Neither Undermine Nor Overplay Your Achievements In An Interview: K.S. Bakshi, Group Head – HR, InterGlobe Enterprises
K.S. Bakshi, Group Head – Human Resources for InterGlobe Enterprises is responsible for providing strategic & operational leadership to the Human Resources function and consolidating HR practices across the group. He has served as a strategic partner to businesses through innovative people strategies & strong HR policies & practices.
What kind of engagement activities does InterGlobe Enterprises do?
We define engagement as a scale to measure how invested our employees are in the organisation. In order to differentiate ourselves as the best employer, we introduced a basket of engagement interventions and multiple touch points to ensure both, productivity and a sense of belongingness to the organization.
Our engagement framework, focuses on individual, team, manager and the organisation, covering both rational and emotional aspects of commitment from the employees. We have identified 6 broad areas that have a positive impact on the growth, motivation, learning and engagement of all employees.
• Rewarding the worthy – The objective is to build a culture of recognizing the efforts of every employee and rewarding the ones standing out.
• Building careers – Our Learning and Development initiatives are designed to empower employees by enabling them with the requisite tools and skillset, ensuring an even better result for their efforts.
• Enriching Networks – Knowledge and experience are the biggest tools that can empower our employees. For this, we try to leverage both internal and external cross-functional expertise.
• Celebrating Together – Our diversified group enables us to believe in bringing together people from all across our businesses, departments and functions. Thus, creating a culture of togetherness.
• Health and Wellness – Our aim is to add a personal touch to the employee experience while caring for their health and fitness.
• Giving back to the society – This includes all our employee-driven CSR activities where we equip employees with 3 days of paid leave to serve the society and evolve into a more satisfied self.
InterGlobe has been recognised for offering learning opportunities to employees. How much do you focus on employee training to find the perfect match for the company?
Our learning framework cuts across the organization, the function, the team and the individual, to cover different aspects of a personality, life skills to service excellence, leadership grooming to nurturing culture, our step approach helps cater to all. The first step is to create a level of self-awareness followed by customizing every journey as per individual needs and deliver it through various modes of learning including e-learning.
One of our key Leadership Development and Transformation initiative in this aspect is “Leading Today for Tomorrow”, where our focus is to develop next-gen InterGlobe leaders through self-awareness, developing business acumen, leading change and driving strategic initiatives. We extensively use tools like Executive Coaching, Action Learning Projects, and Learning Labs facilitated by Internal and External Experts.
What are the best tips to ace an interview?
The key to acing an interview is to strike the right kind of balance by neither undermining nor overplaying your past contributions and achievements. In order to succeed, it is important to be honest and forthcoming about the strengths and development areas. In today’s volatile, it is essential that an individual comes across as someone willing to learn and unlearn skills. It is essential that a candidate displays a technopreneurial mindset and the ability to be an effective team player or leader. And while such traits are good to have, it’s important for a candidate to be able to substantiate these with facts or incidents from his/her experience.
How has the role of HR changed with the shift in technology?
With the widespread adoption of technology, the role of HR has transformed from being an administrative one to a strategic business partner, enabling employee growth and engagement.
We engage with 25,000+ employees spread across 60 cities globally. Every step of an employee journey is now much more consistent across all offices. All facets of this journey across recruitment, orientation, rewards, performance management, communication, engagement surveys, and even exit management, are further enhanced with the help of technology that brings in efficiency and transparency.
Technology, however, can never really replace HR Managers and the personal touch they bring in, but it complements them by giving greater insights and abilities in their job.
Has the hiring pattern changed, with job roles being re-defined?
With digital disruption and the e-commerce world already a reality, demand for agile, technological, analytical and innovative workforce has gone up. We have redefined our competency framework to be more futuristic in order to evolve with the dynamic business environment and that has led to a significant change in our hiring pattern.
Our hiring includes real-life case studies where we test a candidate’s ability to provide solutions within various limiting factors. We have even introduced the concept of ‘Participative Hiring’, where individuals from different departments or group companies participate in the hiring process, which in turn helps cater to the talent requirements of various cross-functional projects.
How important is background checking during the hiring process? How does it enhance the quality of recruitment?
InterGlobe, as a brand, is built around its value system. Integrity is one such non-negotiable trait that we live by. And for all prospective employees, this personality trait is looked at very closely at every step of the recruitment process. The background check is a way for organisations to mitigate risk and validate the key elements like qualification and experience which helps establish trust and strengthen the credibility of an individual. For us, it helps find not just the right candidate but the right cultural fit.
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