The Hindu Business Line : Innovation and HR

A strong current of passion runs through Arun Maira’s advice to young HR professionals in India. “Have a dream; be curious; learn; try; and invent in the area of HR,” says Maira, Chairman of The Boston Consulting Group India Pvt Ltd.

HR professionals should be strategists and not technicians, he believes. “Unless you are solving some strategic problem of the company, you can’t be part of the strategic group,” he argues. “If you are a professional doing a functional job professionally, you would be a functionary; you will not be part of the strategy group,” he adds.

Instead, HR professionals must work with CEOs on strategic questions. They must start thinking in the way required to solve strategic people-related problems of the company, Maira says. And HR professionals should feel: “I’m going to take the plunge myself and deal with the most important thing for my company. I may not know how to do it, but I’m going to learn how to do it,” he emphasises. The best HR practices for the problems India has are going to be developed in India, he adds.

Indian corporates often say that their growth is affected by the lack of people and must therefore take an innovative approach to recruitment practices, Maira says. “What are the things that you have considered impossibilities; then make them into possibilities,” he declares.

For instance, testing policies and methods are often based on certain factors which may not necessarily be required to do a specific task well, he says. Often, testing methods are biased towards weeding people out of an existing talent pool rather than expanding the pool. So, for example, if tests are designed based on the belief that people are well educated in English, then a person who is not fluent in English would not do well in the tests and would be turned away irrespective of his or her skills, he points out.

Therefore, Indian companies need to review their approach to recruitment, he says. “You got to think again, what do I want to test for? How would I find that out?” Maira emphasises. And if companies change their tests, they may find that the very people they used to reject earlier are now passing, he adds.

At the same time, he acknowledges that Indian companies may also have to develop skills in people. Sometimes, it may be enough that companies help people brush up their knowledge of English or improve their soft skills or social skills.

However, companies may also have to help people improve their technical and management skills. Rather than leave this to educational institutions, corporates should step in. “Education institutions sometimes themselves lose touch with the changing requirements of industry,” he says. Therefore, training is best done by industry ,which is in a better position to develop the people it needs. This, of course, requires innovation in the HR process, he adds.

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