Managing the Millennial Generation & Internships

Aman Gupta, General Manager – HR, Tata Communications on how HR managers need to up their game to deal with Gen Y!

They shall come and they shall conquer. The Millennials, the Gen Y, the Echo Boomers or whatever you call them, are the people born between 1982-2000 and will soon form the majority of the workforce. Internshala, India’s leading internship portal for college students, wanted to understand how HR leaders are gearing up to embrace this change.

In correspondence with that, today we have with us Aman Gupta, General Manager – HR at Tata Communications, an organization that boasts of a workforce of 8000+ employees across 40 countries . Excerpts-

IS: Hi Aman, welcome and thank you for taking time out for this. To start with, how do you define the millennial generation? How are they different?

I define millennials as youngsters who, as far as they can remember, have always seen internet around. The availability of the vast ocean of information on their finger tips has made them ambitious, more clear and convinced about what they want, restless (in a positive way) and assertive. While the earlier generation may be hardwired to follow the ‘try it out’ or ‘talk to people’ approach, millennials are more individualistic in problem solving.

IS: Given these differences, what changes should HR managers bring in the way they-
a) Attract this talent pool
b) Engage them
c) Retain them

Given that they are more experimental and have more career avenues available in front of them, HR Managers should understand that rules of the game to attract this dynamic pool are changing and changing very fast. The projected image of the brand and the innovation in recruitment process have a big impact on ability to attract the right talent. Many of the candidates joined us because they really liked our recruitment process and how it challenged them.

The youngsters today are far more demanding (in a positive way), clear about work life-style they seek and can look at bigger picture with ease. Take, for instance, the trend of trying out different functions within an organization (a Marketing person being interested in a role in Operations). Facilitating this with a policy could go a long way in engaging the employees.

At Tata Communications, we have our own internal social media tools (JAM, Chatter) for employees to interact, discuss and share ideas in open. We are setting up a Project Market Place where different projects available within the organization can be listed and people from other teams/functions can apply in any project which interests them. We have also had internal Hackathons to crowdsource ideas from employees and funded couple of really good ideas that came out of it.

IS: During the transition phase, when an organization has considerable percentage of people from both the generations, how can the risks of workplace conflicts be subsided?

Yes, this is definitely an area HR will increasingly need to work on. While we do have a dedicated First Time Manager program, we haven’t had any structured interventions to address this particular issue yet. Most of the times, the messages and discussions from Annual Talent Review meet (where we are beginning to see such shifts) get informally percolated down across the employees.

IS: Given that this generation is far more experimental and wants to experience everything very early, do you see the culture of internships rising?

Yes, of course. Only the other day I had a colleague inquiring about internship opportunities for his daughter who is studying in 1st year of her B.Com. I was surprised to hear that students are beginning to think of internships from the very first year of college. I never really thought about internships throughout my undergraduate studies. But now youngsters want a taste of corporate life as early as possible. The career discovery phase begins much sooner for them and I see internships playing a major role in this phase.

IS: As an extension of earlier question, what major bottlenecks, in your opinion, need to be solved for HR managers to look at internships in a more favorable way and for internships to become a core component of their HR branding and talent acquisition strategy?

For an internship program to work, the HR manager should be absolutely clear on why interns are needed and what value they are hoping to get out of them. Once that is addressed, one bottleneck is the short duration of internships. If there is a way to expedite the learning process, making an intern hit the ground running as soon as possible or if the regular duration of internships could be increased from 2 months to, say 6 months – that would give quite a positive boost to internships.

IS: Even though the millennials are touted as digital generation, why do we still see HR managers using the traditional methods of hiring? What key shortcomings need to be addressed to bring the entire recruitment process online?

An HR Manager primarily looks for three things in a recruitment solution – Quality, Reliability or Trust, and Sustainability; and then there is the element of branding. For any online tool to win over HR community, it must first address all these four elements.

IS: Finally, if there is one career advice each that you could give to the young students and HR managers on Internshala platform, what would it be?

For students : Internships add lot of value to you and your career. Start early and do as many internships as possible to identify your interests and strengths so that you can build your career on them.

For HR Managers : Up the game! The youngsters today are very perceptive and how you position the brand is going to be very important in your ability to attract them to work for you.

IS: Thank you Aman for this insightful conversation. We sure hope HR community will benefit from your advice and fellow HR managers grappling with the change will find these tips useful. We at Internshala (http://internshala.com), of course, will always be there to help them find the best interns for their organizations.

Are you an employer looking for interns? Hire interns through Internshala; it’s free and hassle-free.