Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers, skills and the world of work. The cartoons and sketches are mine.
Is technology the answer to improved hiring?
I have heard of many people who use only their gut to evaluate a candidate. Remember by tossing a coin to make a hiring decision, there is fifty percent chance of the candidate being very successful - statistically speaking. By studying the successful hires made by the C-Suite of a top organization they were horrified to discover that their successful hiring record was far below the coin toss method. How did this happen? They had never tracked the leaders' skills in interviewing. Leaders were using their own heuristics to choose candidates. When the new hire turned out to be a poor performer, they blamed the candidate and never for a minute stopped to think that the decision to hire that person was theirs.
The Confidence Game: Book Review
In India we often refer to a confidence trickster or a con as a "420". The term “420” comes from a reference to Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code is used in India to refer to a confidence trickster. Even in neighboring Myanmar, term 420 persists in popular culture to this date. Psychologist and writer for NewYorker.com, Maria Konnikova has put together a great read on how the cons operate and more importantly, what makes us fall for these cons? Have you ever been tricked? I have. But have you tricked anyone?
6 HR Roles for the Future
Traditionally, organizations have worked based on one rule that every employee of the organization had to follow. Then came the era of five or six sets of rules that applied to five or six types of employment contracts that were offered by an organization. What if each individual employee had their own unique contract based on all the possible variables they could choose from. Today, several startups and digital disruptors have very few employees. For example, Uber has a policy of having only 3 employees in a city who manage the entire operation from partnering with drivers and managing them and serving clients. Xiaomi sold a million handsets in in India with only 75 employees. Will these organizations create new models of performance management and rewards? Will they grow their own talent by hacking new ways of learning at a rapid pace or will they buy out talent on a pay per use model? The possibilities are immense. Here are six roles your organization should think about.
Abhinav Bindra & Kolkata Lit Meet 2016
The one who left the strongest impression on me was Abhinav Bindra who was there to talk about autobiography A Shot at History. Abhinav comes through as “unflappable” almost to the point of being cold and unemotional, but in a very positive way. He seemed to go through this adulation with a somewhat detached view. Look at it like this, he won the gold in the 10 m Air Rifle event at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and became the first Indian to win an individual gold medal at the Olympic Games. It has been eight years since then. Could it be that we don’t win enough medals because we celebrate our victories for too long. It is true that the 6 ounces of gold that Abhinav’s medal had lifted the entire nation’s self-worth. Maybe we should celebrate the moment of victory without lingering on it and then shift our focus towards the next Olympics.
Wazir - Movie Review
The story of Wazir is supposed to have been brewing in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s mind for the past several years. When Chopra met his writer Abhijat Joshi in 1994, he told him about the idea of setting a thriller around two chess players.
Resolutions for 2016
Innovations that get implemented and go viral are the ones that have stories that capture our imagination. Ideas travel faster when they ride on the wings of stories. This year I want to improve my storytelling skills by doing a few things.
How "Program Hiring" helps recruit top talent
In BCG’s list of 50 most innovative companies of 2015, auto companies like Toyota, BMW, Daimler and Tesla compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for the top spots. Technology-enabled innovation cuts across industries. So suddenly tech talent has choice of joining any company they choose to.
Baby talk - is it bad for the baby?
The most common baby talk style is to create new words that are supposedly more comprehensible to the baby. Parents will point to a dog and refer to it as “bow-wow” or call a cat as “meaow”. You could say that they are both referring to the sound of the animal and hence justified. How do you explain referring to food as “num-num”? That is a close approximation of the sound that is made when a toothless infant attempts to eat, a parent had explained to me. Try it out. But does baby talk limit the amount of vocabulary the child picks up? Does that matter?
Wearables in the workplace
By 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employmentWho owns that data? What kind of decisions can the employer make with that data? Can the employee get to opt out of this tracking? The line is getting thinner. Wearables are coming soon to a workplace near you.
5 ways to make Indian B-Schools feature in global rankings
It is always the same story. We have no dearth of B Schools in India. We have more than 150 of them in that list. That list does not include the departments of business education and management in every other university that grants the equivalent of an MBA. Talking of Indian Institutes of Management, we now have 19 of them – the latest one being in a place called Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh. Being located in a remote location makes it harder to find good faculty to come and teach there and even harder for employers to trudge the extra distance to hire one or two students. In any case only 10% of MBAs are really employable.Here are 5 easy to implement ideas that will improve business education in India.
How to find a “jagged” resume
Pursuing an unusual goal is not the sign of having a jagged resume. It is usually an accomplishment that makes you wonder, what motivated the person to take up the challenge. It usually is something that brings out the desire in a person to persist despite setbacks and hardships. The person may finally not even have succeeded. But it is quality of persistence that a jagged resume will show far more effectively than a regular resume.
Brand matters if we wish to go global
I was always told when I was growing up that those who need style do it because they lack substance. Be good at your work and that is good enough. This belief is not true anymore. Both are important. Branding is really about “the truth told well” as a well-known agency used to say.
Do you really need to click that photo?
I don't use my camera to click photos. It is always the phone that is handy. Convenience wins over discretion. I wonder if having the moment accessible on my phone has made me stop working hard at preserving the moment. Do photographers ever enjoy the moment if they are only worried about getting the perfect photo.