The quest to find the most prolific HR leaders, who have been bold, courageous, resilient and future-forward in their efforts and endeavours has been on for the last 12 years through People Matters Are You In The List Awards. And this year is no different! In these times of uncertainty and volatility, organisations are looking towards the HR to design solutions that will help them thrive with a skilled workforce.  

With a new partnership with AON, that envisions to build a robust HR fraternity to drive talent and business outcomes, we are more than excited about the new processes in place to find the next emerging HR leader. AON brings in their expertise as assessment partners, that helps us use valid and reliable assessments to evaluate candidates objectively and uniformly. These assessments are linked to AON’s HR competency framework built on three key pillars - Business Acumen, Effective Partnership and Technical Acumen.

It is not easy to test the skills of a leader, more so today with continuous disruptions at work. That’s why we have a six-stage rigorous application process this year that will test your cognitive skills, personality, behaviours, ability to perform tasks under pressure and learn from the best. 

The application process begins with a simple form that asks the candidates for their personal and professional details, the last date of which is April 6. Once you have filled out the form, you are requested to take an Online Application Test, with the results announced on April 20. The complexity meter rises in the second stage of the application process with personality, cognitive and functional assessments. As a part of this process, we will look at the holistic profile of a candidate through AON’s award-winning personality assessment, ADEPT, their suite of gamified cognitive assessments, and situational judgement tests to evaluate functional and behavioural competencies. While cognitive assessment helps us gauge the likelihood of success and job performance, personality assessments looks at an individual to decipher what breaks them under pressure and if they are indeed a team player, among other traits. 

Once you qualify through this round, you make it to case-based situational judgement questions (SJQs) and video interviews. The idea here is to understand your reaction and response to work-related scenarios to examine your innovative spirit and problem-solving ability. The video interview shall be automated with a set of pre-determined questions for the candidates on a platform. The final results for this round will be announced on May 29. 

Now, the candidates move on to one of the most exciting and enlightening rounds of Are You In The List Awards, where a group of leading CHROs, the likes of Dilip Pattanayak, JSW; Ritesh Rana, Britannia Industries; Pavitra Singh, PepsiCo and Anurag Patnaik, Nestle will mentor and guide the future HR leaders for the final face-off with the jury. It will be a long process with group coaching sessions that will equip each of the candidates with the right mindset and attitude so they are able to understand priorities, policies, people and processes better. 

Next comes one of the toughest barrier to your win: the CEO Jury Evaluation, where the finalists will meet our jury including Ashok Ramachandran, Schindler India; Sukhleen Aneja, The Good Glamm Group; Samir MC, Fortune Hotels; Satish Pai; Hindalco Industries and Shivam Puri, Cipla Health virtually in a face-off you’ve never seen before. There will be questions, discussions, sharing of new perspectives as the jury identifies the emerging future HR leaders. You will be waiting with bated breathe as the results will be out on July 19. 

Once the winners are locked in, the award ceremony will take place at Asia’s largest HR and WorkTech conference, People Matters TechHR India on August 4 at Leela Ambience, Gurugram, where the winners and emerging HR leaders to look out for will be recognised amidst globally renowned HR veterans and colleagues.  

So, are you ready to roll? All you need to be to fulfil the eligibility criteria is: Be in the age-range of 26-35 with three years of experience in HR, holding a job role in that department. Chances like these come knocking at your door rarely so register now!