Cost to Company

The tables have turned.

But the mistakes keep spilling over.

In this episode, we spoke to Ria Shroff Desai (People and Culture Lead, Blume Ventures); Udayan Walvekar (CEO, GrowthX); Bhakti Dhanak (Associate Vice President - Human Resources, CIIE.CO) to understand some of the unobvious errors that candidates are making while applying for jobs in the 'employer's market' of 2023. 

Cost to Company is a careers and workplaces podcast from the The Ken’s newsroom.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform.

Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts, and much more here.

Listen to the latest episode of Daybreak. 

This episode of CTC was written, hosted, and produced by Shreevar Chhotaria. 

For months and months now, there’s a word that’s been whispered among recruiters, founders, CXOs, and executives who are hiring for key positions in their companies.

It’s a word used to describe a cohort of professionals whose salaries are out of sync with the reality of the market. It’s a word that is used for people who work in product management, engineering, marketing, and even cross-functional roles.

Meet the “unhireables”. They live among us. They work in our offices. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see that their careers are paralysed. Some of them are actively seeking jobs, but their interviews end abruptly once they inform the recruiter of their current compensation. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re unhireable.

Between 2020 and 2022, investors pumped billions of dollars into startups whose founders and leaders offered up the mythical “hypergrowth” narrative. Those startups, in turn, pumped money to hire and grow a layer of mid-level and senior-level executives whose job was to deliver on that hypergrowth narrative.

And salaries went through the roof. Hikes of 50% and above were par for the course.

Cut to the present.

If overvalued startups are widely recognised as a problem, can overvalued employees escape the same fate?

This episode was written, hosted, and produced by Akshaya Chandrasekaran with audio engineering by Rajiv CN and creative inputs from Anushka Mukherjee and Snigdha Sharma.

Listen to how Apple is building an army of ‘faithfuls’ in one of the most price-sensitive markets in the world, on Daybreak, a business podcast by The Ken.

Cost to Company is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

Some call them discreet reference checks, some call them back channel checks, some call them ghost reference checks.

They're growing rapidly, and recruiters are leaning on them like never before.

In this week’s episode, host Sneha Vakharia takes you behind the scenes into why they’re growing, how they’re done, and what you need to do about it. 

This time last year, companies were giving away eye-popping rewards to retain talent. From BMW bikes to sponsoring vacations, they did it all to lure top talent.

Times were good. Talent was scarce. And start-ups and companies were flush with money and endless capital. But, not anymore.

On today’s show, why retention has gone from broad-based to focussed, open to hidden, and most importantly – equal to unequal. Companies are applying focussed strategies only for select top performers who are crucial to the bottomline. Retention has become extremely targeted, discerning, and most importantly, triaged.

Employees are often unaware of the goings on in the HR department, but they can definitely sense a shift. This episode will help you identify what’s changing and where you stand in your company. In fact, it will help you answer the question: does my company want to save me?

Credits: Written and hosted by Akshaya Chandrasekaran, produced by Anushka Mukherjee, and engineered by Rajiv CN.

Also check out Brady’s brand new newsletter, Present / Future, out now. 

Subscribe to The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. 

The situation has changed. And the equation has too. 

If the past two years were all about throwing money to attract top talent, 2023 has seen a general sobering up of appraisals and job switch hikes.  

In a strange turns of events, some employees are okay with taking a cut on their annual compensation in exchange for ‘stability’, in this highly volatile job market. 

I speak to Saaquib Dawoodani (Head of Talent, Revolut), Abha Khurana (People Success Lead, inFeedo), and Shashank B. (Writer + creative consultant, an international OTT giant) to understand the new math of careers. 

Which is more than just the numbers. 

The First Principles episode featuring Gaurav Munjal of Unacademy releases on 11th May. Subscribe to First Principles and get notified when a new episode drops:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/first-principles/id1639125773

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Rou1kKH8CQYoDDaHavaw1?si=ca8662215b5c4a18

Cost to Company is a careers and workplaces podcast from the The Ken’s newsroom.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform.

Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

This episode was written, hosted, and produced by Shreevar Chhotaria 

This week your host Sneha will take you inside businesses at war, through the voices of those fighting in the trenches. We’ll hear how the same war — the war against inflation, a funding winter and shrinking markets — is being fought differently in different businesses. We’ll see how war sharpens, and sometimes disfigures, a business. We’ll see what is martyred and what is protected.

This is what a business fighting for survival looks like.

Tell us, is your business fighting for survival?

MBAs – love them or hate them, but you can’t ignore them. Over the years, they have taken over every business vertical – general management, sales and marketing, growth and strategy, human resources, and even product and technology. Name it, they have been there and done that.  

But there was one bastion that remained unconquered by the MBAs for the longest. One last holdout – hardcore finance. Sitting at the apex of this pristine castle were the chartered accountants. Crunching numbers and calling the shots, out of reach and beyond attack. Or at least so they thought. 

Compliance used to be the moat for CAs, but companies need finance chiefs to see more than just the account books. They prefer proactive risk analysis, strategy, and financial planning. So, the generalist MBAs, with microscope in one eye and telescope in the other, look more attractive for the job. 

The MBA army has arrived at the CFO gates. The attack is real and from all sides – on curriculum, on relevance, and on pay packages. Will the accounting purists be able to hold the fort and defend themselves against the mighty army of MBAs? 

In this episode, I spoke to the best and brightest CFOs in our country, especially the ones who have done both a CA and an MBA – PayU India's CFO Arvind Agarwal; OYO's CFO Abhiskek Gupta; and co-founder and CFO of Cars24, Ruchit Aggarwal – to get an on-ground perspective. Tune in to find out more.

This episode was written, produced, and hosted by Akshaya Chandrasekaran. Write to her to become a part of Cost to Company. 

In the last few months alone, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce announced that they were going to begin the process of flattening their organisations. That they were going to have fewer and fewer hierarchies in their organisations. Fewer hierarchies means fewer managers.

The pattern here appears to be that in tough economic times, when efficiency becomes paramount, businesses are rethinking their need for managers. And concluding that they don’t need that many.

Because managers are expensive, and then you need managers to manage managers. And people to manage paying, looking after, and hiring those managers. And if you have self-motivated, ambitious, and disciplined lower-level employees, why do you need managers to manage them? Are we not capable of self-management? Why would you layer on unnecessary bureaucracy that only slows a business down?

We spoke to three experts about this. And learnt that hierarchies and layering are essential to a business based on its complexity. A more complex business will always need more managers, no matter the economy.

And that the reason we are undermining the role of managers in this present moment isn’t because we need them less and less. It’s because all the managers around us are just so bad.

This episode was written, produced and hosted by Sneha Vakharia. Write to her to become a part of Cost to Company. 

You've heard about them. You've worked with them. You've thoughts around them.

But have you really heard from them?

In this episode, I speak to Kaavyya Kesarwani (Growth & Community, Juno), Sherina Poyyail (Policy professional, Ex: The Quint), Bhavya Narula (Founding team, GrowthX), Sindhu Shivaprasad (Chief of Staff, Obvious) and Shashank Baliga (Writer, a major OTT platform) to understand what the 'new kids on the block' think about careers, workplaces, and whatever else happens in between.

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Hosted, Written, and Produced by Shreevar Chhotaria

Here are some messages Cost to Company has received over the past months.

“I believe working with GenZ is the toughest thing I do at work.  They look at their jobs as a means to the next job. This has dramatically reduced their qualitative output, even if their quantitative output is enough. “

“Workplace hierarchy is its absurd with GenZs”. 

“There is an increasing gap between values of older generation and new generation of knowledge workers”. 

“There is a huge mismatch in expectations that millennials have in the workplace.”

From this vantage point, It sounds like generations are tussling it out on the floors of workplaces, each resentful and angry at the other. 

We decided to dig deeper.  And we found that the real story hear is not about GenZ’s and millenials, but that many managers,  are struggling to manage a generation shaped by a pandemic. Anyone working with the newest, freshest interants to the workforce, is tasked with getting work out of those who were young and most impressionable thought some of the most traumatic moments in our collective history. 

In this episode of Cost to Company we talk to managers who are coping with these changes. We find out what would make their lives easier, what they’re looking for in their colleagues. If at the end of this episode, you can empathise better with your manager, and have learned how to work with them to get what you need, then we will consider this episode a success.