Talent acquisition, talent enhancement and talent retention are our top HR focus areas. Being in our early stages, attracting high-end entrepreneurial talent and building a highly-skilled workforce is of paramount importance to us. While it is important to attract talent, it is also important to help them enhance their skill sets through adequate training and guidance, and keep them motivated and happy. In the last one year, we have built a strong team of entrepreneurial individuals, and now the focus is on talent enhancement and retention. We provide the new entrants with an excellent platform for learning and development to create further chiselled manpower. We try to create an employee-friendly work environment where each employee feels like an entrepreneur to ensure a motivated and satisfied workforce. And yes, we do reward our employees suitably!

While the investment banking sector is expanding and employees enjoy opportunities galore, there is a shortage of skilled and experienced talent. This supply-demand dynamics makes the market very employee-friendly. However, the trick lies in managing employee aspirations and providing employees with ample growth opportunities. We are de-facto a very flat organization with a highly entrepreneurial culture where every employee’s learning and growth needs are addressed. So yes, there is a big challenge when it comes to retention of employees, but it also provides a competitive advantage for firms with happy and loyal employees.

Being a new company, I invest a great amount of time and effort towards a range of talent management activities, including talent acquisition, team building and employee engagement.

Initially, talent acquisition would take up most of my time as it was important to get the right people entrusted with the job. My focus during recruitment was not just skills and knowledge, but also best practices and professionalism. We strive to find people who were best-fit for the future success of the company. My philosophy is that it is worth the wait to find the right people, a ‘they will do approach’ does not work for me. We must have excellence in our roles, so only the best will do!
Presently, employee management and retention takes up most of my focus as we aim towards building a culture where people love to come to work and take a sense of pride in what they do.

Timely rewards, both tangible and intangible, performance-based appraisals and bonuses, formulation of employee-friendly policies and other employee engagement activities such as outbound trainings, in-house team building sessions etc., are some of the initiatives taken to rebuild the organizational work culture. This has been greatly instrumental in increasing motivation and job satisfaction amongst employees directly contributing towards the profitability of the business units.

We have however not been able to focus on leveraging technology to integrate talent platforms and have sparingly used the social media for talent engagement purposes. Talent acquisition and integration have been priority areas as of now. Going forward, as the organization grows and we achieve success in priority areas, we will try to capture the benefits of these tools as well.

HR at SMC Capitals Pvt Ltd is a strategic and business partner. HR’s role is to align the business requirements with peoples’ needs through the formulation of ‘Company’s Corporate Scorecard’. This clarifies the purpose and objectivity in performance management by clearly communicating the organization’s vision, mission, and values, to all employees.

HR also plays a transformational role by acting as a change agent. It has undertaken various restructuring measures and employee engagement initiatives such as ‘Reward & Recognition programs, team building trainings, etc. HR has been a key player in determining the KRAs and KPIs and assist in formulating ‘Goal sheets’ for employees with the focus on business profitability, which has led to clear accountability and performance-based rewards driving the efficiency and growth of the organization.

HR has benefited our company by acting as a business partner in the creation of the ‘right talent pool’ for the company. The key enabler of any organization is talent and it is the quality of our people which is our last true competitive differentiator. It has helped in aligning the company’s mission and vision with the demands of the business requirements.
Further the ‘Balanced Score Card’ method we follow entwines the business objective with our most important asset – our human capital. Hence people development, mentoring, and coaching are key factors that find importance in my scorecard.