Recruiting Lessons from Google

How does Google manage to be different everytime 🙂 Their recruitment advertisement in today’s Times of India Ascent is another example that !

The world’s no.1 search-engine company has positioned itself as a startup in this job-advertisement.

The catch line says ‘Start-up company with manpower, funding an ideas seeks entrepreneur‘.

A thing or a two to learn for the modern-companies:

Comfort feel for your potential employees
Learn how to position yourself even if you aren’t a startup anymore. Provide a start-up comfort factor to your potential recruits. Talk about the open-culture, encouragement for entrepreneurship and things like that.

Startup tag works well
Jumping on the big company bandwagon is easy. Staying on with your current start-up tag is tough.

They say it works both ways. A company’s screening process includes relevant experience, educational background and similar parameters. OTOH, a candidate screens the right companies for his job. ‘Culture’ is a vital ingredient of his company-screening process.

Marketing, Social Media & Branding Blogs in India

What XML feed of some of the best Social-media, Marketing and Branding blogs in India

Why Thoughts inspired by Age of Conversation’s Douglas Karr. Primarily, there was a need for an XML/OPML file for india focussed blogs.

Who All blog-readers who enjoy following trends/thoughts/insights/analysis on social-media, marketing and branding trends in India.

How Simply use the import feature in your feed reader to import from these blogs.

Where Download the xml-feed from here

Featured blogs so far [listed in alphabetical order]:

Abhishek Jha, Anjali, Daksh, Dhivya Subramanian, FMCG & RETAIL Marketing, Gaurav Mishra, Gaurav Shukla, Harish B, Jessie Paul, Manish, manuscrypts, Pallavi Bhardwaj, Preeti Chaturvedi, Rajesh Aithal, Rajesh Kumar, Rajesh Lalwani, Rajiv Dhingra, Ravi Kiran, Sampad Swain, Saurabh Garg, Vandana Ahuja, Vikas Tandon.

The list has just begun. Feel free to contribute more names and I’d happy to update the XML feed 🙂

India’s Buzziest Media Brand

Times of India has been given the ‘Buzzy 10 Award’ for catering to the consumer in a complete 360 degree way.

(Image clicked with KODAK EasyShare C653)

Congratulations for the award and thank you for making my morning ginger-tea Xtra special since childhood! Keep the good work on and on…

A Promise to the Nation

‘Where are the booking forms available?’ Ramesh asked the sales executive at a leading car showroom in Bangalore.

‘Sir, I am not sure about the booking dates, but I do believe that you should visit Auto-Expo in New Delhi.

‘Oh! Auto-Expo’ , Ramesh paused for a while and to confirm asked the sales executive, ‘Are you talking about the one that is being organized in Pragati Maidan in a couple of months from now-on? ‘

‘Yeah, you’re right Sir !’, the sales executive answered.

A man in his early 40s, Ramesh walked out of the show-room and headed towards his home. Back home, children were waiting for their dad to come. The bell rang and they opened the door with excitement in their eyes. To their happiness, dad told them that they would be going to Auto-Expo 2008. Everyone was excited, as they knew they’re going to get its glimpse.

Image Credits: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/graphics/2008/01/12/mftat3.jpg

Yes, Ramesh’s family could now think about buying it. All his life, he had been traveling on a two-wheeler scooter. With his four-figure monthly income he couldn’t even dream about affording a luxury called as ‘car’. But suddenly from nowhere, some-one had given him hope. A man born in the streets of Mumbai on December 28,1937, a man called Ratan Naval Tata had raised his expectations.

After-all, it was Ratan’s promise to the nation. The promise was about a car! A car which was termed as the car for a common man and Ramesh had every right to consider himself as a common man 🙂 Ramesh had only one man and one brand to thank for it. Ratan Naval Tata and brand behind it i.e. Tata Motors.

Well that was about two months ago ! Today, the whole nation is swooning over Tata’s new car available at a cheap price of 1 lakh Indian rupees. The name of the car is Tata Nano and Ratan has fulfilled his promise 🙂 with full-support from the engineering team by unveiling it at the Auto-Expo which is being organized at Pragati Maidan.

As for Ramesh, he happens to be just one among the billion.

Update – Although off-topic, I just wanted to share with you Glossary of Blogging and Social Media Terms. It would give you clarity about the whole link, please visit the link here

Updated on January 15th at 3:08 P.M. Other thoughts on this topic – Tata Nano – the Dream Car? , Sampad Swain’s Blog-Post

Technorati Tags: brands,cars, nano, automobiles, indian cars

ATM Redefined

Strange heading for a blog-post, but I must admit that I couldn’t find a more appropriate one 🙂 Amul has announced the launch of its 24/7 ATM. Nope, it is not Automated Teller Machine aka Any Time Money it is Any Time Milk.

Consumers have strong reasons to be excited as there is every chance of milk dispensing machines being seen across the entire nation.

I do see several positives in the entire move and there are indicators that it would work big time

• The experiment is being carried out in tier-III cities and would be expanded to tier-II and tier-I cities later on . A well thought out bottom-up approach 🙂
• The machines can be operated 24/7, a customer-focused USP which is bound to attract a lot of buzz and attention. Having said that, it remains to be seen where & how much would the milk sales be during the 10pm-6am slot.
• Density of outlets in each city would be governed by the milk consumption/demand. The beauty is that the structure and operations of each outlet would be same in each city
• Although, the market space is not purely un-contested the only competitor/similar service seems to be Mother Dairy which isn’t 24/7 and is functional in Delhi & NCR.
• The whole concept isn’t born from scratch but again adds value to the original idea..

Only downside – Whenever the evolution takes place in metros Amul outlets have to beat the heavy price of commercial location rentals

A big word of thanks to trak.in’s post which instigated me to write this piece rather than dropping a comment in the original post.

REVAi: Old Story in A New Bottle?

Very rarely do I blog about topics not which are not tech-specific and today seems to be one special day! I am basically talking about the launch of new REVAi from the electric car company REVA. To its credit REVA is the first company in India to come up with this unique innovative concept of electric cars.

 

Talking about REVA for that matter, let me ask if you have seen it (very few guys have actually seen this toy-shaped car on the streets of Indian capital)? If you have, what is the first impression that you get about it? The first thing that strikes my mind when I talk about REVA is “cost”. Yeah, REVA has been promoted so far as a cost-effective fuel efficient car for a typical Indian consumer.

Lets look at some of the features of REVAi -:

Easy to Drive

Which car manufacturer doesn’t say that it is not easy to drive. I won’t really look upon it as an improvement from the previous version.

Easy to Charge

Strong point here! It can be charged just like a mobile charger. To charge the car to 100% it takes about 8 hours. At a charge of 80% the car runs for 65kms. Quite interestingly it takes only two and half hours to charge the car to 80%. As you can see the real time is taken while charging it from 80% to 100%.

Assuming, a car-owner travels from Rohini to Gurgaon everyday, with a bit of route-diversion he could end up traveling about 65kms which means that he has to effectively charge his car overnight to ensure that is charged fully :).

Low Voltage System

From the security aspects, REVAi is a safe car as it uses a low voltage system.

The never ending of list of features makes it difficult for the average consumer to identify what’s really new in REVAi? What’s fresh?

For more features click here..

At an ex-showroom price of Rs 399343.00 it seems to pitched on the higher side. (Having said that no can deny the cost-advantages it offers in the long run).