When did you start your career in HR?
My career started in sales but my HR career started in talent acquisition for technology and e-commerce companies back in 1999. At that time, I closed a search assignment with a significant billing and worked with various European and Indian firms.
I then moved to a tech startup wherein I subsequently did my first HR generalist role starting with hiring tech talent, setting up the HR systems and processes including creation of the ESOP plan from scratch. This was a great experience as the role also required me to present to our clients from US on our talent strategies and culture.
How did you come to choose HR as your profession?
I don’t think I would like to make any clichéd statement but the fact is that I specialized in HR and Marketing during my management days and was interested in the most complex part of the business i.e. people and decided to take up HR as a career choice.
Describe the initial years of your career in a few sentences.
I had a very unique start to my career in advertising sales with Indian Express where I spent 11 months; in those 11 months, I created history for Express Pune by carrying 12 pages of appointments (the segment I handled).
went on to launch Headstart (appointments supplement from Indian Express) and also spent considerable time in promoting the newspaper in education feature across Maharashtra besides doing my day job.
The initial years were extremely challenging. For example, during the launch of Headstart, I was working 24/7; my 9-6 job was to sell advertising space. At 10 pm, I had to be at the press for the printing schedule, and at 4 am, at the distribution office. My initial years, though tough, gave me some fantastic learnings and it was really a process of discovering myself as a professional and understanding my strengths. Talent acquisition was something I really enjoyed during my initial career years which then transformed into my love for compensation which was the area I really built my expertise in over the years.
What might be described as the best moment of your HR career ?
It would be difficult to describe just one exciting moment as I have had several in the areas including compensation, change management, mergers and acquisitions related HR integration work, creating and running a region wide leadership program etc.
I was working on mergers and acquisitions related HR integration for a company we had acquired in Sweden and due to visa issue was actually based out of the London office. I worked with the London based EMEA team and the team from Sweden to manage the integration work including pricing of positions and creating a compensation grid for the market, aligning policies, launching our HR systems etc in a fairly short span of time.
The appreciation I received from the management team in US, EMEA and APAC was extremely gratifying. One of the acquisition related due diligence in Turkey for a very large potential acquisition required me to work on some heavy numbers oriented excel files; I managed to identify hidden costs which were not factored in by other teams which really helped the process significantly.
Some of these experiences tested my skills for managing complex time bound project management and my number skills too. These were great learning experience working with people from diverse backgrounds. I was seconded to Hong Kong for a couple of months to manage the C&B for APAC, while over the years my experience was more around doing compensation surveys, pricing positions, creating and managing the compensation grid etc for India and later for the particular region.
But during the time I was seconded, I had to also manage the appraisal process for all countries in the region and it was then for the first time I had to actually run simulations on data based on the grid that I had proposed for every single market in the region to validate my specific proposal.
The appreciation came from the region management around the fact that every single market in the region was within budgets without any push backs and we actually finished the full compensation review in 20 minutes flat; and this was an amazing experience. The key was that I continued to head HR for South Asia while I was working out of Europe and APAC ; this was an amazing experience especially since I love working in multi-cultural environments.
How has this improved you professionally and personally?
These experiences helped me become a better professional and gave me great insights into my strengths and validating the fact that my experiences in India transferred very easily into Europe and APAC.
Some key guidance and advice you would like to suggest to HR practitioners…
I think the most important thing is to first spend time in understanding the business indepth as in my experience the business has utmost respect for HR professions who can empathize with them and deliver solutions which have a direct impact on the bottom line.
The other important thing is to always experiment and stretch yourself to learn and do new things as in today’s era of disruption, the world around us is changing rapidly and the only way to keep up is by experimenting and learning new skills on the go.
