Kcafe Bitsom Final

hello guys uh we'll start with you introducing yourself and then we slowly take up the conversation ahead hi guys I'm son uh I was born in Delhi but I've really moved around for like a huge part of my life I've lived in Bangalore I've lived abroad and I think that's helped shaped a lot of the experiences that I've had um I did my undergrad from JMC Delhi University and then I got into the HR profession uh when I worked as an HR business partner in ey then decided to do an MBA like most corporate professionals

and then got the opportunity to now work as an HR consultant with Deo hi everyone good morning I monish based out of aabad I'm currently in bitom alumni and currently working at the ad B group's leadership program where I was fortunate to be a part of several companies from sales at Billa white to marketing at Billa Opus and currently I am doing a supply chain role at hindalco apart from that before my MBA I did BB honors in marketing and I also used to play lawn tennis so yes that's something about me great okay so

let's unpack your um careers a little more uh why don't we elaborate on what you exactly do and you know what are some roles and responsibilities that you have been bestowed upon by your organization I want to begin by explaining what HR Consulting is because I don't think a lot of people really understand because they typically think Consulting is more more towards like management consulting supply chain but no one understands that there is a vertical called HR Consulting so basically it's the same right you have clients you have to solve problems for them and diagnose

it and give your recommendations as to what they can do better but it's related to HR so clients can have problems like yeah we think our Performance Management process is not great because it's very subjective managers feedback how do we ensure that it's very holistic and that you're getting a very unbiased View on an employes performance so you sort of help the client arrive at a better management system for them to ensure that it's they sort of take as many inputs as possible when they evaluate like employees like you when you work in companies and

to ensure that it's not very biased um so that's what we work on and it can even be towards Less HR problems such as workforce planning so companies want to understand and how do we ensure that we have an optimal headcount how do we ensure that for one person we don't have five people doing the same job or similarly five people are not doing the job which can actually be done by one person so this is also uh problems for which HR Consultants are sort of roped in to just help companies and clients understand what

they can do lovely so um safe to say that you are HR of many companies I mean thanks for putting it that way I guess yeah I would like to say this going forward to people now it could be a good oneliner for yeah definitely I think in interviews in the future when maybe recruiters ask me this is how I'm going to explain my job so thank you for that okay great uh what about you so as I mentioned earlier I'm a part of the leadership program of adilla group so the structure of this program

is that uh in the first year for every four months you get a stint in a different business at a different role so this repeats for four months into three companies that's a year so in the first first ENT I was at Bera Opus the newly launched paint business which is kind of challenging the Giants of the industry so I had a marketing strategy role where I had to uh do from branding to various campaigns and running that and now I'm kind of at a kind of at a working at the backbone of a company

which is around supply chain at hindal Co Specialty Chemicals plant so the role here is kind of end to end from production to Packaging to kind of delivering the materials to the customers so yeah it's been a diversify Ro where I've been at various companies working on different aspects meeting new people kind of in and out okay so you guys uh did you pass out before the new campus watch launched yes before that right I was fortunate to be on the new campus for the last 3 months got it yes great okay so now I

want to kind of drive this conversation to your B School selection process so bsom is relatively a your B School compared to a lot of other B schools that are there in Mumbai and in India um so how do you go about selecting a b school for yourself possibly um a b school which is a little newer so what are some of the things that you look for that made you sure about your investment of time and money for your career uh so coming to my personal decision like before uh when I plann to do

an MBA I went for I think three three main important things which I was looking for in the B school so the first was educ education so I started out filtering B schools on the basis of Education if you see and B was a big highlight for me in that because we have faculties from Harvard won NYU SMU so you pick up any top school and we have faculties from that so you know rather than flying all these from B schools taking different courses we have faculties coming in for a few weeks and teaching us

that courses themselves which they kind of teach in those B schools so one is that secondly it's also about the diverse opportunities you get inside the B school it's not just limited to education it's also about interaction with those professors you know participating in live case competitions and live cases in the courses along with that the main thing being you know there are many companies which comes for different kind of opportunities which brings you there which is quite tough in an Indian context without going to a b school so yes and the main thing it's

also about people I think Sun might also agree that after getting in you it's like of for the two years you are uh with your peers who are also have done something good in their life in a kind of fastpac environment where you learn from them they learn from you so yes the entire context and this opportunities brought me to an MBA and bom yeah I'm just curious what do you mean by new AGB schools and how what is that differentiator between traditional um institutes that are there for a long time and new HB schools

that we talk about so the one point of difference which I feel after you know interacting with also many other people who have also graduated from B schools which are kind of Legacy oriented so I believe the new age B schools kind of have updated curriculum so we have courses on the majors like I think e we have e-commerce the digital operations so I think this new courses kind of lack a bit in the Legacy B schools as far as I know so the new B schools kind of get updated with the local Trends and

in the specific Indian context so what the current market demands so they are kind of very up to date with those fans so I think that's the one more important thing which I guess yeah agreed and um I think traditional B schools also focus a lot on very core of functional skills like okay Finance marketing but nowadays there's a lot of emphasis on how you do the work as well which is more like the behavioral aspect of it um the emotional intelligence aspect of it right the leadership style that you adopt because all of these

things playing together to to to for a team to succeed it's not just how much uh intelligence or knowledge you possess about a particular domain it's also about how you're actually doing the work or how you're getting that output from other people um for instance I I feel maybe some traditional B schools don't focus enough on the concept of leadership and collaboration and team success but you could have the brightest people in a team but if the style of the team of the leadership style isn't one that is going to get people to discuss or

collaborate or or feel like they can feel safe in the team to express what they have to express the team is not going to succeed all right so let's FASTT trck this conversation and um I am again wanted to cover many different aspects so both of you are from founding batch if I'm not wrong I'm from the co-founding badge co-founding bat okay I'm from founding batch got it so initial stages of a b school um what are some of the things because I'm sure when a b school is starting out and you are probably the

first second batch pursuing an MBA there you might not get everything and you might not uh you probably have to figure some things out right I'm sure there is Mentor I'm sure there is handholding but some of the things that you are left to figure out on your own and I'm sure it could be helpful also in retrospect if you think about it so what were some of the things drawing from your personal experience you would like to share with us uh So speaking from my personal experience I was a member of the student council

at bitom and I saw the benefits of being in the early batches of a new Institute you can uh you know bring out the culture bring out the structure of the Institute yourself you have a lot of chance of kind of contributing your bit towards the organization when in the initial period of time than an Institute being 30 40 years of age the structures and the things are already set up it's similar to a startup you can say when you are in a legacy company all the processes all the structures are set up and you

are kind of following those or kind of improving those but in a new age B school it's like a startup you build things on your own you get a chance to contribute more meaningfully and more impactfully so yes uh as a part of my role there I was kind of heading seven committees there and you know I saw each and every committee kind of bring life to The Institute and also contribute to the institute at the same time yeah very similar and uh because it was a new school there the administration was a lot more

supportive because they were very invested in any new ideas that we had to sort of shape the school uh so that helped a lot and similar experience I was part of placecom so I was really invested in the type of companies that we would bring in for all the students um for more established B schools that's already in place you already know because there have been the same participating companies for the past 2 three years you know that most likely they are going to come again but for a new school you don't you don't have

that Insight you don't have that confidence or thing that you can rely on that you know that these these good companies are coming or 100 companies are coming so you just have to be more invested in the development of the school because that's going to also dictate your own development so if we as placecom didn't do a great job of bringing companies in ultimately it's hampering our own experience so yeah if in the market job market I am with a different candidate who is from an established B school and I'm from a and let's just

say a candidate B is from a newer B school is emphasis given on the B School brand name if yes how much I think that's a great question I think it depends also on the company and your mindset towards Talent if your mindset is a little more close that you want to you want a shortshot thing you don't want to stress too much on it you know that a CV has a 999 GPA or from this Grade B school so you know you just want to pick it up you don't want to necessarily experiment and

get D more diverse Talent you will go with the former option of picking someone who's from an established B school but if you have a more open-minded approach to Talent which is that you know you look at an individual with respect to what they can bring to the table and then you realize that that is not dictated by the B School you come from that's really dictated by okay what are the five things that you've put on your resume that really stand out to me and the these things that you've put on your resume are

they transferable skills are they skills that I think will really be suited to the role and to the culture so it really depends on actually the recruiter and the company's mindset and culture and approach towards recruitment if you like I said if you want to experiment and if you if you want to seek someone who demonstrate certain skills and you want to look at the culture fit you're not going to really it's not really going to matter whether they come from an established B school or not but if you're a company that just wants to

not you know take that approach then you're going to look at the B school so it's difficult to ascribe the weightage to you know a established versus non-established B school and how much that matters because it I think it's very subjective okay before I move on with uh you with our questions I would like to again see if you guys have any questions that needs to be addressed first uh so there's this very common stereotype because when I mentioned that I might go into HR there was like HR really do you really want to go

there because the common ISS um like there are multiple HR Professionals in one company like why do you want to be one of the and like what's what's the like scope like the how lucrative is it how um the how is the career progression and all so HR is actually now moving more from a support function to a strategic function so earlier definitely HR may have been seen as you're just doing backend work you're not really helping an organization you're not driving any revenue for them which is true but now a lot of companies are

realizing the True Value ad that HR can put forward so every year an organization will set certain organizational goals now HR initiatives are being properly aligned with those goals so if for example example I take Walmart Walmart was a company that realized it needed to skill its Workforce to just be more new age to adapt to how fastpaced things were because of technology and they realized that Workforce was not equipped in those skills so they decided to actually launch a program and not in the name of Employee Engagement I'll do anything just to keep employees

happy they had a very strategic motivation for it which was if I equip my Workforce in those skills they will be able to take on those roles in my own company in the future and the way they did it was they sponsored an educational program for them so employees could actually take an entire degree and pursue an entire degree and that entire thing would be sponsored by Walmart but that degree obviously had to be in the same skills that they wanted from the employees and that eventually ended up helping that Workforce be a lot more

equipped so now HR is really transforming into more activities like these where you really get to do more strategic work so I think HR is really boom booming as a vertical now and we also have so much data present on our hands right and what that means is that you get to make more informed decisions as HR so for example I think I had mentioned something about Performance Management earlier where typically I'm sure some companies still adopt the approach where they seek feedback an employee has to seek feedback only from their direct manager as part

of the Performance Cycle but now companies are realizing that why don't we base an employees performance evaluation more on data and how they do it is by getting employees to go through certain standardized assessments like a case study a role play We also will interview the employees in a certain Manner and collect data points from all these different assessments to really arrive at a more holistic understanding of where the employees current skill lies and where their potential also lies and this is how now decisions are being more and more taken right it's more data driven

so you have a lot of work happening in that manner as well um so I think HR is a great field to get into now honestly speaking especially if you're equipped more towards the data driven skills as well um can you try yeah HR does have a lot of verticals under it you have a recruitment you have a learning in development which will look at okay what are the sort of trainings that I should ensure employees should go through throughout the year to just get them to upskill uh you have the payroll team which will

look at compensation so you have a lot of these different verticals it really depends on where your interest lies so if you think you will enjoy a recruitment more than a learning in development then you can take that forward how easy is it to transfer from one to the other of course companies will always look for experience within that same vertical but again if you're able it all depends on the way you communicate it to them as well if you're able to communicate that you have gotten certain skills while you are working in recruitment that

you can apply an L&D then they will be able to consider you and back that up by more theoretical knowledge by taking some add-on courses that will give you an idea of what L&D let's say really is um I hope that answer your question yeah hi I had a similar questions on what you asked uh like we know Legacy B schools have I know higher end placements uh but bitom surprised us with you know a good uh I mean similar placements to that uh I wanted to ask like what do the companies like he said

McKenzie also came in the first year itself so I wanted to ask like what do the companies see in uh uh bit some what does it help like it's it's is it the bit tag or the location advantage or the curriculum what is the USP that helps in uh companies believing in a graduate graduate from bitom there are a couple of things the first as you mentioned the bit stack so bitom being a new Institute but I think we still get the degree of bits pilani at then so bitom is kind of very well connected

to the bits Pani which is as you might know is one of the leading institutes in the India so that's the first point that builds the credibility that is the first point additionally you know it's very well connected to the industry they have the backing from The adity Villa Group they have the board members who are spread across companies not just in India but in different aspects of the world from us they have people they professors from leading B schools of uh you know world so they bring their Network there so all these things add

up to kind of build credibility of bsom and Trust to the recruiters and not just uh to the students as well and eventually you know after one two years the people will go there and perform and then the recruiters come back again and see the actual work they are doing so that builds on that I don't have a very high score in cat but I saw a bits and and I saw the campus and absolutely loved it and I fell in love with that campus I said I want to go here but I did not

score good on my cat and I'm not planning to give GMAT right now so what do you think I should do right now uh I have a 85.6 7 percentile in my cat what do you think I can do so that my chances are higher to get into to bitom okay so uh talking about bitom it is a highly profile based B School uh as far as I remember we don't have any cut offs as of now but uh you know we have passed data point that when I was there the cat percentile was around

94% so you know it's a mix about you know you can get the error tables on both the sides that what are the chances of getting in and this is also based on your work experience how much you have or that other X Factor something you know as in Consulting companies go for spikes do you have any other spikes in your resume or the work you have done till now so based on that and good and bad is always subjective I I don't know what is good and what is bad it is always you for

you uh B school might be good this might be or you know someone for them that might be aspirational for the other one you know I don't want to get in the so everything is subjective over here and you need to kind of get into some data points which are facts okay what is their average placement what is their average percentile of the batch and this information is available to the public on their website as well so I think that should help you I just have a let me just try and ask you a question

is that keeping cat score aside is there anything in your profile or whatever you've done in the past few years some that one thing that you're extremely confident about that you think stands out or is very unique uh I have been constantly participating uh in my college and all the competitions that have uh eluc debates and dancing so I think uh I'm very active in extra curriculars and I'm uh I've also kept a good score in my academics in my college the only thing that uh I was weak at was uh in my 12th my

score in 12th was uh very bad but I think I have uh participated in a lot of extra activities and I've won a lot of extra activities as well and I'm upscaling myself by doing I want to get into marketing so I'm doing courses on marketing and getting to digital marketing I'm currently enrolled in the course as well okay so I I think your main focus should lie on just finding that one thing that you think will really make you stand out from others maybe you would have a sense of what your peers would also

be doing some of your peers would also be taking certifications pass uh taking part in extracurriculars but what is that additional thing that you will be doing that will make you stand out since you mentioned marketing think of something more unique in terms of doing any initiative relating to marketing try to get some hands-on experience if you can through you know email companies see if they can look for any external support in terms of any campaigns or any support that they want but just think more on those lines so that tomorrow you can just focus

on that and really bring that different experience out okay so what doesn't get um discussed enough I feel is the nature of any job let just say HR has a particular nature of the job that you're kind of required to do marketing has a different nature of the job that I required to do um from your personal experiences I want to kind of shed light on the nature of the roles and the industry that you are a part of and what are some of the challenges that are associated with that so that we can help

students not be a m Misfit for the career that they are planning to choose I was fortunate to start my career in sales with baa white which is the India's largest white s manufacturer so uh you know I was kind of inclined towards the sales and marketing domain but uh you know I just thought sales as a negotiation role or something like that but you know I understood the importance of market research you know which people don't emphasize enough because it's start everything you know if someone wants to start a new company or a new

product or a new business it starts from the first step which is market research so you start with that then you come up with you know understanding the competition you Benchmark them and then come up with some you know Market positioning road map that where do you want your company or product to be in the next 5 years next 10 years after that I was fortunate to be with baa Opus uh in a marketing and strategy domain so there I got some sense of branding and I went through various customer Journeys so I kind of

understood a holistic approach of how companies are taking some marketing decisions while understanding the consumers the main highlight I think was the use of data and Technology to drive business decisions as of now you see companies are not just guessing things they want and they're ready to spend on collecting data analyzing those and then taking the decisions after that not just guessing it you know Investments are quite big if you see at this Brands so yes and currently I am at as I mentioned I at hindal CO's in a operational role which is kind of

not very customer facing but the role of supply chain is as critical as it can be because if you see without them the sales and marketing won't have any product to sell and deliver to the customers so yeah uh based on this experiences if there are any questions I'm happy to answer more on them I'll just start with an HR business partner because that's how I started my professional Journey HR business partner explain because I I don't think a lot of people are aware what an HR business partner does so whenever you're working in a

company you will be in touch with an HR person who is like your main point of contact for your entire tenure in the company so any any grievance any issue any policy related query that you have anything and everything that you want to know relating to HR practices in The Firm okay what is your company's leave policy um how do I transfer from my department to a different department what is the process it goes via an HR business partner so the HR business partner basically manages the entire employee life cycle from the time an employee

joins The Firm to the time the employee decides to leave the firm so the challenges that I think typically HR business partners face is sometimes they don't possess enough relevant knowledge to be able to address the employees question or grievance that they have and that's because HR is consisting of multiple teams that are working on multiple different aspects so for example if an employee comes and asks okay I want to know about more I want to know has a very nuanced question about medical insurance which you as an HR business partner are supposed to know

the medical insurance policy but you're not able to respond to that cuz you don't know the exact Nuance behind that question because you're not the process own of the medical insurance process so what you have to do you have to reach out to different teams you have to reach out to the medical insurance team to figure out how to respond to the employees question and the challenge there just lies in you know increasing Reliance on other teams at times which leads to a lot of a lot of delays um second it's it's realizing that you

have to at times as a nature business partner Balance company interest with employee interest because at times they can be at all with each other so for example a company wants an employee has decided to leave the firm they have to serve a notice period of 30 Days by policy the company wants the employee to serve the notice period but the employee does not want to serve what do you do they eventually end up coming to HR to figure out the best course of action you can't exactly take the employee side and say um you

know and tell the tell the business or tell the manager and the team that you know no this this person has to be ex uh this we have to follow with the employees saying let that employee go because that team needs that resource to work for 30 days but at the same time you also can't take the company's side and tell the employee can no we're going to force you to serve 30 days so what do you do you know so you have to really figure out how to balance the two and the way to

do that is just to say okay listen what you know you both have to come to a mutual agreement as different parties and decide what the ideal notice period would be in this scenario how closely is bitom associated with bits Alumni network like bits Pani Alumni network do you guys get to interact with them do you have a common Forum where probably you can um reach out to people that you want to from that Network so there's a community of bitsa which is uh so if you graduate from bits Pani or bitom everyone is a

part of that Network called bitsa community and it is not just in India it is present in probably each and every country you visit in the world so you will find some other other senior leader who has graduated from bits who is working in some other company or something like that additionally uh you know the it's not just limited to alumni you also get support from bits and other things let's say there's a incubation Center which is pilani entrepreneurship and Innovation development Society Peds so if you have know someone is interested in starting something of

their own they can kind of go ahead and apply to that because you are eligible member of bits you can go ahead you can also go to the next stages of getting incubated and if you go ahead you you can also get some funding rounds from them they are quite involved with many VCS and PES in the Indian Network so yes you are quite connected then other than that you also have sports Fest you get to visit uh bits Goa bits Hyderabad and other campuses for participating in the sports Fest interacting with with them in

present so yeah did you go to Goa or Hyderabad to play badmon I made a sacrifice going on my friend's wedding rather than going bits go of Fest yeah but I participated any other competition like sibm punes pjes I am Mumbai Sports Fest and all those yeah awesome what about you s yeah no similar I'm forgetting the name of the event but every year we have this annual event where we'll call a lot of cxos Industry speakers and a lot of bits bits alumni to come so that's a great event where you get to interact

with the different alumni of of the bit schools and that happens on an annual basis okay um I had a great time honestly lot of relatable examples anecdotes and learnings for you guys to take away from um I'm opening the floor for questions uh feel free to ask any question that you have so this is a very common question like what is the implication of Gap years in today's age and when you are taking a gap year what do you think is an uncommon like profile building uh St like what do you give HR can

answer that well uh if you have a good reason for The Gap here what is so for instance if um this is just at the top of my head if I decided to take a gap here because I wanted to climb Mount Everest and maybe I made it to base camp no company's going to look down on you for doing that cuz that's a huge feat so if you're able to achieve some sort of feat and justify a good reason for taking the Gap year it should not be a problem um but yeah if obviously

if you take the Gap here and you're not able to justify and it comes across as though you took it because maybe you just maybe wanted a break maybe companies won't favor you when you are in the initial journey of your career maybe later on as you get more senior you can take a few months there here and there or a year off because you've already established enough experience and that builds your credibility but maybe initially you can't unless you have a good strong justification that you can really talk about in an interview maybe uh

just to put on it like my case I have a couple of years of experience so I'm I'm planning to take a gap here because uh like I feel I want to concentrate more on the cat uh I think like maybe with the job it is becoming quite a bit hectic so it is a common reason but how do you suggest uh this will justify how can I justify the Gap here I think if you if you it's again all about how you communicate it to the recruiter if you say something like and people at

the end of the day know it's difficult to do both a job and study for cat so if you show that self-awareness and you say listen you know work was obviously uh for 8 9 10 hours a day and then after that to be productive the next day you need those two three hours in the at the end of the day to just sort of um relax and get yourself going and recharge for the next day at work and that makes it very difficult to give a 100% focus on cat which is something I knew

was extremely extremely important to pursue my passion which was an MBA so I took the tough decision of taking a gap year and I think it made me extremely extremely focused and productive and helped me gain a much better score than I would have had I done it alongside my career so if you put it that way I I don't think you're going to get questioned I think the difficulty will lie in if the score is not that great and you took a gap here so maybe you can try to hedge that by doing something

on the side along with studying for CAT so maybe if you take a certification that takes up maybe one or two hours of your time in a day or like in a week then you can also say listen I took the Gap here because I was actually trying to explore different verticals and see whether my interest lies in marketing okay see I did this course then I also did a course on finance because I wasn't sure if I wanted to do Finance so maybe if you want if you're not sure which way it could go

try to hedge it by doing something alongside cat which doesn't take up too much of your time that you can also talk about okay guys great question asked uh thank you for being so so interactive and thank you for taking our time and coming here both Mish and Su thank you