Back in the late 90s, I was living in New York and emails just started becoming popular with consumers. I hung out with a lot of folks who thought cell phones would give us brain cancer and that emails were just a fad. They also feared that there's too much technology and people would be loosing all their privacy online. This was the beginning of the dot com boom. People feared the digital world because everything is recorded in the world's servers. Some chose to completely go off the grid, and some totally embraced technology -- pushing forward the concept of harnessing its power for the betterment of humanity.

Fast forward to the 21st century, when social networks like Friendster, and MySpace were getting popular. I was working for one of the first Indian dot coms that used social media effectively for marketing. At that time a lot of business leaders were saying that social media was just for teens and it won't effect the way we do business. B2B social media marketing was unheard of. By the end of 2010, marketing experts were predicting ways to measure the ROI on social media. It wasn't a question of "should we use social media for B2B any more", it was a question of "how can we most effectively use social media in business?"

Lately, I've been conversing with a lot of HR pros and managers, talking about HR automation, and how HR is perceived as just a processing department. A lot of them agreed that HR pros are too focused on shuffling paper and handling day-to-day process requests that they forget to look at the big picture. Some folks had told me that HR pros are not always for HR automation that they fear technology because they think that it's going to replace their jobs.

Another thing is people fear change. As a change agent myself, I feel bad walking into an office or taking over a function even when it's assigned to me by my superiors because I know that I'm going to cause discomfort. If a process can be done more efficiently, I do change things, cutting out whole teams and departments as necessary. It's the sacrifice you need to make to be more efficient, to produced a better product in a faster time frame. I've lost friends in the process, too.

Change brings uncertainty. Humans and most animals do not like change, it pushes them out of their comfort zone. This is why people had resisted technology or things that they do not understand. Naturally, all of us fear that we'd loose our jobs because we're going to be replaced by robots or software. However, there's a lot of things that software can still not do i.e. arrive at proper conclusions after analyzing numbers. No HR software has artificial intelligence embedded in it. They can help you decide your successors, plan your company's succession and help you arrive at conclusions or make decisions.

HR software or HR automation makes life a lot easier and convenient to employees, managers, and HR professionals. Case in point, check out our yesterday's release. If you look at it, there's a lot of things that we're automating and we will continue to automate as much as possible. When a client signs up with us, we configure their HR workflows, so that HR spends the least amount of time handling process requests.

Now it's up to you to decide what you'd do with the time that you just saved. What will you do when you don't have to check and double check attendance figures? Or look around for spread sheets because there's so many to keep a track of? HR software gives you the time to get up from that chair and check in with your team, your employees, engage with them at a personal level -- even if it's just to go and congratulate them or just to say "hi". Rediscover people again and have meaningful engagements.

Photo by: dpwolf

The SGEnterpreneurs.com reported that CareerBuilder just entered Southeast Asia market by acquiring, JobsCentral. JobsCentral has a strong presence in Singapore among college students, and a growing presence in Malaysia. The site does more than just have job postings, there’s a growing community with lots of tools, tips and blog posts for job seekers.

What does this mean for India? I don’t think sites like Naukri, or even the smaller players like Shine.com has anything to worry yet. They both have a strong brand presence in India. Shine is backed by Hindustan Times. Plus, CareerBuilder seems to be more focused on the very south of South Asia. Their India site CareerBuilder.co.in doesn’t seem like there’s much activity going on. However, that might change dramatically over the next couple of months to come. As an observer, I’m somewhat excited.

I really believe that this is a wake up call for sites organized in India to start thinking about building up the job seeker community. Major job sites here tend to have outdated or syndicated content, rife with spammers harvesting databases of candidates with no one stopping them. (I kid you not, I was in fact encouraged to just get an account and harvest the database by a sales person!) I told him I wouldn’t do that because it violates our own privacy policy. Anyone registered in one of these sites can tell you, they’re bombarded on a daily basis with job offers that are totally irrelevant. Read my post on that here.

What do you think should these sites be doing in order to improve their image and get a higher quality of candidates?

Photo by: supertobor

Human Resource Automation or having an HRIS system in India is something business owners and managers don’t think about until they’re a sizable company. Sadly, it’s an after thought. There seems to be a disconnect between regular small size businesses of under 100 employees, and those at the enterprise level. The MNCs, or the 1000+ employee companies tend to have their systems in place -- either by inheriting the policies and practices of their parent companies from the west or because of the progressive leadership and HR heads that make changes. Those SMEs that are home grown in India tend to focus on growing the business by keeping operational costs down and hiring cheap labor. How far can you keep costs down and how effective is hiring the cheapest labor you can find? Especially when they lack the skill set to carry out business tasks that matter the most.

HR in India has a long way to go, according to TV Mohandas Pai, the Director and Head of HR (among other things) at InfoSys, “HR in India is 10 to 15 years behind the curve”, he said in the address to CII Karnataka Annual HR Conference earlier this month (read the Financial Express report here). From my interaction with HR thought leaders and professionals, I understood that there are HR change agents - there just doesn’t seem to be enough of them to actually make a huge impact. So, change happens in increments, in a small paces. Automating HR processes is one of those small changes that happens. More and more companies are realizing that it’s not an efficient management system when you have to manually keep several spreadsheets, plus at least one person on the HR team to mange those spreadsheets. This is there just to manage employee data. Imagine what that one person could do if you freed up their time from processing.

As this economy grows, we will see more changes happening. More progressive companies, and those who are forward thinking leaders are starting to put programs in place that truly engage their employees, and leverage technology to the fullest extent. It’s all about optimizing, and maximizing output. What are you doing to close this gap in your organization?

Photo by dmason

Our CEO, Sumeet Kapur, was invited to speak at Sri Ram College of Commerce's National Colloquium. This year the theme was "Appetite for Change: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate". The morning session was opened by Ajay S. Shriram, the Chair for SRCC with inaugural address by Arun Jaitley and keynote by Hari S. Bhartia.

For the afternoon, along with Sumeet, the speakers panel included Neera Abuja, Subomoy Bhattacharjee, Rohit Rellan, Salil Bhandari, and Gaurav Khosha.

Sumeet spoke about frugal innovation and what markets like India need. You can check out the presentation below. Let us know what you thought about the event in the comments, too!  By the end of the session, the Department Head for Human Resources, Gauri Shankar, resounded "all of us are innovators", which I thought was pretty cool. I think all the students really enjoyed the Q&A session.