For those of you with prior work experience, here are some simple questions.
Who was the person representing the company when you first walked in for an assessment interview? Possibly, a guy from the HR department of the company, taking care of recruitment.
For those of you who have had issues with the management or have at any stage switched jobs, who was the person who played the role of ears and mouth of the company? Again a person from the HR department.
Your experiences might vary from firm to firm but the point that the HR department is an important representative of the company has been made. In fact HR is the sole department taking care of a company's internal marketing. You will be happy or unhappy with your firm depending upon the extent to which the people from this department have understood the HR policies of your firm and employed them for your benefit.
The idea of viewing HR as an independent corporate activity deserving credit is a pretty recent one in India. There are many reasons why HR might have been relegated to the shadows of its more dashing cousins like marketing, finance and operations. A few prominent ones being -
The wretched salaries being offered till very recently to HR professionals. (This is changing.)
Lack of corporate backing to educational institutions, which are churning out HR professionals.
The general perception of students about HR being a "common sense" discipline not worth specializing in.
Lack of apparent "Power" and "Glamour" associated with an HR profile.
I will try to address the above-mentioned concerns / misconceptions over the next few paragraphs.
The first point will soon loose its sting for the better as the trend at India's various prominent B-schools reflects. MDI Gurgaon has reported a 100% placement of its HR program students at a whopping average salary of INR 8.0 Lac per annum. Similar figures have been reported by colleges like XLRI and SCMHRD Pune and IIM Lucknow.
A similar script is being re-enacted at other lower-rung B-schools of India like Welingkar's and IMT Ghaziabad.
As far as the second point goes, HR as a function is a low strength domain at most of the Indian B-schools (almost 2000 now) in the sense that typically the percentage of students who decide to be part of this stream at B-schools hovers at around the 10% mark. Resources being limited, the dominant streams like marketing and finance end up getting a larger resource quota allocation, and thus, the decline cycle of HR as a discipline starts. It starts with the hiring of less qualified faculty due to monetary constraints, translates into lower level of corporate interest due to the low quality of faculty, and finally, it all adds up to paint a really gloomy picture of HR as a career option.
In simpler words, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy being enacted in the brains of MBA students - "Because there haven't been any good placements in HR in the previous years, students will not choose HR as a career. Since there would be a lesser number of students choosing HR, they would be getting lousy professors. Since they would be getting lousy professors, good companies won't recruit from their college, resulting in lousy placements. These lousy placements would spark off the initial idea of HR not being a good option."
The smaller institutions in this manner are proving detrimental to the cause of HR as a discipline. They have their task cut out, if they mean to lift HR from the status of an appendage, they would be better off bringing in renowned faculty for their students; otherwise it is just a hogwash to claim that they provide specialization in HR.
Well-established institutes like XLRI Jamshedpur, TISS, SCMHRD and MDI Gurgaon are doing a wonderful service to this discipline, the professors from these institutes have been taking up guest lectures at a gamut of other Indian B-schools thereby contributing to the overall development of the HR domain.
The third point is regarding the perception of HR as a "common sense" discipline not worth specializing in. In essence, HR incorporates within itself numerous other disciplines. Let us take the example of a recruitment process as an HR activity; you have been entrusted with the job of hiring employees for your firm, which means you are choosing the future workforce of your firm. You need to make sure that they fit the desired profile, you need to make sure that they would stick around with your firm, you need to access their adaptability to a team set-up, you need to gauge their communication skills (I am not referring to their talk alone), you need to judge the potential of leadership in the person, and to add to all this, you need to pick the best from a nebulous mix of individuals after having compared them carefully.
If you go through the list of above-mentioned activities, you will understand that you need to have knowledge that is vast, you need to know relevant bits of psychology, sociology, leadership, body language, communication styles, teamwork, and to some extent, technology (this may vary depending on your role). Each of these is a huge body of knowledge by itself; HR combines all these disciplines in order to become a virtually all-encompassing field. I have not mentioned here other numerous processes that come under its purview, like conflict resolution, diverse workforce handling, employee compensation design, etc. Do you still think of it as a common sense field?
Now I come to the final point, which I want to address. Marketing is associated with glamour and limelight, Finance is related to power and such link-ups go on and on. What do you link HR with? HR people are hardly seen at product launches, they do not get photographed with actresses, they are not seen when a company uses the media to announce its profits and growth, and you have not heard about companies fussing over them.
The answer to this question will sound more convincing coming from an HR guy with close to 8 years of work experience who has worked with some big names of the corporate world. This is what Praveen Pantula, a student at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, has to say, visibility of HR people has not been spectacular, but the kind of power youngsters today desire comes with time, you will not become a power centre in your company just because you did your management education from some A-grade B-school and so be treated like a king immediately. The same holds true for HR too. You need to slog it out real hard for the initial years, but I will also like to add this as an HR guy in a firm, regardless of your knowing any particular person, the chances of him/her knowing you are very high. I would not call it power; reach or accessibility would be better words. You get the best possible platform for networking and you will know its importance when you start working. Of course, the utility of these contacts is not limited to your present employment, as people cannot just stop knowing each other just because they no longer work together. If you want the bottom line - yes, there would be power in your hands, but the 'powers that be' will ensure that you are wise enough to handle that power when you get it. So the vision of power that MBA aspirants have associated with certain profiles is not accurate."
The above lines should serve the purpose of proving that HR profile deals with power to the same extent as any other management profile and scores above these profiles in terms of networking.
Having cleared some of the reasons why you might not go in for HR in your specialization phase, let me tell you why you should go for it. To back up my point, I will try to give you some reasons why MBA-HR is going to be hot and evergreen option; I hope they instill some faith in you.
(a) It is not an industry specific domain, you learn to deal with 'people issues', you can deal with people in any set-up, be it media, IT, manufacturing, or for that matter, ITES. Switching domains is less painful at an advanced stage in career.
(b) With attrition coming up as a big threat for IT and ITES firms, the need for HR initiatives is pressing upon firms. They need professionals to take care of this problem.
(c) Human resource processes are being outsourced to India and companies like Hewitt Associates have started making a name in this domain in India.
up shop in India are more concerned about handling the workforce here in a sensitive manner to avoid conflicts like the one at Hero Honda's Gurgaon Unit.
(e) Indian companies along with increasing sizes are waking up to the importance of an integrated HR function. (Apple India is one of them.)
(f) The sheer lack of skilled work force in this domain is a boon, there is no traffic as of now and so the early-bird prizes are still up for grabs. It is an opportunity no doubt, and like all opportunities, it first needs to be identified. Some have done it already; some are on their way... where are you?
