It was overwhelming to see a big smile on her face, when she once again came across IIPM, after almost a decade. But the decade has been a long one for her, from an IIPM student to now AVP – HR at Miditech Entertainment Pvt. Ltd., she has travelled a long way passing by many a milestones to establish herself as a successful professional in the HR arena.
A simple and generous person with enormous patience, Divya Seshan, is also a skillful and hardworking person at the work place. But then, this never acted as a deterrent for her from becoming a great mother and homemaker.
Divya took off her career from Electrolux (then called Kelvinator) in the year 2000, the same organisation, which was thoroughly impressed with her work during her summer internship on a project titled “Employee Management and T&D”. In fact, the report is still referred to by Electrolux, when there is a need for similar kind. In her initial days as a professional, though she always had a dubious feeling for the competition from colleagues, who came from the so-called ‘big B-schools’, her inner strength never let her enthusiasm go down and she strived day and night to put things the way she wanted for herself.
She still remembers her early days in Electrolux, when she had to travel all the way to the plant site in a remote place near Gurgaon called Daruheda. According to her, being a fresher it was really advantageous as she could easily connect with the employees. In those days itself, she had started a pilot project on cross functional trainings to create a great team. At Electolux, Divya took an initiative of hiring students from IIPM for three years consecutively.
Soon after, Divya moved to Sony, which at that time was investing in Hi-Fi systems and Flatrons. Here, she leveraged her learnings & experience and developed many improvised training programs. At Sony, she primarily had a generalist profile, which allowed her to gain experience in almost all the HR functions.
Post-marriage Divya relocated to the city of dreams, Mumbai. She got a break with ABC Consultants, where she worked as a recruitment consultant. As one of her achievements, she recalls how she single-handedly created a databank of students, who would be passing out in the near future. However, her active career at ABC was cut short when she had to take a sabbatical for family responsibilities.
However, always a fighter Divya soon returned to action aft er enjoying the early years of her motherhood and joined Times Job, a venture of the Times of India Group. Considering her relatively frequent switch between companies, when asked about her views on job stability, Divya says with a smile, “Job stability is industry specific, but somehow instability has always worked for me.” True to her words, she soon joined a start up company called Ikya as regional head-north, which, being a new venture, provided her with a good learning experience across verticals and also a lot on sales & business development. She always wanted to break the common notion that HR is a cost function, and at Ikya, she got her chance to prove herself right as there she backed up the sales team successfully to generate business by grooming real talent. Her HR mantra of “staying connected and approachable” to all employees also played a key role in her success.
She always believes in learning from mistakes. At the same time she is always hungry for more and fascinated by multi-tasking. With such an attitude when she went to a business development meeting at Alva Brothers, she end up being offered a senior position at Miditech Entertainment. Like always she didn’t hesitate a bit to assume new responsibilities and joined the production house (associated with films like Aamir and shows like Girls Night Out on MTV) to again start from scratch. But then, as she puts it, she never faced any problem in starting this way. In her words, “I was always been blessed with a good and efficient team to make my work easier.” But then if we keep her humbleness aside, the fact is its her dexterity in connecting with people and grooming them to perfection which has always worked for her.
Divya is also an adroit in changing mind set of process oriented HR teams, which think that their job is only a role play in the performance review cycle. At the same time, she has great skills in understanding people and in perceiving their needs. Perhaps that is why she has been able to initiate a lot of employee engagement activities at Miditech to break the monotony of work.
Being a self-made person, Divya has been ambitious right from her IIPM days at Lodhi road and it only grew more with each passing day that she spent enjoying the fun filled Mandi campus or attending Arindam Sir’s serious sessions. Today, apart from being ambitious, she is also very serious. As her husband is an entrepreneur and keeps traveling for most of the time, she makes sure to spend quality time with Arjun, her son. While managing her time between home and work, she believes that every human being is a rock star and one must make the most of the learning opportunities he/she gets, both in professional and personal life.
