The two-day summit was centered on the theme ‘Managing Talent for Global Competitiveness: Issues and Challenges’.
Elaborating on HR’s role, Ms Sabharwal said, “Earlier it was finance and marketing that was next to CEO’s role but it’s HR now.” She was of view that the role of HR is now more than only tackling personnel and emotional issues: HR must deal with the much bigger issue of managing talent. “Human capital is increasingly becoming the source of value creation for organizations so it is very important to mange the talent.”
Day two of the Summit also saw eminent speakers from leading Indian companies including Vijay Rai, Director (HR), Apollo International; Piyush Dutt, Head (HR), HCL Comnet; Vivek Jain, AVP (HR), Genpact; Mr. Amitava Saha, Head (Talent Acquisition) First Source; Mona Kaura, Senior Manager, Competency Development, Birla Soft; Mark Thompson, Head of Reward Practice; and Rajiv Gupta CEO SkillRoots MaxLearn.
The session began with a panel discussion on Employer Branding where Mr Vijay Rai said, “Employer branding is the relationship that one company creates with its employees. There is the myth that employer branding is the tagline of a company, but it is not. It is about capturing the essence of company in a way that it engages employees. It conveys company’s value proposition…”
According to Mr Piyush Dutt, “Employer branding is a relationship between a company’s culture, system, attitudes and its employees. Positive employer branding can be a way of differentiating one organization from another.”
In the second session of the day, panelists discussed ‘Planning for the Future: Succession Planning’. Panel member Mr Marc Thompson outlined some points necessary to understand succession planning. He said, “For succession planning one must need to understand the business context, people, work and then gap. With this they also need to evaluate and manage the risks associated with succession planning.”
The buzzword ‘Outsourcing in recruitment process’ was another issue that got attention during the panel discussion. While addressing the issue, Mr Amitava Saha said, “There is abundant talent but not enough to match up to the increasing number of jobs which leads to Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). Outsourcing is spreading like a virus in India and our country is a preferred destination for RPO.” On the other hand outlining the future of RPO, Mr Rajiv Gupta predicted that, “India will lead the global RPO industry and an Indian RPO provider will be among the top three global RPOs by 2012.”
Closing the session, IMI Director Dr C S Venkata Ratnam in his concluding message highlighted the need to hire and integrate the talent of different skills. He said, “While hiring talent companies face lots of conflicts and to reduce these conflicts companies need to hire people with different skills. So don’t hire the clones. I think the role of a manager is similar to a conductor of an orchestra, where different kind of talents and instruments integrate with perfect harmony to create melodious music.”
MBAUniverse.com is the media partner of the IMI Summits. Stay tuned to read about the Summit highlights.
