HR plays vital role in strategic business planning: experts

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Chennai: Enigma of Engineerings donning the role of MBAs in leading the corporate bandgwagon leaving huge void in core engineering professions, the IT industry setting unidirectional career path for fresh engineering graduates and role of the IT in talent management are some of the high spots hit by the practising HR professionals at the two-day conclave of National HRD Network (NHRDN) in Chennai.

Divulging the interim findings of HR practices survey 2008, NS Rajan, regional president, NHRD (North), partner, Human Capital, E&Y, said HR has a 90% role to play in strategic business planning process. About 70% organisations in the survey revealing plans to hire despite slowdown with majority of bigger companies favouring internal recruitment to external hiring on talent acquisition, he said.

Addressing on ‘next generation talent’, Padma Kumar, head HR, Saint Gobain Glass, India, said time has come for a creation of skill development corporation interlinking the colleges business schools and technical institutions to generate large pool of talent.

Referring to the emergence of corporate universities and HR competency testing tools, Kumar said the HR industry at the threshold of identifying the right talent can benefit from such universities by continuous learning and training on broad areas like business leadership, social intelligence and international capability and competency screening by IT-enabled tools.

On way forward for HR, Rajan’s paper describes HR professional to be an alchemist imbedded with multifarious skills in cost efficiency, job sculpting, HR communication, competency based PMS (performance management system), diversity programmes, workplace flexibility and action learning programmes.

Delivering her address on role of technology in HR, Ganga Priya Chakraverti,India business leader, Mercer India, said human capital management software market with solutions like HRMS (Human Resource Management System) and HRI (Human Resource Intelligence) is growing and is expected to reach $10 billion mark in 3 years from now.

HRMS and HRI are growing twice as fast as enterprise application market and Gartner study on human capital analytics find Saas (Software as a service) next in thing in the segment, she added. Urging HR professionals to adopt quantitative skills to provide high level analytics, she reiterated numbers, analyse, read, interpret data and be technology literate.