The Shape of Work
The Shape of Work
#512: Sathish Arumugam on exploring tech recruiting, diversity, and women in leadership
"AI's integration in recruitment holds promise, yet challenges persist. Exploring its potential in optimizing candidate searches, especially in addressing the indexing issue within applications, can significantly save time and enhance efficiency in identifying top talent."
Welcome aboard! In today’s episode of The Shape Of Work podcast, we're turning the spotlight on the realm of tech recruiting and the journey toward workplace diversity, guided by our insightful guest, Sathish Arumugam, a Senior Talent Partner at Ansys. With over a decade of professional expertise, he boasts a diverse career path, having contributed to esteemed organizations like TML Inc, Symantec, Dassault Systemes, and VMware. His educational journey includes a Bachelor of Science degree from Bangalore University and an MBA attained from Visvesvaraya Technological University.
In this episode, you'll journey through Sathish's career, gaining insights on current trends in tech recruiting, the integration of AI, rising hybrid work opportunities, and the path toward achieving diversity.
Episode Highlights
- AI in recruitment and hybrid work opportunities
- Challenges in achieving diversity hiring goals due to scarcity, interview biases, and lack of accommodating workplace arrangements
- What are the challenges faced regarding gender equality in leadership roles and during job applications?
- Tech industry trends and skills in demand
Follow Sathish on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Archit Sethi
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks prides itself on being an organisation focused on employee well-being and workplace culture, leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.
Hello and welcome to the Shape of Work, a podcast series by Springworks. My name is Anoop and I am your host. Each week, we will be talking to top people managers across the world on the future of work and how it's shaping our workplace. So sit back and get ready to find out more from these movers and shakers, as we have a no-holes bar. Anything goes. Conversation with them about their journey, their insights, their thoughts, most importantly, their ideas and vision for the workplace of the future. Join in on the conversation, leave a comment and don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Shape of Work podcast, and today we have with us Mr Satish Arumugam, who is currently working as a senior talent partner at NCIS. Hi, satish, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Hello Ajit. Thank you for having me on your show. I've heard you've been a podcast before. You're an amazing host. Thank you for all that you're doing for the HR community.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy to have you. So, to begin with, could you please tell our listeners about something about yourself, your career trajectory, and how has your journey been so far?
Speaker 3:Sure, but talking about myself in a Bangalore, a group of last-year-gen Bangalore live in a place called Kair Krum, which is the heart of the city and which is the most busiest road to the IT corridors from the back, coming to studies. I was an average. I ended up doing an MBA in HR from BDU and I think my life changed during my MBA days at that time, when I got based in a firm called Talent Management Labs. About Talent Management Labs they have the appeared management concerning firms in Bangalore and I happened to work on different requirements software development, testing, devops, support groups and my clients were majorly tech giants like Google, amazon, worldwide Labs. For anybody, I think the kind of start someone gets in their first company will play an important and important role in deciding the rest of the career.
Speaker 3:I think that way. I was very blessed to get a good start at Talent Management Labs. I worked there for about a couple of years and then I went on to work for various other tech giants, like exchanging semantic, the source systems, where I had the opportunity to work on some challenging assignments and previous to learn a lot from the seniors and from the team that I was working with. Currently I work with a firm called Ansys. I work there as a senior recruiter. Ansys is a software product development firm. We try to solve problems that exist in simulation work. Ansys mostly carries to manufacturing companies, aerospace companies, automobile companies, semiconductors and healthcare. We are perhaps the market leaders in simulation.
Speaker 3:My primary role at Ansys is to solve one of the two critical R problems that exist in the organization, which is recruitment. I help bridge the talent gaps. I help build engineering teams. I play an HR architecture role in designing and developing talent strategy for Ansys. The second R we all know, you know it is attention. That piece is taken care of by colleagues who are in the job organizations. That's about me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And now, as we all know, this is sort of like the season of recruitment, so we are going to ask you some really relevant questions, I believe. What are some of the latest trends in tech recruiting?
Speaker 3:Tech recruiting. I think AI has been AI and recruitment has stuck up the town. Perhaps I did try my hands on chat GP, the great job descriptions for AI and MLX and I did work magically. I am looking forward to know if it can solve indexing problem in the application tool as well, say if I have founded applications for a position and if it can list me the actual top 10 resumes in order, considering all the other valuable, sorry variable factors like quality of resume, tech stack etc. And if it can give me the top 10 resumes. I think that will save a lot of time for us. Ai and recruitment yes, I think that is one thing which most of us are looking forward to, and the other common trends that we see in the industry are companies are offering more and more hybrid work opportunities these days. I think that will continue to exist in the coming days as well. There is a significant spike in companies who are working on simulation I mean spike in recruitment who are into simulation, 3d modeling graphics, aerospace, healthcare, automobile, food and travel industries.
Speaker 1:So these guys are actively hiring.
Speaker 3:Perhaps they have been very conservative with their hiring approaches and I think they will continue to grow in the market.
Speaker 2:Amazing. When we talk about tech hiring, I think one of the really key pain points that we usually discuss is how to bring in diversity into the culture, because if we go with the trends and how, it is usually more male dominated or male oriented, so it becomes relatively difficult to bring in the diversity into the organization. So what are some of the challenges that you think are there or maybe you have faced, and how do you think we can overcome that?
Speaker 3:Well, that's one of the most difficult problems that most of the organizations are trying to solve. The basic diversity requirement we need to address today is gender equality at work. We are kind of struggling to strike a balance there, but most of the companies are now at 20% or 25% or 30%. Achieving a 50% mark is a dream for many and place. We have veteran hiring and PWD and LGBTQ, etc. So how do we achieve this 50% mark? It's going to be challenging for most of the stakeholders. We're talking about the challenges. We certainly cannot compromise the skills and hire diversity candidates because organizations are not running for charity.
Speaker 3:So, I would say, if you ask me what are the challenges and diversity recruitment? First of all, there is a resource capacity in some organizations that are interview biases. A few of the organizations don't have friendly policies, and I think that is very important for anybody to come and work, and can organizations accommodate the special workplace arrangements for these diversity candidates?
Speaker 3:Well, that's another question we have how do you solve them? The second part of the question. I think there should be more and more gender equality in leadership roles. In today's context, there are very less women leaders. I think there should be more opportunity for women leaders in the organization. Organizations must train, educate their recruiters, interview panelists to bring more awareness on the common biases that we have when we are interviewing candidates. Perhaps companies should see what they're getting from the market rather than thinking of only one side. They should also contribute towards the market is what I'm trying to contribute to the ecosystem as a whole. So there must be more and more trainings offered to potential candidates for the organizations. So I think there must be long-term investments.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Very accurately, you said that we need to have more women leaders, or maybe women representation at the leadership level, which is extremely important. Only then we can expect some change to come in. I mean, it gets easier to bring in the change, but at the same time, I think it's high time that we just stop looking at the conventional ways of recruiting and give different expects more importance with changing times. So, now that we've spoken about the diversity-related challenges, what are some of the most common challenges otherwise that you think the tech companies would be facing or are facing?
Speaker 3:I think there are a lot of job requirements are. There are a lot of resumes that's been but I don't understand what is the missing factor. I think the answer is most of them are junk People who apply to our roles. At least 70 to 80 percent of them are junk today. Now I see a fresher applying for the next two years for profile and all that. I appreciate their confidence, but it may not work out practically.
Speaker 3:So candidates should be more mindful in applying to these roles so recruiters can review profiles and update candidates' application status to them. Because there's another complaint about this side. They say we don't hear from recruiters, we don't hear from hiring managers or organizations or other application status. Today, if you talk about recruiters, let's say a particular recruiters working on some 10 to 15 racks. Each one of the racks they would get about 400 to 700 applications and that would roughly contribute to five into 15, roughly around 7000, 7000 applications. So we're dealing with that kind of number. So candidates should be more mindful and apply for right jobs, right roles. I think that is very important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely so. Also, if we see at the global level, there was in the major economies like the UK, the US. We saw a sort of slowdown in there especially. I mean there was a lot of layoffs, especially in the tech sector. How do you see these entire tech jobs being impacted here in India because of that?
Speaker 3:Well, in my opinion, there is no slowdown of economy at all. Tell me which companies at last. You're talking about. The third giants, the cloud companies, the e-commerce companies? I don't think so. Nobody is at loss, perhaps along these companies. Travel industry is a hotel and food business we're doing well. There's a significant growth in automotive industry too, so I don't think they are at loss. What I think is they are trying to reorg themselves, probably let go their employees or working on their rent and splits. So the herd mentality should change. Employees or candidates should work on different domains, solve different problems, different universes. That might put them in a safe zone. Yeah, that's what I think, but if you ask me honestly, I don't think there's a slowdown in the market. The market and the share prices are equally good. They're doing pretty good on the financial aspects as well. I don't think any companies are at loss.
Speaker 2:So, now that we move towards the last question, I would really want to take this opportunity to ask you, since you've been recruiting so what skills do you think are currently very relevant in the industry? If you speak from the tech point of view, what are some of the skills that are completely non-negotiable?
Speaker 3:Good question. I think, like I said, people working on rent and skills could be the old-time Java or Selenium. All of these skills are becoming very relevant in these days, with automation and AI coming into picture. If you ask me the top skills that are being recommended in the market today, ai plays, takes the first role, and then you have web technologies, data science.
Speaker 3:I think these are a few topics that candidates should probably upgrade themselves and learn about these skills in parallel to what they're doing today, so they can be ready for the next 10 years Awesome.
Speaker 2:So thank you, Sudeesh, for joining us for this extremely well-informed conversation today. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Archeet. I'm really thrilled to be talking to someone like you who is studying it, doing amazing podcasts. Thanks for your time. It has been a wonderful session with you as well. Wish you a new organization.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you so much and thanks to all listeners for tuning into this episode. Thank you, bye.