Exit options: One should be clear about how ESOPs can be monetised. Unlike the share of a listed company which can be traded, encashing an ESOP happens only when the company gets listed or when a merger or acquisition happens. Documentation: Ensure the grant document is executed in a formal manner.

It should capture all details related to an employee’s grant, right from the vesting period to monetisation of the grant in case of acquisition, IPO and even a shutdown.

Taxation: Returns earned from the ESOPs are taxable, which is currently 33%. Apart from the fineprint, self-awareness about one’s own risk appetite is also critical. Just like investing in the stock market, one needs to be mindful that this is a high-risk investment.

Startup executives becoming millionaires with their ESOPs is an exception and not a norm. It’s important to understand the vision of the partners and their value system. Startups which crop up, taking advantage of the valuation game, lose steam. It’s also important to understand what is one’s own financial objective behind joining a startup — if one is fine with deferred gratification, then one should not hesitate.

However, if one is looking at ESOPs as a means to fund prescheduled financial commitments, one should think twice. Though an exciting option, it is always prudent to walk in with one’s eyes wide open and be clear on possible outcomes — you win big, you lose big.

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This article was published in Economic Times Panache

Hiring right

Hiring is an expensive proposition, and hiring wrong even more expensive. “It’s difficult in a 30-minute interview to make a full assessment of someone,” says K. Narayan, the Mumbai-based president, human resources (HR), of textile company Raymond Ltd. He finds psychometric tests useful because they add an important input to the evaluation of a candidate. Narayan says Raymond uses a mix of tests like the Thomas Personal Profile (TPP) Analysis and the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ).

“While a job interview reveals the person’s achievements, psychometric tests provide insight into their style of thinking and engagement,” says Gurprriet Siingh, Mumbai-based country head at leadership consulting firm YSC India. Tests like the MBTI, the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior and the Hogan Personality Inventory can tell employers whether the candidate has a participative style or a directive style of doing things, whether s/he is more operational and detail-oriented, or more of a strategic thinker, says Siingh.

There are also a whole set of customized psychometric tests. In India, testing companies like Gurgaon-based Mettl and Aspiring Minds and Pune-based Jombay design their own tests. There are different tests for different job roles and different seniority levels. “It’s about reducing error and subjectivity,” says Mohit Gundecha, chief executive officer (CEO), Jombay. Gundecha has a client list of 250-odd firms in sectors such as banking, insurance and retail hospitality. “We are democratizing assessment by defining key competencies, based on the analysis of top performers. Like for hospitality you need to be high on stress tolerance and networking, while for production management in a manufacturing concern, you need achievement orientation and attention to detail. Hence our tests look for these traits in potential hires,” says Gundecha.

Do they work?

Mumbai-headquartered Angel Broking is a user of Jombay’s “Feet on the Street” test, meant to select salesmen. “We’ve been using this test for the last six months, and we have seen our attrition levels go down,” says Subhash Menon, chief of HR and learning at Angel Broking. The test has identified perseverance, communication and relationship management as traits that top-performing salesmen have.

Some companies, like HR outsourcing firm Teamlease Services Ltd, develop their own tests. Teamlease recruits up to 5,000 employees every month and determines what role is best suited to their skills and personalities—sales, back office, retail, data entry. “We have our own in-house team that administers psychometric tests and looks at attitudes like patience and perseverance levels, decision-making abilities and confidence,” says Neeti Sharma, the firm’s Bengaluru-based senior vice-president.

How accurate are they?

Can candidates “game” the tests by pretending to have behaviour patterns that they think employers will like? It’s not so easy, say the test-makers. “We ask questions in different ways to check for consistent responses. And we employ ‘situation tests’, where we ask for their response to a particular situation. There are no clear right and wrong answers, so it makes it harder for candidates to fake responses,” says Varun Aggarwal, co-founder and chief technical officer, Aspiring Minds, which works with both students and companies, testing domain knowledge in subjects as well as behavioural skills.

Aggarwal, a postgraduate engineering student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, became interested in testing and psychology while he was pursuing his postgraduate degree in engineering. “Testing is at the intersection of statistics and psychology,” says Aggarwal. He returned to India in 2007 and set up Aspiring Minds. Aggarwal says each psychometric test has an inbuilt measure to gauge if the candidates’ responses are incongruent.

Mettl’s CEO Ketan Kapoor agrees that the tests are all about statistics: “Psychometrics may be an inexact science, there may be a few false positives, but on an overall population we will be directionally accurate.”

Still, there are many caveats to using psychometric tests as recruiting tools. Firstly,the test should be chosen carefully, depending on the job requirement. Then, the test results need to be interpreted carefully. Even with the right interpretation, test results don’t always hold. Siingh explains: “The test results will tell you in which category people fall (extroverts, introverts, micro-managers, delegators.) But it tells you nothing about whether they are true to the type.” And, he says, the test does not take into account the possibility that an individual has the ability to manage their type. So you may reject a candidate whom the test labels as having a preference for micro-managing, even though he has developed the capacity to delegate.

For all that, psychometric tests remain an integral part of assessment. They are popular not only at the recruitment stage, but also later, in assessing leadership skills and in succession planning.

Spot the talent

Psychometric tests are used by career counsellors to help students choose suitable careers. Young professionals looking at career changes, as well as older professionals, can also take the tests to determine their competencies and future trajectory. These tests, which include the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) and others, are available online, for prices upwards of Rs.2,500. Consulting firms like Aon Hewitt, YSC India and AscendPsychology, as well as assessment firms like Aspiring Minds and career counsellors like Mumbai-based ReachIvy, also administer these tests, and will help you interpret results, and suggest the additional skills that need to developed, for prices ranging from Rs.3,000 to Rs.2.5 lakh.

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This article was published in Mint

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and senior vice-president, TeamLease, said, “A unified code signals accountability, uniformity, simplicity and ease of compliance and supervision. It is a forward-looking, progressive move, far from the erstwhile complex and regressive approach in our labour laws.”

RP Yadav, chairman and managing director, Genius Consultants, said, “Attempting to bring down 44 labour laws from to four codes and further to just one, the government is taking a major step in labour law reforms. This will also help to convert formalisation of the informal employment which will help job seekers.”

Under the draft code on wages, which amalgamates the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, the government intends to bring all employees under a minimum wage and vest the the power to fix it exclusively with the states, fix the wage ceiling for the purpose of eligibility for bonus and substitute the term “inspector” with “facilitator”.

This article was published in Financial Express

Essentially RPO is about bringing in predictability into the recruitment processes through dis-aggregating tasks and handing them over to specialist/s. Recruitment Services have been perceived as a human intensive and laborious. RPO breaks the myths of many such thought processes by offering results to customers on a real time basis. RPO aims at managing 100% fulfillment in a manner enabling decision making both for business teams and talent acquisition teams. A win win situation for both customer and the provider unlike the contingent model where there are very low levels of accountability to offer support and the choice of catering to difficult-to-hire roles lying with the provider making it a risky proposition for the customer.

Providing a recruiter on the rolls of the provider is not genuinely an RPO process as is misunderstood by the many in the recruitment industry. RPO is more than than outsourcing services as it can only succeed with mutual coordination and handholding on each process.

The levels of accountability to serve increases when the provider has exclusivity of requirements against the competition and the investment of time, money and effort are equally rewarded by outcomes. The provider is tied down by SLA’s and governance for the client to have a hold on the outsourced recruitment process which could prove risky if the commitment is not honoured to.

Few of the strengths which a true RPO brings to the table are predictability in hiring within TAT, enhanced employer branding, superior quality of hires, flexible recruitment, optimising processes through technology and automation, reduced cost per hire etc.

RPO proposition is not just helpful at enterprise level but also cater to the project specific need of an organisation which are sporadic and tsunami in nature. The most reliable answer for volume hiring in terms of TAT and cost efficiency is Project RPO which is designed to address size and scale of any recruitment need.

In today’s need for speed of growth with all the organisations the most edible cuisine to propel growth in terms of human capital is RPO. This is proven with over 50 RPO’s which TeamLease has executed successfully with multiple corporates in the last 18 months. The insights on the challenges revolves around capacity to build, cost consciousness, apt source mix to hire, calibrating the quality of intake, volume hiring requirements, niche or tough to hire skills etc.

Nature of RPO required for the specific needs of organisation vary from a transient engagement to managing the end to end recruitment process for organisations to meet their enterprise demands for manpower. TeamLease have bifurcated these RPO suites as Enterprise, Project, Process, Campus & Blended RPO.

Process RPO’s have gained fame and adoption as they address one or more pain points of the recruitment process which the organisation wants to outsource due to various reasons such as lack of specialisation, lack of manpower etc. One such RPO is POFU Process RPO which is a series of interventions (as defined by the organisation) which predicts the flight risk of an offered candidate through an interactive web and mobile enabled platform. This is truly called as predictive hiring. Any volume transaction process in recruitment can be outsourced as it saves manpower and creates better efficiency in the hiring eco system enabling the core team to focus on more important tasks.

How can RPOs help Startups? Well most of the Startups need to start from scratch. The first 50 employees in a startup are critical hires as they need to share the vision and goals of the founders. RPOs can help Startups to staff people by offering them exclusive services like salary survey and benchmarking, employer branding and analytics and other such value adds which will enable the recruitment engine to propel them.

Indian RPO industry is crossing the 1000 crore mark in the year 2017 with large players signing volume and long-term deals. There is a growth of 20-25% year-on-year for RPO and the acceptance and adoption industry wide is becoming rapid. Looks like RPO is the answer for all questions the recruitment challenges pose in India.

This article was published in World HR Diary

An article in DNA, talks about recent Maternity Benefits Bill being passed; along with inputs from Rituparna Chakraborty.

Radhika Pendse, head of communications at a top telecom company, is a happy mother. She can nurse her seven-month old baby while finishing work from home. She travels to her office twice a week if necessary but tends to stay put in her home-turned-study from where she monitors her nanny.

Not everyone is as lucky as Pendse. Currently, most women stop working after the birth of a baby or turn nervous mothers/workers having to stay away from them for a long period of time. Fortunately, the government seems to have taken the issue into consideration as the Maternity Benefits Bill passed by the Rajya Sabha increased maternity leave to 26 weeks from 12 weeks for women working in private firms. The policy also says that in industries where it is possible, nursing mothers should be allowed to work from home. After the Bill turns into a law, most mothers will be as happy as Pendse.

Experts say that this will standardize the way maternity is handled in most organizations. “Three months is not adequate for most working mothers to stabilize and generally request for an extension. Some companies consent and others do not. In some cases, they are paid and in others they are not. But this will bring in standards,” says Rituparna Chakraborty, Senior VP at Teamlease Services.

Companies gain too

A survey on gender diversity by Teamlease services, 22% of women said that managing maternity leaves and their return is key to ensure gender equality in the organizations. As per the survey, 72% of women are aware of an existing gender bias in the organization they work for.

Apart from creating a conducive environment, companies have much to gain by retaining this group of employees who constitute mid-level executives. Most women who would hail maternity benefits are in the age group of 28 and have at least seven to eight years of experience. The need for such executives in an organization is high. The cost and efforts of head-hunting and hiring such executives is high, along with the necessary training.

“The costs of providing the benefits will be offset in a healthy way in the form of retention and stability,” informs Dr Moorthy Uppaluri, MD and CEO of Randstad India.

Uppaluri says that companies should also plan for the change of work after they come back to work. “In most cases, the role that she was holding will be given away or she would have to join at a different position. Such changes have to be planned ahead to ensure their career growth leading to building a pipeline of women leaders in the future,” he advises.

Women in workforce

The participation of women in the workforce is as low as 20% currently and increasing these numbers will have a profound effect on the industry and the nation. According to a McKinsey’s The Power Of Parity report, “India could add $700 billion of additional GDP in 2025, upping the country’s annual GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points,” if it matches the momentum towards gender parity.

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This article was published in DNA

According to Babajob, a Bengaluru-based job search portal for blue and grey-collared workforce, there has been an increase of close to 10% in the salaries of delivery personnel year-on-year for the past four years.

“The sales season generally requires these companies to hire in big numbers, which results in an upward trend for not just delivery, but other job categories too like sales and customer service. We’ve also seen increased activity from hyperlocal, logistics companies, as well as more traditional retail operations,” said Babajob Co-founder Vir Kashyap.

Online players like Flipkart and Amazon have added 30% temporary delivery staff to meet the expected surge in shipment volumes during the festival sale season that started last month. According to previous reports, Flipkart and Snapdeal have said they will be hiring 10,000 temporary staff each during September/November to strengthen logistics and delivery.

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This article was first published in Economic Times

Civil servants are often better-educated and more articulate than ministers; so they are able to talk about any area. But familiarity is different from mastery. The most interesting recent books about adult learning — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Carol Dweck’s Mindset, Angela Duckworkth’s Grit, and Anders Ericsson’s Peak — suggest that mastery requires time. Isaiah Berlin once said “A fox knows many things but a hedgehog knows one important thing”. Better policy outcomes need hedgehogs; general practitioners don’t conduct heart surgeries.

India’s private sector has substantially raised its stakes in human capital, technology and innovation since 1991. Of course, comparing private sector execution to government performance is unfair because private sector goals are finite unlike the multiple and often contradictory goals of the government. But the capacity of the state does lag in certain respects and fixing it doesn’t need more cooks, but a different recipe. Political economist Charles Lindblom once described markets as similar to fingers (nimble and dexterous) and governments as akin to thumbs (powerful because of their capacity to exercise authority but lacking subtlety and flexibility). Countries should not have all fingers or all thumbs. Civil service reform is not a demand for a smaller state; it is needed to improve state capacity and effectiveness.

Of course, technocratic intervention alone is not enough to fix the government’s deficits. This is not a case for eliminating the generalist civil service but radically reforming it; ending the monopoly (25 per cent of top bureaucratic positions should be lateral entries), introducing specialisation (generalist civil servants must specialise after 10 years of field experience and have longer tenures), weeding out people (replicating the colonel threshold of the army for early retirement if not shortlisted for promotion), sharper performance management (it is mathematically impossible for 95 per cent to be outstanding. The across-the-board pay increases are unfair), ending ageism (we need to give top jobs to people when they are 45 rather than 58 years old), giving the top roles to functional services (for example, adopting the police commissioner system nationally), de-layering (eliminating additional and special secretaries) and rationalising (cutting the number of Central ministries to 25).

India and China are on opposite sides of this great divide. China’s geographic core has been governed, almost non-stop, by a rationalist bureaucracy since the late sixth century. But China is banging against the limits of what Daniel Bell admiringly describes as a “political meritocracy” in The China Model. The Chinese state’s sole focus on improving material conditions by “filling their stomachs and emptying their minds” is running out of steam as an increasingly affluent middle class recognises that they don’t live in an economy but a society and need more generalists (elected politicians and impartial judges). India, in contrast, has enough politicians but needs technocrats. In his book, China’s Economy, Arthur Kroeber suggests that, in public, Chinese officials like to describe reforms as “crossing the river by feeling for the stones” but in private they admit it’s more like “walking a tightrope over a bottomless pit with the rope behind you on fire”. A tightrope, raging fire, and bottomless pit are apt metaphors for urgency of reforms in India. The expiry date for generalist senior bureaucrats is past because they were never — and have only rarely become — technocrats.

“We work with leading pharma companies in the country and hire candidates for the industry in the top 8 metro cities. While Mumbai leads in job growth, Bengaluru and Hyderabad take the second and third slots respectively. Our experience has been that the sector is poised for exponential growth in the coming years. There is also a change in the face of hiring. Whiles medical representatives continue to contribute to the bulk of appointments for the pharma industry, the sector is also scouting for experienced and qualified experts to man regulatory and IP domains,” he said.

Another employment avenue is the e: pharmacy platform, which is beginning to indicate momentum with a tacit encouragement coming from the government to approve such service platforms. In addition, with a slew of regulations expected from the government, we see opportunities in niche segments like clinical research and demand for experts on drugs pricing, as noted Sen.

Yet another sector which indicates ample promise of new job opening is the healthcare sector. Here too, the need for trained manpower remains constant. “We see new hospitals, novel medical device companies and early-stage healthcare enterprises requiring both fresh and experienced qualified candidates. Therefore, while the pharmaceutical industry is perpetually in search of replacements, the healthcare sector is seeking access to better talent to keep pace with innovation and improved medical infrastructure,” Sen said.

This article was published in www.pharmabiz.com

Top sectors doling out jobs at these locations include information technology and BPOs, auto and auto ancillary, insurance, hospitality and healthcare.

Companies looking for recruitment beyond metros are Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), Godrej, Dabur, Hindustan Unilever and Hinduja Group.

“Knowledge of the local terrain is the prime requirement…Since frontline roles require good knowledge of the local market and its sensibilities as also the ability to speak the local dialect, hiring locally helps ensure business performance,” said V Krishnan, human resources executive director at Dabur India which has added close to 1,000 jobs in “upcountry and rural geographies” in recent months.

Officials said that smaller cities are relatively free from strikes and other disruptions compared to headquartered units.

“Moreover, workers from smaller towns are considered less attrition-friendly and more dedicated,” said Shubhayu Gupta, head of HR at Hinduja Global Solutions, part of the Hinduja Group.

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This article was published in Hindustan Times

Ecommerce companies are driving demand for temporary staff this festival season, accounting for as much as 60 per cent of the short-term jobs being created, as they go on an overdrive to win market share in the most lucrative few months of the year. Brick-and-mortar retailers as well as consumer durable and telecom players are also hiring staff on a temporary basis.

Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, LG, Samsung and Panasonic are among the companies that are set to ramp up temporary workers by up to 35 per cent to see them through the expected surge in demand. The trend is gaining steam in smaller towns as well, and most of the staff demand is in sales, logistics and customer support.

“Hiring in the ecommerce industry has become more skewed towards season. We see an increase in demand as well as compensation by 10-12 per cent compared to last year,” said Guruprasad Srinivasan, president, people and services at Quess Corp.

According to estimates, between 60,000 and 80,000 temporary jobs would be created in the organised sector alone this festival season while the unorganised sector would hire more. “Ecommerce companies account for over 60 per cent of the demand,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, senior vice-president at TeamLease Services.

Other staffing firms such as Kelly Services, Manpower and Randstad said while ecommerce continues to dominate, retail and telecom are going strong as well.

Moorthy K Uppaluri, managing director at Randstad India, said companies are expected to strengthen manpower by 20-30 per cent.

Flipkart, which kicks off its Big Billion Day event on October 2, is expected to hire more than 10,000 temporary staff to ramp up its delivery and logistics service to meet festival season demand.

Rival Snapdeal said the Diwali run-up would see the creation of nearly 10,000 temporary jobs from September 15 to November 15.

Amazon, which will be launching its Great Festival Sale in October, has launched six new fulfilment centres (FC) cater to the festive demand. “These new FCs will create direct employment with a mix of full time and temp staff,” said Raj Raghavan, director-HR at Amazon India.

Staffing sources said mandates from Samsung and LG have nearly doubled while Hitachi and Bata are also recruiting. Big brands are going into small cities and towns for better market coverage, they said. Hyperlocal firms such as Swiggy are also hiring temporary workers, they said.

“A lot of the consumer durable companies want freshers for which we have tie-ups with colleges,” said Vishnu Dev, director-manpower at ManpowerGroup.

At Panasonic India, Ajay Seth, head of sales and service, said the company has placed almost 34 per cent extra temporary staff compared with last year.

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This article was first published in Economic Times

China’s labour force is declining while India’s increases by 10 lakh workers every month. China’s farmto-non-farm transition happened to factories for exports. India’s fastest growing job roles are sales, customer service and logistics. Also, India doesn’t have the equivalent of a Chinese New Year weekend on Diwali, Eid or Christmas when 250 million people buy a train ticket to head home because we have not taken people to jobs on that scale.

In supply, the ‘degree premium’ in India is being replaced by the ‘skill premium’. This year, the bottom 20 per cent of engineers will get less salary than the top 20 per cent ITI graduates. Unemployable graduates is not a uniquely Indian problem. The world produced more graduates in the last 35 years than the 700 years before it. Consequently, 60 per cent of taxi drivers in South Korea, 30 per cent of retail sales clerks in the US and 15 per cent of high-end security guards in India have college degrees.

Just don’t let the princess turn into a frog

The case for employers engaging apprentices is strong: taking employees for a test drive, ensuring training is functional and firm-relevant, judging soft skills, lowering attrition, creating a pipeline for talent, lowering per-hire cost by lowering rejection rates, etc.

Soft skills are increasingly valuable, yet are hard to teach and are almost always learnt on the job. Apprenticeships offer a solution to the market failure in skill financing. Employers cannot pay for the manufacture of their own employees because of three holes in the bucket: (a) you pay for training but the employee does not get the job, (b) you pay for training and he gets a job but is not productive, and (c) you pay for training and he gets the job, is productive but leaves.

The three risks of hiring, productivity and attrition have created a financing failure in which employers are willing to pay a premium for trained candidates but not pay for training. Which means employers have not been able engage with the National Skill Development Mission with the numbers that policymakers expected.

This can change because apprenticeships offer a solution for the broken model for bottom-of-pyramid hiring. But this will only happen if skill development is seen by employers as core to their growth and productivity rather than CSR or philanthropy.

At a recent job fair where employers were only hiring experienced people, a frustrated fresher said, “You tell me that you will not give me a job without experience. How do I get experience without a job?” This chicken-and-egg problem plays itself out on a daily basis for lakhs. The only way out of this is to become ‘vegetarian’: do something completely different. One hopes that employers are paying attention. Because we know they are tired of kissing frogs to find their princess.

(Sharma is joint secretary, ministry of skill development, and Sabharwal is member, National Skill Development Mission)

This article was published in Economic Times

Hedge your bets

Baba and his friend, Abhinav Kandarp, 31, set up a travel blog, Potliwalas, in December 2012 as they travelled through Lakshadweep, Rajasthan and Ladakh. After their road trip ended in June 2013, neither of the two friends rushed to find a job. Instead, Baba tried his hand at farming—using family funds and his corporate job savings—and built a home-stay in Wayanad, Kerala, hoping to stay in touch with a more “natural and rustic sort of life”. “This way, I knew that even if I wanted to quit my job again, I did have this to fall back on,” he says.

Kandarp, who worked as a business analyst at the Cognizant Technology Solutions in Pune, now heads Breakfast@Cinema, a start-up that trains students and mid-managers in behavorial leadership, and freelances as an assistant director in films.

While Baba’s home-stay, Kabani Riverside, gained popularity through word of mouth, he needed a steadier source of income. So he returned to the corporate fold. His family now manages the home-stay. Potliwalas is still active, although it doesn’t have regular posts.

It’s easiest to quit your job and start something new if you’re in the first decade of your career, believes Shailja Dutt, founder and chairperson of Stellar Search, an executive search firm. “Most senior-level executives have both personal and professional responsibilities and often cannot put their own passion ahead of the company’s interests,” says Dutt, adding that people in the early stages of their careers are also less likely to be judged for taking a break to discover themselves.

Stay updated

Revati Victor left her advertising job in 2013 to focus on her travel blog, Different Doors, which she had set up with husband Charles Victor. “There were opportunities that we wanted to seek in the travel industry, but both of us quitting our steady jobs to travel would have been a risky bet to take. So I decided to quit and travel while Victor would join me on his vacations,” says Revati.

She travelled alone across the world for two years, picking up several freelance writing projects, such as travel articles and hotel reviews, for brands like the Jordan Tourism Board, Hyatt Group of Hotels and Lonely Planet magazine, but made sure she got regular updates about the advertising industry from her peers. This is what probably helped her return to the industry in 2015. “I had no intentions of giving up on a career that I had built over the years,” she says, adding: “Whatever you do, don’t burn bridges. These people will probably be your way back if you ever plan to return to the same industry.”

There can be another challenge when you return: Your colleagues would probably have moved ahead in terms of designations and salary packages. According to Visty Banaji, founder and chief executive officer of Banner Global Consulting, an HR consultancy firm, a former employee returning to a company could either get the position he would have held otherwise, had he continued in the job, or a role that is more suited for him after his travel. “Most managerial positions are likely to get filled up in a few months. Finding a new role in that company depends on how big the company is and how high is the attrition,” he says.

Merge your passions

Gaurabh Mathure and Anuja Joshi met for the first time in New York in 2010. A few years later, they decided to travel together. Joshi, then a design strategist at material consultancy Material ConneXion, quit her job, while Mathure, creative director at design consultancy R/GA, took a sabbatical. The couple applied to Remote Year, a year-long programme that offers 75 professionals the opportunity to travel to 12 cities around the world. While exploring countries like the Czech Republic, Croatia and Turkey, they did freelance work for various companies. Upon returning to New York in June 2015, the duo started Pikkabox, a monthly box where subscribers can receive products locally sourced from the countries the duo visit, such as trinkets, postcards and confectionery. “For us, it wasn’t ‘Eat, pray, love’ or ‘finding your soul’ kind of a year. We still worked while we travelled, and took the opportunity to build our personal brand and grow as individuals,” says Joshi, who now works full-time on Pikkabox. Mathure, however, has returned to his job.

Travel helps you learn and meet new people, says Teamlease’s Chakraborty. “Hence the benefits of travelling are many. If one can channelize that to become an entrepreneur, one should grab it with both hands.”

Deal with the resume’gap

A travel sabbatical, as opposed to maternity or study leave, is a relatively new phenomenon in India, but corporate policies usually do not distinguish between the nature of sabbaticals. “What matters more is the sequence of events that led to someone taking the sabbatical. Was he let go of? Did he leave on an amicable or neutral note?” says Praful Nangia, a partner at leadership talent advisory firm Hunt Partners.

At any cost, keeping it off the resume’ or trying to cover it up would be a bad idea. “You need to be honest and upfront about it. No company will look at it negatively as long as you can explain it. Nangia advises you to prepare answers to questions like, ‘What did it teach you?’ or ‘What have you learnt in this one year that will benefit you in this job?’

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This article was published in Mint