, can choose what aspects of BGV do they want to consider while hiring, e.g. one may not want to necessarily take education background into account while hiring for a particular role, companies get that flexibility when they hire.
5.How do you handle someone who has lied on their resume?
We have had cases where unknowingly the candidate has put incorrect information on the resume and few dates were erroneous. That can always be discussed and rectified. However in the case of intentional fudging of information on resumes, across my experience in multinational and Indian firms, it has always led to employee separation.
People should know and understand that their background has to be truthfully written on the resume, even when they have failed in a job or flunked in a particular class in academics – call it out truthfully.
With startups like ours who value if people have experimented in their lives and have dealt with failures, it is essential to be completely transparent. Lying doesn’t help; it may work in short term in some cases, but certainly, it fails in the long term.
Studies today show that an organization can lose INR 10 lakh (~ $17,000) on average on a wrong hire or for hiring someone with a false degree. The only tried and tested way to prevent frauds is via a thorough background verification process. Download SpringVerify's e-book for a comprehensive guide to Employee Background Verification in India.
6. Several global companies have come out and thrown their support behind not needing a formal education. What is your opinion about this?
As compared to most other countries particularly in Europe and the US, India has a lot more focus and pride attached to formal education. Parents strive to get their kids to complete graduation and then in most cases now, post-graduation before they are able to decide a career for themselves.
I have close friends and batch-mates who have done Engineering followed by MBA and till now they joke about the lack of clarity that students have at that age where it is mostly herd mentality that drives higher education.
I think skill development has to be our key focus as a country today, we have~3 crore graduates coming out of college every year, and a large proportion of them still unable to find jobs. At the same time, there are numerous jobs that go vacant due to a lack of ready talent available.
More than education that is a tick in the box, we need professional skills to be developed in students. Formal education or no is a question that is certainly up for discussion, for now, what I can say is that formal education is unable to meet the talent needs we have in the industry.
7.What advice do you have for aspiring HR professionals?
Two pieces of advice to HR students who are aspiring HR professionals
(1) understand the industry and business context very well in whatever you do. You will be expected to deeply understand the internal context of your company and marry it with external reality to come up with impactful HR strategies. One without the other is incomplete
(2) Have an excellent hold on HR technology – HR tech and Automation are the way forward from here. And then the real value of HR professionals will be strategic HR thinking and solutions that they bring to the table. Everything that is non-strategic would be done by bots.
8.Which is your favorite book and why?
‘The Hard Thing About Hard Thing’ by Ben Horowitz: for all start-up founders and HR professionals should read this book. Ben Horowitz, the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, shares his journey of building a start-up from scratch and some really hard problems that he encountered.
There is no one way to build a company or build culture, it is a journey that each founder and HR professional in the startup has to define for their own context; however, this book offers tons of good advice. Haven’t read a book as practical and brutally honest as this one.
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