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Mr. Govindan Ramu (Metallurgy 1990) has launched midcareers.com, a professional career and placement service firm to help mid-level professionals achieve their career goals. This is perhaps the unique placement service company in India, providing professional career and placement services exclusively to mid-level professionals.
Mr. G. Ramu has extensive experience in the field of recruitment of professionals. He did his B. Tech. (Metallurgy) in 1990 from IT-BHU and MBA (HR) from XLRI, Jamshedpur in 1994. He shares his experience with Yogesh K. Upadhyaya for Chronicle. We hope this will be interest to many of our alumni looking for career change at mid-level.
Q-1: Please tell us briefly about your organization.
Midcareers.com is India’s first job and career service focusing exclusively on mid career professionals. Mid career professionals, given their professional and personal position in life are unique. The challenges they face are different from that of other segments of professionals. We have researched, understood their needs and created services which would benefit them in building the careers.
Midcareers.com is a project of Yoganishta, which is a five-year-old placement services company. With offices in Chennai and Bengaluru (Bangalore), it caters to several leading corporates. Our vision is to be the leader in the mid careers space, making a meaningful difference in the lives of mid career professionals.
Q-2: What are the services offered by midcareers.com?
Our services revolve around placement and career development. We have two target groups as our clients; one, the mid career professionals (midpros) and two, the employers.
For midpros, we have developed career services some of which include career counseling, assessments, career planner, and thought exchange. Our aim here is to bring perspectives on career so that midpros can make enlightened choices. Of course when they decide to change jobs, we will provide the right avenue for making the right kind of job change.
Employers have two primary needs as far as hiring midpros are concerned; one, finding mid career professionals and two, finding the “right” mid career professionals. Employers will find that midcareers.com addresses both these needs in the refined placement process which we have evolved.
Q-3: Why did you decide to start career services for mid-career professionals?
Midcareers.com came from three factors. One, the unfulfilled - expressed and perceived - needs of midpros - the need for finding the right jobs and making the right kind of career choices. Two, the opportunity in the job market for us to leverage on - there is no exclusive service for midpros, while there are many job portals and thousands of consultants. Three, and this is significant, our inner urge to build on our capability in relating to mid career professionals. With our background in HR, experience in corporates and insights into evolving trends, we knew we could create services meaningful for midpros.
In short, it was a combination of market opportunity and our passion.
Q-4: What are the career-related problems faced by the job-seekers at mid-level? How is the balance-of-life approach useful to solve the crisis?
Mid career professionals have challenges both on the professional and personal front. We believe career wellness comes from a combination of personal wellness and professional wellness. Now, midpros’ challenges on personal front include things like having to focus on relationships – family and friends too, creating assets for the future, taking care of aging parents and growing kids, nurturing ones own personal interests. We have created a framework called Panch Mantra for personal wellness which looks at the five dimensions of personal wellness - health, wealth, relationships, leisure and spirituality.
When we analysed the challenges midpros face with regard to professional life, we realised that the past experience, in may be more than one job and more than one company, gave them a sense of what their preferences are. Professionals at middle levels are likely to get more tuned to what we call as “roles”, for example business development is a role, technical architect is a role and so on. Similarly, they have a better understanding of the organisation context where they would fit better – small or big, entrepreneurial or process driven, aggressive or stable environment, product or a service and things like that. These have to be factored in when a midpro makes a choice of a job; and similarly, by the employer when selecting a midpro. A right fit between the midpro, role and the organisation (M-O-R) is very important. Thus we have the M-O-R fit.
We feel that an integrated approach to wellness is the key to solving the crisis of wellness.
Q-5: What is your advice for a professional approaching his/her mid-career?
Awareness, confidence and planning in my opinion are the keys to approaching the mid career. Let me elaborate on these:
Awareness is about knowing ones strengths and limitation, about knowing where one is better off, about knowing what kind of choices one is good at making. Awareness is also about accepting ones innate qualities. At mid career level this becomes very important as this is the phase when an individual is moving away from being influenced by the external environment, to bringing the locus of control to the within.
Confidence means being able to accept what comes from the awareness, acceptance of the individual as he or she is, knowing that one can build on ones personality to nurture the potential in the person. After all, career is about utilising and developing ones capabilities. I see many mid career professionals giving up and becoming what I call passive participants in organisations. This is very sad indeed.
The third factor is planning. At the mid life, given the challenges one has on the personal and professional front, one need to be able to prioritise and give time to make things happen effectively. Planning is also important because the decisions one takes, at mid life, impacts many people around the individual. For example, if one is planning a career change, it has to be thought out well and given some time for it be acted on.
Q-6: What qualities are necessary to launch a recruiting/career placement firm?
Recruiting and career placement firms have to view it as a service to human beings. It is not like any other business. A service orientation requires empathy, understanding and maturity in dealing with people. Recruitment is not about just resumes and jobs. How you relate to people is what will make a difference. It is a people’s business. Not everyone sees it that way when they start, and that’s the reason why many eventually fail.
The second aspect is that one should be prepared for the fact that in this business, dependencies on external factors are very high. This can create anxieties and swings in the business, for example cash flows can vary wildly between months. One has to be prepared to buffer this kind of financial vagaries.
Q-7: Please tell us about college days.
BHU days are as fresh as flowers in spring. The well planned huge green beautiful campus, the narrow lanes of the romantic and mystic Banaras, the mochu where we gulped chai after chai, the hot hot samosas just near our metallurgy department, the famous three rupees cold coffee outside the temple in the campus, are all fresh in my memory. Most of my classmates are connected and we relive those days whenever we meet. That reminds me of something interesting – almost all of them are the same as they were 20 years back, the same mannerisms, the same responses to stimuli, the same goof ups, the same laughter. The world changes, yet we beautifully remain the same.
XLRI brings to me the memory of the tough time I had coming to terms with management learning, and particularly, human resources. As an engineer we learnt of A plus B being equal to C always. Here I learnt that A plus B could C, D or E, anything for that matter depending on something. I was just not able to relate to the latter. It took me some time. Only the second year was I able to relate to the humanistic side of the world. The appreciation came out very well. The blending of thought in science and humanities happened. That was indeed the wisdom that I gained – the truth in the yin and yang – rationale and emotion, analysis and synthesis, people and systems, perceived and the unperceived, etc.
Q-8: Please tell us about your personal life.
I am quite a spiritual person. Maybe there was some philosophical streak I was born with. Yes at different points I was against the concepts of God. Every time I negated it, it came back after sometime and I again started the questioning and introspection process. After a couple of cycles, I guess I am in a stable state of spiritual life. And it is quite blissful indeed.
I believe that I am being led by the Divine in a manner, for a particular purpose – I don’t need to know what it is; it is enough that I am being led with a purpose. My spiritual beliefs have gained strength and continue to gain strength. Many things which puzzle me – behaviours of people, my own behaviour, happenings around me, all seem to make sense now. The awareness of it is liberation.
To me spirituality means two things. It is not about it being contained in the books, or to be practiced in the Himalayas. It is here and now. It is in our every day life. It is in the every day living. It is in every transaction. It is in every moment. It is there without us having to bother about. It is the screen on which the movie is running. The other is that it is central to finding peace. Particularly, at middle life when our perspectives of the world and life change, challenges at work and home increase, spirituality not only can bring peace but build strength in us. It is central to our self and not at the periphery.
Yes, I have many small desires to be fulfilled and one big idea. Small desires include travelling on a truck with a Sikh driver from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, traveling by the local bus (it’s been ages since I boarded one), travelling by road across the country, and many more, doing case studies on the everyday entrepreneurs – the fruit seller, the next door restaurateur etc. and many more.
The big idea is to share my experience on spirituality with more and more people so that they can also experience, realise and become, in their own lives in their own way.
Q-9: Sir, thanks for sharing the info about your company with us
I consider it my privilege to have been given an opportunity to share my thoughts with friends who have had the same once-in-a-lifetime, life-changing experience of having been in the great institution called BHU. I wish the chronicle the very best in mission of connecting more and more of these fortunate BHU alumni.
Mr. G. Ramu can be contacted at: gramu@midcareers.com
(Chronicle note: We appreciate the help of Mr. K. S. Rajasekar, Chief knowledge Officer at midcareers.com for his help in conducting the interview. Email: raj@midcareers.com)
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Additional links
1) Midcareers.com
www.midcareers.com
Midcareers.com
5, 10th Sector, 65th Street,
KK Nagar West
Chennai – 600078
Tamil Nadu
2) Career related articles
http://www.midcareers.com/index.php?page=texchange
3) Placement services for mid-career professionals
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2008/07/12/stories/2008071251050700.htm
4) G Ramu launches midcareers.com, in chronicle
http://www.itbhuglobal.org/chronicle/archives/2008/06/#002406
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Puzzle for Career Advancement
http://www.guy-sports.com/months/jokes_salary_review.htm
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(if you having troubles, try posting your comment on this page or send an email to chronicle @ itbhuglobal.org)Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi 221005, UP