EP120: BluWheelz - How to Integrate TA and Employer Branding

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to another episode of All-In Recruitment by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and with us this week is Pranay Prakash, CHRO at BluWheelz. Great to have you with us, Pranay.

Pranay: Thank you for having me here, Lydia.

Pranay’s Journey in the Talent Space

Lydia: So, Pranay, walk us through your journey in the talent space. You must have seen some pivotal changes in the industry. Is there anything you'd like to share?

Pranay: It's been a pretty long journey and I think recruitment, per se, has been considered to be the easiest entry point into the HR space for somebody who starts fresh out of college. So, right from my first assignment at Adecco, which was India's largest staffing company back then, to various greenfield projects at Reliance Retail, Videocon Telecommunication, and then the last about 10 odd years through various startups—very successful startups at that. So, that is a very different ball game altogether because you need to scale really fast. But then the fun part is that you need to figure out solutions because the business cannot suffer for one person less on the roles.

So that's how the journey has been. I think I've been fortunate enough to have a bunch of very good mentors and colleagues around me who have always helped me, handheld me, and guided me through the entire process. I mean, it's been a very exciting journey, and I'm still recruiting for a lot of roles. That is one aspect of the talent space that probably does not die down. A lot of good talent is coming up. Something that I've observed out of my personal experience, which has changed—or evolved, rather—is the mindset of the talent that comes into the talent pool or the organization.

Right from when we started with Baby Boomers to Millennials to Gen Z and so on and so forth. There has been a very strong shift in the mindset of people. There was a time when people never shifted jobs in their lives. [They] kind of sticking to one organization for a really long period, to the time when people started shifting jobs for a few bucks, to the time when people are looking beyond money—at the role, the culture, and those kinds of aspects. So, it's been a very fun journey all this while.

Understanding the talent out there has been the biggest challenge, as well as their mindset and demographics. I think with every industry, that changes a lot; with every geography, that changes a lot. And then the most fun part for me personally has been that every time you meet or interview somebody, you meet a new person every day. A new personality that you come across, someone you have never met before, and I still have yet to find two individuals who are absolutely in sync with each other.

So, right from the hiring managers to Candidate A versus Candidate B—different mindsets, different people, different backgrounds—you still need to make it work. So, all in all, a very enriching journey, I think the most enriching part of the role.

Evolution of Talent Mindset

Lydia: What stage is BluWheelz currently at in terms of hiring, and what key areas are you focusing on?

Pranay: So there are two parts to it. One is an organization that you are trying to build—which is true for most startups. You start from scratch, then you take baby steps, then you scale, then you run, and then you kind of leap.

The second part is BluWheelz specifically, which operates in an industry that is evolving. Electric vehicles in India are still a very new game. We don't have enough talent right now because we ourselves are alien to the entire concept, and people are still getting used to it. But the flip side is that, since the industry itself is in such a nascent stage, you don't have enough people who understand how an electric vehicle works, how to sell an electric vehicle versus any other vehicle, or how to maintain an electric vehicle versus a normal combustion engine vehicle.

So those are the skill sets that are still evolving, and we still need to figure them out because the company has to grow. And then we need to figure out a lot of models. Sometimes we have to do a hit-and-trial approach. There are times when we have figured something out, but it is only good enough to take it from one to ten, but not good enough from the point of view of taking it from ten to a hundred because that's a different ball game altogether.

So that's where BluWheelz stands—it's a mix of blue-collar, white-collar, tech, non-tech, all sorts of folks. Surprisingly, nobody knows exactly what to do with electric vehicles or how to go about electric vehicles. So we are figuring out that journey ourselves. We generally look for people who are willing to figure out that journey with us rather than looking for somebody who, if you go out into the market seeking a sales professional with ten years of EV selling experience, India has zero such people right now. So you'll have to figure out how to do that.

Lydia: So where do you look [for such talent]? How do you expand that kind of search? And if it's a matter of geography, and you need to make sure that they are locals, how do you make sure you find the kind of talent pool that's willing to probably move into your area?

Pranay: Since you don't have that expertise readily available, you have to look for people who, one, align with the cause that you are trying to promote. Two, align with the vision that you are trying to promote. Three, who are willing to create that hustle and be part of that hustle for you. And then people who have some bit of that intelligence or problem solvers, typically.

At the junior level, you just need very execution-focused and operational kind of people. So if they commit a small mistake, the impact is very small. The entire organization does not get impacted, right? But at a senior level, if those mistakes happen, then that's a bigger trouble you're looking at.

Attracting Talent with Vision, Not Just Salaries

Lydia: Speaking of plans that constantly change and evolve, you need to have that evolved to be in a healthy economy, such as the such as the EV industry.

So in terms of talent acquisition strategies, Pranay, how do you make sure this is the key ingredient in aligning your talent acquisition strategies with the business's overall objectives?

Pranay: So this is one mistake that I think a lot of larger organizations end up committing sometimes, and startups would commit that probably a whole lot more. It’s to look at talent acquisition purely from a hiring lens and not align it to what the company wants to achieve, right?

A very classical example of that could be—and this is one mistake that people keep on committing—to throw people at problems. That does not ever solve the problem because once you get into that habit, you think, okay, more people will solve this for you. That does not happen because you still don’t have the right brains working on it.

So what is the larger objective that you are trying to achieve? Does the person you are interviewing or assessing at any given point in time, to some extent, align with that larger objective? If he or she does, then you get them on board and together you figure out the solutions.

We still look for people who can build those solutions and co-create those solutions for us. At a certain level and beyond, there’s nobody who comes into the system with just one interview or an interview with their direct line of reporting. We have a cross-functional interview system right now, where everybody who comes at a certain level and beyond—typically mid-managerial and above—has to necessarily talk to two, three, or four different people across functions.

Sometimes, if none of these people are available for some reason or another, the CEO or the founder has to get involved and conduct the interview. And then there’s a quick sort of debrief. Are there any classical red flags that you see? We go on a theory that says no red flags mean you can give it a try.

The second challenge is that at this early stage for the company and the industry, organizations don’t have a lot of money to offer. So convincing somebody who’s earning probably 40, 50, 60, or 70 lakhs a year to come down to maybe one lakh a month plus some ESOPs, and then asking, are you in it for the long run with us? Do you want to have that skin in the game together?

So that alignment also becomes very important. Do you let go of very good, solid candidates because of budgetary constraints? Sometimes you have to. Those are the kinds of key differentiators. Hence, at a certain level and above, people have to be interviewed by a whole bunch of people before we even consider them for an offer.

Lydia: So how do you look at ensuring that talent acquisition and employer branding, for instance, are strategically integrated rather than functioning separately as totally different entities?

Pranay: Yes, I think that's a very valid question and very easy to make a mistake on, because a lot of people I know, meet, and interact with see employee branding—or employer branding, rather—in isolation, which is kind of the biggest mistake you can make.

The good thing is, as an organization, you are already creating a larger brand and your employer brand can just piggyback on that brand. It cannot happen in isolation, and it does not work the other way around. You cannot create a very good employer brand but have a very poor product brand. That cannot happen. You build a product brand, and your employer brand goes along with it.

But I think the biggest brand ambassadors are, one, your current employees. If you give them the right recognition—okay, why are you happy? I mean, this organization is total chaos, but you are still surviving with us. Why are you here? And I think the bigger ambassadors are people who have left that organization. Those who are typically alumni of any organization. Are they going out and leaving a good word in their circle for my organization?

The least you can do is to make the exit process very smooth for the individual. So it does not actually start when you are reaching out to a candidate. It actually starts when the candidate or employee is moving out of your organization, because that's the easier problem to solve. Creating that experience is not difficult.

When people know us in the market, our clients will talk well about us. That helps me build a brand for the organization, and my employer brand kind of goes along with it. I’ve had cases where we had very high CSAT from some clients because they experienced our services. And a couple of people from those clients approached us saying, "Hey, can you hire us? Because we think you're doing some amazing work, and we want to be a part of that.”

So how do you make somebody want a piece of what you're doing? The overall culture, the openness to disagree, the openness to throw ideas—which may sometimes end up leading to nothing practical. Those are the things you need to sell.

We are also not hung up on the culture of the organization, because, by choice or by chance, all organizations, from day one onward, have a certain culture that starts getting built. So nobody should say, "Okay, I’ll shape up that culture and change it to something else." Changing that culture three years into the organization’s existence may probably destroy the organization.

So, anything of this sort—or the conventional stuff people try to do—we make it a point not to do any of that. Our interview debriefs never happened around questions like, "Will this guy be a cultural fit?" Because to be honest, it’s a 15-month-old operation. I don’t know what my culture is. I cannot define it today. It’s too early for me. My entire focus is on building the business. But there is some sort of culture that exists within the organization that was created.

So those are some of the things that, on the employer branding side, I think work very well. I’m 100% sure these can work amazingly well for a lot of organizations. I’ve seen this in my previous organization, where particularly when you go around hiring tech folks. Obviously, good resources might be expensive. If you play the money game, there will always be another person willing to pay more than what you can pay or afford.

And then, just like any other marketing or branding initiative, the employer brand also sometimes has to be customized to a certain audience or population. What gives me the kick may not give the same kick to someone else. So how do you sell that role to me and the organization to me versus how you sell it to somebody else? That can differ. The sooner you figure that out, the better it is for the organization and the better and faster brand you end up building.

And then the first point I mentioned—and wish to reiterate—is how well you are able to piggyback on the overall product brand that you are creating. If your overall product does not work out, whatever employer brand you create adds up to zero.

Proactive Hiring Strategies for Fast-Growing Industries

Lydia: You also spoke of a different kind of motivation that the younger generation is looking towards when they find a job that they want. They might be looking at the scope and culture. How do you approach recruitment when it comes to roles that are niche or very specialized?

Pranay: I don't think the basic fundamentals have changed a lot on that. I mean, for example, if you ask somebody in their 40s or mid-40s who is a car aficionado or who is very into cars and vehicles, this person can open the bonnet and do everything with the vehicle when it comes to diesel engines. But when it comes to electric vehicles, the entire mechanism changes. Whatever you are able to do with your diesel or petrol engine, you cannot do any of that with an electric vehicle, because these are more delicate.

But that talent is not available. Nobody is training that talent right now. So you go back to the roots, go back to the drawing board. You look for partnerships, and there are certain roles you will always keep hiring for—not vanilla roles, but niche ones that will keep coming up every now and then. So how do you build a pipeline for that?

For example, we went back to the Logistics Sector Skill Council and said, "Okay, hey, you train a lot of people in logistics, right? Why don't you work together with us? We'll help you because we have connections with all the OEMs, manufacturers, and all of those guys. We'll get you vehicles, and we'll do part of the setup. Why don't you start training people who can maintain electric vehicles? Be it scheduled maintenance, preemptive maintenance, or post-facto maintenance, whatever it is. Because nobody knows that.”

The same goes for when you are hiring a driver. Right now, there are only so many electric vehicles in the country, particularly on the cargo side of it. When you want to hire drivers, you will not find drivers who have driven an electric vehicle before. So you invariably get a driver who has been running an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle or a diesel engine vehicle, and then you convert that person into an electric vehicle driver. So how is that transition process working out for you? Have you figured that out?

Do you always train people once you get them in, or can you set up a mechanism where you can get them pre-trained and then keep hiring them? Maintenance is kind of a niche skill for us right now, purely from an operational perspective. But how do you create that pipeline where, as you expand, you have the talent ready?

We operate in 17 cities right now. We may end up operating in 100 cities in a few months from now. Every city will need one, two, or maybe X number of maintenance personnel. You may not have a reliable external partnership everywhere, and you'll have to put your own resources in place. How do you get 200 maintenance guys in a few months?

You cannot bring them all in and then spend a bunch of money training them for two weeks. Some of them get trained; some of them don't get the hang of it. Then what do you do with those people? If you want those people to be deployed across 100 cities, you cannot call all of them in, train them, and then send them back. That's a different process altogether, and a very expensive one.

So how do you find those partnerships where this training can happen remotely? Then you can just disseminate the personnel across cities. They are pre-trained, and you can deploy them there, ready to hit the ground running.

Balancing Speed and Quality in Hiring

Lydia: So when it comes to hiring for speed, how do you balance that need to be really quick in your hiring and make sure that the quality of a candidate is also sound?

Pranay: So again, two parts to it. One is the classical blue-collar segment, where you end up hiring in masses. You need, like, 200 drivers every month and so on and so forth, because you need to support your expansion and growth. That's a different problem altogether. It's a problem that has been cracked to a huge extent by, say, all the logistics players or the e-commerce players. And in my past experience, I have cracked that.

You have a lot of external support that you can seek—maybe manpower agencies, partners, online platforms, and so on—that specialize in this type of hiring. You can outsource it to them. Instead of having five recruiters for this population, if you reach out to vendors, you’ll have access to 200 recruiters, while you, as an organization, would never have 200 recruiters. It does not make any business sense.

And then on the other side, you have roles that require a certain skill set—typically white-collar roles, as we would call them, for lack of a better phrase. We place a lot of bets on people coming out of college. Because college placements, unfortunately, have not been great over the last couple of years. People are seeking jobs, and some of these guys are very smart. The younger generation is much smarter than I probably was when I got out of college.

Some of these guys are really hungry, and they want to do anything, because they need to, one, get a job, and two, make a career out of it. And that's the other differentiator. When you speak to a candidate, you can either offer them a job, which is a very transactional kind of thing—they provide a set of services, and they are paid for that—or you offer them a career, which is a more long-term association, where the person sees their growth in it.

So we bet a lot on these young folks. Somebody who was out of college two months ago and is still finding a job writes to us randomly. We ensure that at least somebody speaks to them, even if it’s just a five-minute conversation. Then you figure out if you can fit this person somewhere or if you need to create a role, and you explore it further.

When people reach out to you, you just don’t say no to them. That is something I think a lot of people are working on, and I hope it gets solved faster than expected because it's a huge opportunity. You lose out on good people because of their inability to write CVs. You’re not hiring them to write CVs—you’re hiring them to do a completely different job.

And hence, my personal, well, dislike—though I know it’s a strong word—for rejecting people based on their CVs. If somebody has reached out, made the effort, and is following up with you maybe five times in a month, at least have a word with them. Maybe that person is worth something. But instead, you look at the CV and say, “Okay, it doesn’t match the JD I have because this is the JD,” right?

That job description is something I wrote. How much of that role I also fully understand is another question the hiring manager needs to ask themselves. It’s a very traditional way of looking at things. I’m not saying it’s bad or good—it has worked well for many organizations for a very long time—but considering the kind of demographics coming into the workforce, I don’t think it’s going to work much longer.

Lydia: What kind of traits do you think a recruiter should have now when they look at different kinds of CVs, especially those that are coming into an industry that is so new and just breaking into the market?

Pranay: I think, when you're talking to somebody, or if somebody has reached the stage where they're having a physical interaction, now, if you get a whole bunch of CVs, then you'd rather use a tool and maybe an AI-based platform or something like that. You ask them to give responses to a certain fixed set of questions, or a random set of random questions generated, kind of a thing.

The AI tool analyzes those responses and tells you, "Okay, you can talk to this guy, you cannot talk to this guy," or whatever the outcome is, right? That is one. But once that step is done, and if this person is speaking to an actual person and not a system or an algorithm, you need to understand if the person will ask questions. As a hiring manager, I take it on myself, or our teams take it on themselves to get a person who's 70% there in terms of these traits, and the remaining 30% will train them.

So what you need to then check is, if the person is trainable. If the person is trainable, he or she is good enough. You just need to invest some amount of time into that individual, and you'll get the results that you want. Those are some of the traits that you need to look for—whether this guy will get bogged down by situations, whether this guy will keep on trying hard, and whether this guy will be able to communicate if he gets stuck. Because all of us will get stuck at some point in time or the other with certain situations. So what do you do in that scenario? Do you keep it to yourself, or just sit quietly? Because I tried five times and nothing happened, and I reached 10 people, I escalated an email. So when I ask these kinds of questions from somebody's past experience, and somebody says, "So a typical question would be, okay, this situation happened, and what did you do? Or what would you do?" "Okay, I'll escalate an email to whatever my next-level manager is." "Okay, your manager did not respond to that email for two days. What do you do?" "What can I do? My manager did not respond," right? So that is a red flag for me.

If the person says, "No, I called him up, I texted him, I wrote again, and kept on trying till this was solved, or the manager came back and said, 'We cannot do anything about it,'" that answer you cannot control, right? But it shows that the person was persistent and wanted to get the job done. At the end of the day, you need people who can get the job done for you. You don't need people who know everything, because deep inside we all know we don't know everything, especially in an industry like ours where nobody knows anything right now. The same was the case with Zomato or Swiggy about their delivery a few years back. The entire startup ecosystem has been built around people who have kept on persisting despite all odds. And that is how you build a company, and those are the kinds of people that you need to get in.

Building Skills in the Greenfield EV Sector: A ‘Train the Trainer’ Model

Lydia: So in terms of where BluWheelz is, it's really green field. So, where are you with L&D, or what is the emphasis on training and development?

Pranay: For us, that is very important. For every organization, that is important, but more so in our case, because, again, the industry size is very small and nascent. So you don't get a readily trained person who can come and work for you. You cannot keep on building your internal capabilities for training people at this stage of the organization, at least. Maybe at a future date, you'll probably have a team and structure and everything.

But then what do you do as a core business? The vehicles can come from Tata Power and all the OEMs. We do have partnerships with them, not only to take their vehicles but also to provide us with their trained drivers who can train my drivers, and my operations guys, who can further train. So it's the classical "train the trainer" model, without one single trainer or a structured trainer kind of organization with us. But then I have 15 trainers who are training people for me in every city, for every OEM.

But we ensure that every time a new driver, rider, or operations guy comes in we connect them to the relevant OEM in that city or the dealership in that city, and the guy gets trained on that particular vehicle. If there are five different types of vehicles, then he has to go through every single vehicle, because my supervisor needs to know the ins and outs of every single vehicle. What happens when the vehicle suddenly stops in the middle of the road? What do I do?

So those quick responses like who do you call? Are there any small fixes that you can check for yourself and then say, "Okay, my vehicle is fine now," because something minor has happened? You are not somebody who takes a wrench and everything and starts opening up the vehicle, because that's what we all used to do in the past. Because these are different kinds of vehicles.

So that's where we are on the L&D right now. Obviously, it is very important, because nobody knows anything. The OEMs know what they have created or what they have manufactured. They have their own people who are thorough with the vehicles. We just clone them to ourselves, and we say, "Okay, can you please train our guys? Because our guys will be using your vehicle soon. If your vehicle stops working, I'm going to give you a call and give you a hard time. So rather, train my person, and then both of us remain happy.

Lydia: And finally, Pranay, what advice would you give someone who is starting out in the talent space today? I know you spoke a lot about the traits earlier and several unconventional ways of looking at different segments of talent acquisition.

But for those who are starting out in recruitment or even wanting to have a career talent acquisition, what advice would you give them?

Pranay: Don't be shy of doing anything. Take things head-on, and communicate with your stakeholders, the people you are hiring for. Try and become part of the business, and not just a recruiter. Because none of your business people want to hear your HR or your talent acquisition staff; they are concerned about their business. If you talk to them about their business, if you are able to narrate your problems to the business owner, a lot of times, in my experience, the business owners understand your problem, and they sometimes come up with wonderful solutions that you, as a recruiter, are not able to do. So maintaining that communication is very important.

Getting a hang of the business is also very important. Why that role is important helps you sell that role to the candidates that you'll end up hiring. How that role adds value to the organization is something that is, again, very important to answer, because that is a differentiator between somebody who's been hired and somebody who's contributing.

So for anybody who wants to get into the recruiting space and start a career, remember, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. By the time you aspire to become a TA head, a head of talent acquisition, or head of branding, it's a long 10, 12, or 15-year journey.

Being a big fish in a small pond sometimes gives you immense learning. The flip side is that a lot of things will be unstructured, and you'll have to figure it out. So go find out a mentor who can help you, and guide you, because once in a while, we all will get stuck again. And then, within the organization, there will probably be nobody who will help you out, because nobody has that expertise. It's not a very difficult task. All positions get filled at some point in time or the other.

What separates recruiters from good recruiters is, how soon are you able to fill those positions with the right set of people? That's the only differentiator. I work on a role and you work on a role. Both of us are good recruiters, with the same experience, and the same exposure. We'll be able to close it. You can do it in two months. I'll take six months. That's what makes you a better recruiter than I am.

Lydia: Thank you very much, Pranay. These are valuable insights into how you're breaking into not just an industry, but just a talent pool that is absolutely new in this whole EV sector, in fact.

So for those listening in who want to pick up a conversation with you, and maybe explore a little bit more about what you're doing at BlueWheelz, where can they contact you?

Pranay: I have a decent enough LinkedIn profile. I do not say no to any of my LinkedIn requests. Anybody who wants to reach out can easily reach out. That's the best and easiest way to reach me. Just drop me a DM or send an invite, and we'll connect.

I do actually spend a lot of time talking to young folks, because I think whatever bit that I have learned, if I can pass it on, it's going to be a huge value. I'm already in the process of putting all my experiences together. So maybe mid of next year, all of that will be out in the form of a structured book. That's what I'm trying to do.

I started off that book-writing journey, but then it turns out that it's a much more difficult journey than reading a book. I don't think I'll delay that a lot. Basically, it's the crux of anything and everything that I have learned over all these years. So if I've done anything worthwhile, you'll find it there. If I have done something where I screwed up badly, you'll find it there.

Lydia: Looking forward to seeing that Pranay. Thanks for sharing and again, thank you for your time and for joining us.

We have been in conversation with Pranay Prakash, CHRO at BluWheelz. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.