“HR Is Like That Oil Which Keeps Various Cogs In Firm’s Machinery Working”

“When I was given a warm welcome at OYO LIFE, I came across the problem that our TA team was spending more time on reporting and less time on recruiting and the lack of advanced tech tool didn’t help either. This led to the team working on the collation of data from various recruiters as and when Management asks for an update. We were recruiting on Google Sheets! There was no formal Applicant Tracking System. We needed to innovate and make our process more efficient without incurring a lot of costs. As the company was growing fast, this used to happen more often than usual. There was a need to establish a focus on recruiting and reduce efforts on non-value adding tasks to the function.”

To solve this problem I and my team approached it through 3 angles;

 People - We trained our people on how to input values on google sheets.

 Process - We followed a practice of reviewing the statistics with leadership and adhering to timelines for audit 

Technology - We created advanced visualisation to increase recruiter productivity by 50 per cent and reduce our time to fill by 33 per cent

Anuj Mishra, Ass. Manager, compensation and benefits, OYO, developed an understanding of a wide mix of job roles across new-age sectors like transportation and hospitality after having joined OYO. 

Initially, he used to prepare salary costing and focused on optimising it for his business unit. He encountered an anomaly where the company was paying a certain set of off-role employees extra salary. “We had paid them 2 per cent of our monthly budget. I had recommended heavy actions on Managers. However, the Head cited the problem as a human error and the investigation inconclusive. This problem arose due to a lack of audit of a set of employees who moved from off-role to on-role. I later integrated off the role with HRMS.”

Considering that it is an era of knowledge workers and HR needs have evolved, hence, ensuring six working days, a meal and keeping the Compliance officer happy is actually the need of the hour, believes Mishra. 

Mishra’s belief system is such that, “HR is like that oil which keeps various cogs in the firm’s machinery working; in the absence of HR you might not feel a thing till the machine starts showing symptoms of friction.”