Ruchi Bhatia On Opening Up On Her Journey As An HR Professional And Her Industry Perspectives In The Present Times

Today’s HR Speaks story is about Ruchi Bhatia, a Talent Branding Consultant with HRGurukul. She is a result-oriented HR Professional & Recruitment Leader. She is IIMC Alumni. Her vast work experience across Talent Management, Talent Branding, Recruitment, Performance Management, Employee Experience, Diversity and Inclusion, Workforce Analytics, Culture Building, Learning and Development, OD and Digital Storytelling at IBM is highly appreciated. She works as Guest Faculty in several reputed Business Schools across the country and as a Talent Branding Consultant with HRGurukul.

We started the conversation with Ruchi enquiring about how she started her journey as an HR professional. She replied that after she graduated from Hans Raj College, North Campus Delhi University, she joined GlaxoSmithKline as Sales Representative and learnt Key Account Management and started managing vendors/distributors. She also learned concept selling and was promoted to management cadre, one of the youngest Sales Executives in GlaxoSmithKline.

After a point, she had her enough with field jobs and wanted to be in a desk job. So, she joined the BPO Industry and started hiring graduates. She performed well in Operations, promoted to manage Call Centre operations of 800 FTEs (Full-time operations) in the Workforce Management role. She added, she always had an interest in reading books and thus applied for an internal job opening in HR / OD and got selected from a pool of 108 candidates who applied for that role. That was her starting journey in HR in 2008, and she has never looked back since then. After that, she worked in multiple roles in HR as Learning Facilitator, Learning consultant, Workforce Partner (HR Business Partner), Professional Development Leader and Recruitment Branding Lead at IBM India.

Then we asked Ruchi how she managed to balance her work life as an HR and personal life. When we asked this question to her, she replied in a light mood that she never maintained a balance between her HR and personal life. She quoted, “For over 12 years, I was married to IBM…ha-ha :).” She added that she made a lot of sacrifices to be where she is today. She is happy with the choices she has made in her professional life.

Next, we asked Ruchi about her experiences with diverse roles and enquired about the transformative projects she had undertaken. She was more than happy to take this question and stated that “IBM is a great organization to work with, which gave me a lot of exposure to work on different projects with India and Global Colleagues.” She added that over and above the day job, she took a stretch assignment as Country Lead to work on Social Media Adoption across the enterprise. IBM being a technology company, has internal collaboration tools. The role involved training and creating awareness, and being an Evangelist.

This gave her an experience with the Digital Transformation journey at IBM.

Moving forward in the discussion, we asked about Ruchi’s biggest challenges as an HR professional. She replied that HR is seen as the cost centre by Business. As an HR professional, creating value for Business and stakeholders has been one of the major challenges.

Our next question to Ruchi was how the pandemic has affected her positively and negatively and how she had decided to cope with the same. Ruchi shared with us that she loves to travel, and so she was living a dream life, travelling across India and working remotely on Gig projects before the pandemic hit. Pandemic has halted all her travel plans, which caused a major setback to her freedom. During the pandemic, she spent time reading more books and reflecting on her life values and her journey in solitude. Also, she focused on what she wanted to steer her life into next.

Before we concluded, we asked Ruchi to share any of her personal stories or vivid experience that can inspire or motivate others to enter other incumbents in the HR industry and other HR professionals. She expressed that she was lucky to meet several interesting people in HR and from diverse fields. She is delighted to make many friends, be guided by mentors and get invited to industry forums as Speaker.

She quoted that “Luck is preparedness plus opportunity.”

We hope Ruchi’s story has inspired you and you have enjoyed it thoroughly. We will soon be back with a story of another accomplished HR professional who is a trendsetter in the HR industry.