"We hire for attitude and train for skills" By Mr Arindam Chakraborty, Corporate HRM, Britannia

Date: 15-Dec-2010

Mr Arindam Chakraborty: Speaking about Britannia and its selection procedure

 

Britannia as a company I think does not require any introduction as it’s a home known name. The company is into a solid growth path, a company which is into international footprints. Our growth in terms of top line and bottom line is really very exiting. As a company we don’t go out and hire very much in numbers like other company. In figures we hire around 14 to 20 people and that’s the kind of number we look out when we go for campus.

 

When we take summer trainees, we take around 35 to 40 people. We are very selective about the kind of institutes we go to. Typically the strength and the kind of people we take are more towards sales and marketing and towards supply chain management because that’s the biggest bucket and that’s the key area and where we move on in terms of our growth path. So it is pretty exciting to note that as a company we are a ninety years old company and still we are ninety years young too. In fact we have people in the system those who joined the company as a management trainees in 1997 are still working with us. I am very proud to share that the people who joined the company 10 years back as a management trainee from B schools like IIMs or from other top B schools, people continued to work with us. 

                                                                         

 

The kind of freedom, the kind of latitude, the kind of space, the kind of opportunity, and the kind of assignments we give to this people to grow, it’s phenomenal and this is why people stick on to this company. It’s not the compensation but the kind of platform that we laid in front of those people.

 

When a person join let say into sales or a person join into HR we do not say that you are a sales manager or a HR manager but rather see your self as a business manager and that’s a kind of expectation we have from them to have a overall experience of business appreciation and see how the function get gels into the overall picture and the expectations that we laid out to the new recruit at the very beginning when they joined the company.

 

 

Mr Arindam Chakraborty sharing his own experience when he joined his first job:

 

When I passed from B school and when I joined my first company and this was in 1996 I felt that I know everything about the work J   When I was given my induction for first year to work under an officer, I was sure that after a year he is going to report to me. I felt that no, I am not here to learn from him, rather I know that because he is going to work under me I know enough and more than him. J

 

With the passage of time and in several occasions again and again I stumbled and I struggled and therefore I came to know and I believed that institutes at that point of time have actually given me a knowledge foundation. But there is much more to learn when I start crawling in the industry and trying to find my own identity and I was feeling that I need enough to learn. Not about myself being a pragmatic person but to know what is happening over there. I don’t have large scale knowledge over there and there fore I need to accept that.  There comes the whole thing and which I think more and more colleges are doing today is the industry and the academic interface. It’s extremely critical today.

 

 Mr Arindam Chakraborty speaks about the industry interface and awareness in TPO Conference Bangalore:

 

How do we collaborate with the industries and institutes and therefore bring the best breed. There are two important points, the curriculum and the second part is about the expectations. When I marry these two it talks more about the relevance and the kind of people we get from the institutes and deliver.

 

Now when I talk about curriculum, I think it is very critical today that the institute whether it’s an engineering college or a B school has to catch on to the latest trend or the contemporary trend which is going on today. Otherwise we are 10 years behind. As I came from sales and marketing let me take an example: Am I as a student fully aware about what is going around? If I am not, then in the interview I am proving in an hour discussion that I am 10 years behind. Some examples like Rural as a segment has fundamentally changed. It is not the rural India what we have seen 10-15 years back.

 

Rural has dramatically changed. Thanks to the telecomm sector. Anywhere you go with the population of around 1 thousand or two thousand villages everyone would have cell phones of 1 thousand to 2 thousand rupees. Thanks to microfinance so what is the knowledge I have about Rural. Do I have knowledge about rural market today?

 

As FMCG we see rural as one of the biggest area to penetrate and that is what we call village penetration. If I would not have been there, I would have lost that market. It is really exciting that people from rural areas are opening their facebook accounts and every other day a rural guy opens their twitter account. So I think we need to segment that particular sector and have something built in to my curriculum. I know rural which is no longer as it was 10 years before. And that the reason IT sector is more and more exploring category C to D today.

 

Who thought that the guy sitting in cochin or the guy sitting in Jaipur today would be excepting a job around and the sector is moving to the particular place itself. Never thought about 10 years before that cochin would have some sector over there from any IT companies or so. So there is a solid transformation over there.

 

The second thing which I want to talk about is the channels of distribution. I think distribution management is something which is thought in B schools and distribution management has also undergone a change. It is no longer a general trade or a Kirana trade that we have been seeing. As a company or as a FMCG sector there are alternate channels of distribution. Railways has given us a huge growth, it’s a channel of distribution.

 

 

About Placement platform like rangrut.com:

 

I think that an avenue or a platform like this builds in or ask the placement officers to go back and feed it back to the professors and students that this is what industry is looking forward to.

 

So as quickly as possible we need to change our curriculum and to get our curriculum more upgrade about what is happening in the industry and what industry experts are expecting from the students. I think that the professors and the placement officers have a great role to play here.

 

 

Expressing his thinking about the end consumer?

 

Let’s talk about shopper and the consumer. When a kid goes and buys a Cadbury’s perk or Britannia biscuit, he or she is my consumer where as the shopper is the mother who is getting the product over there. So we have shifted from a consumer behaviour to the shopper behaviour, the shopper knowledge and that’s the kind of shift we are talking about today. What is my consumer behaviour? What is my shopper behaviour? And therefore building my insights about the growth of the product. I think these are the things we should have more and more in our curriculum.

 

Addressing Expectations from institutes and advice to first job seekers:

 

More and more company say that “we hire for attitude, we train for skills”. Brittannia is no different then those companies. If I look back into my days in coca cola when I used to go for campuses and all it was just the same. We used to hire from attitude in terms of behaviour of the person and we train them for skills. I am sure an aspirant or a promising candidate for a company sitting for campus would know end to end about marketing or HR or  so is like too much expecting from him. I think it’s all about the attitude, the drive, the confidence in that person.

  

As a part of company I can say that: I am looking for a person who is going to manage ambiguity, who is going to manage uncertainty, who is fair, trustworthy and high in values and who is going to manage risk. So overall if I put that into one basket I am looking at an entrepreneur.

 

Are you in your institute developing entrepreneur skills in your people?? Are you developing leaders or good team members?

 

I think it is very important for students to understand and think what is that I am looking for? Am I looking for a career or I am looking for money? The choice is his, we can’t influence that.

 

When we talk about career, the packages the flip side is that the package is not about money, it is tagged with stronger stuff into it in terms of knowledge, exposure, projects, ventures etc. A student should think about it in long terms prospective.

 

 

Posted By : Parul Sharma

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