Last few days @ Mindfire

Hey friends ….

Just can’t imagine where all the time has flown past and I am almost at the end of my internship period at Mindfire Solutions….  It seems as if it were yesterday when I came to appear for the interview.

As there were only a few days left for us in Mindfire, we had do all the wrapping up….                                                                                                         The HR funletter was almost over and we were just left with the collection of the articles for the “Cuento” section. After receiving them, we had drafted them and sent it to the concerned people to carry on with the work.

The next thing that I had to do was to collect some resumes…  some other requirements of the company…

First, I had to collect some resumes for Business Development / Sales having some experience in IT… And that took me a lot of time, frankly speaking… I ended up collecting the wrong ones two times initially. And then finally, got the right track…

Then there was also a need for developers in Sharepoint and so I downloaded some of that as well…

When I had started working here, in my initial days, I had prepared a list of companies of different sizes in four locations..(I had mentioned it in one of my blogs earlier) . Till now I was wondering what was that for… But now I got some work based upon that.                  I had to search for the employees there who were basically from Orissa. And then prepare an excel sheet listing their name, company name, email ids, phone numbers, and the areas/technologies they worked upon… This took me quiet a long time because the naukri site was not available to me that time and the information was not available in the LinkedIn site…

In the meantime, we were also working upon our reports.. After a discussion with Mainak Sir, we finalised the contents of the report and started collecting matter for it. And as usual, it was Google which came to our rescue. And along with that, all the formalities that our college demanded…. the fortnightly reports, the completion report, the feedback report, the certification from the company n what not !!!

I can’t believe its my last day today in Mindfire Solutions… n frankly speaking, I am feeling a bit odd about it..                                                      It had become a habit…. coming here daily, the meetings, keepin busy, the coffee sessions, the evening gossips, blogs, waiting for the Saturdays… I am goin to miss everything so much… for the initial few days atleast….

And not to forget about all the things that we got to learn here… the co-operation that we received from the people here was really appreciable… Our training leads, Mr. Mainak Mittra and Mr. Subhendu Pattnaik… Sudesna Ma’am ( my inspiration, bcoz of whom I decided to go for the HR field in the first place ), Smita (we became friends soon after joining)…. and all my old friends (Tushar, Nidhi, Manoranjan, Subodh) with whom I had little contact after my Btech days….   🙂                                                                                                                    It has been a fantastic learning experience for me as it had been earlier in 2009… I got to do some real things in recruitment like attending the campus drives and shortlisting students… selecting resumes… and a lot many things….

Overall, it was an amazing journey (though it was short)…..   😉

Now wat next ?????

KSOM calling…..  Ofcourse, wat else…

Excited to return back to my college life once again… hostel life, classes, seminars, presentations n EXAMS, ofcourse….  Can hardly wait to get back to my friends n our “khattis”…..

I don’t know if I am going to write any more blogs after this…. but ‘Thank You’ to all those who helped me increase my site stats figure….  😉

Keep Smiling everyone….  n God Bless….   🙂

HR Funletter @ Mindfire

Hii everyone…

Long time….  My internship in Mindfire is going on smoothly and I am quiet busy…

For the time being, at Mindfire Solutions, I was mostly into the HR funletter. The title of the funletter was finally decided to be “The Pulse” as per the outcome of the survey. It received the highest number of votes…                                                                                                                The subsections were also approved of.  Now, we had to design the contents for these subsections. So, the work that had to be done next was to finalise the content for all the subsections.

Some of it was easy and got over quickly….. and some were time-taking.                                                                                                                                    There is a section called “Art-e-facts”. This section was to be based on office humors based on day-to-day happenings. Like we could design cartoon characters and make it sort of comic. So, what I thought was that in the office, the daily funny thing that goes on is increasing and decreasing the temperature of the A/c.  Thats why, our first cartoon comic was based upon that.

And then, there were other sections as well. Like, one of them was the “Voice of Mindfireans” . Here, one of the employees of Mindfire had to share his experience of working here. So, we had to catch hold of a person and persuade him for a video shoot.                                         And the funniest part is that, no one was ready to do that !!!  Everyone was like, pointing their fingers to other people and saying that he will do !!

We also had to collect short stories from the employees here for the “Cuento” section and had contacted two people for that. There had to be a constant reminder for them. First call was whether he would like to write an article for the section and he is like “Ok, I will think about it”. Then the second time you ask whether he has decided and then the reply is “Yes, I will write but not decided the topic till now…”   And it doesnot end there.                                                                                                                                                                                                                A funny incident comes to my mind at this point… My fellow intern Swarupa had to contact one of the employees for a story. As he was a night shift employee, so, she had to contact him via emails. And he was asking Swarupa for some motivation to write upon. And at this end, Swarupa was bewildered as to how to motivate him to write… She was trying her best to make him write as soon as possible as her work was pending because of that. She used to come to me and ask “How am I supposed to motivate him so that he writes ???” And I just could not stop laughing watching her helpless funny expression. She was totally clueless as to what she should do… Finally she came to me one day, completely frustrated and said “I am going to tell him that if he needs any kind of help or motivation or whatever then he has to contact our lead because I can’t help him”… And I was almost rolling on the floor laughing…  😀                                                                   Oh My God !!!! Her expression !!!   And she actually did that. Not the way she told me, of course… Bt nevertheless, conveyed the message… (She received the draft shortly afterwards, Thank God !! )

And the time just went by so quick….

The next blog will follow soon… 🙂

Keep Smiling…

week4@Mindfire

Hii again…

Time is moving fast and I am trying to keep up.                                                                                                                                                                                     Now, when I come to think of it, I had already spent one whole month here in Mindfire.

Needless to say, we were getting busier day by day. But it didnt hurt because I was enjoying the work. This week it was the HR funletter. It is to come live very soon and for that reason we had to speed up the work as well. We worked on it more and more in order to give it a impressive start.

We visited new sites and revisited the old ones, looked for the synonyms and antonyms, worked on various words, combined them, tried to make it a bit funky and what not !!!!  I never realised earlier that there were so many words in the English dictionary !!!                 To cut it short, we spent a lot of time and effort in it.  We also consulted Mainak Sir in the process.  Finally, we shortlisted and came up with a list of eleven names to put up in the survey.

Same happened with the sub-sections as well. For that, we had already decided the content but had to finalise the headings for it. Same process went on and we came up with appropriate names. Finally, on Tuesday, we were ready with the names and decided to launch the survey without any furthur delay.

We typed in the questions and then the options and were ready to launch the survey. Subhendu Sir checked it out and modified a bit here and there and approved it for launch. But where we needed to launch it so that it reaches all the employees of Mindfire, we had no idea. So, with the help of Subhendu Sir, it was launched in Facebook in the Mindfire Fan Page. The work till here was done and we had to wait for the response.

On Wednesday, we were alloted another task by Sudesna Ma’am. As the hiring is at its peak now in Mindfire, so candidates matching the requirements had to be shortlisted. There was a requirement of 2010 passouts, freshers basically from the field of Btech and MCA.  She called up a meeting and explained us how to refine our search in order to get the right ones.

And again I started searching resumes from Naukri.com. This time Swarupa also had to search along with me, so we took it in turns to log in to the site. It was because we could not do it simultaneously. I had to search resumes from Orissa and Kolkata. And in that, separate folders had to be made for complete freshers and candidates having an experience of 1 year or less.

On Friday, we checked in the response and found out that we got a response from around 70-75 people. As we were expecting some more, we decided to give it some more time and start working on the content part instead. The content part had around 10 sub-sections and it was distributed between me and Swarupa. I got to work on six of them. Along with that, I had to accompany Swarupa to all the leads of Mindfire in order to collect data for one of the sections.

There is a section called “Trendsetters of the Month”, in which the name of one of the employees was to be mentioned for his/her outstanding performance. For that, we had to go to all the leads and ask them who they think is the best performer in their team and collect names.

The problem in it was that neither we knew any of the leads nor did they know us. So, we had to go to every floor, ask the guard as to who were they. He literally showed us the desks of all of them.

Thanks to him !!!  Otherwise, how we would have found out, God knows….

We had to go to all of them one by one, introduce ourselves, tell them about the upcoming funletter and ask them to spare 5 mins for a short meeting. Then in the meeting, we told them in detail about the section and asked them to name the star performer in his team. Many of them were a bit reluctant to name any one in particular. And why not, it was the time for appraisals, after all !!!  So, they basically did not want to give any type of impressions to the team members. But, we persuaded them, nevertheless.

So, after running for about 3-4 times up and down the floors, our job was done.

And guess what  !!!!

We come back to our seats, happy with ourselves that we were able to convince all of them for a name and what we come to know is, that section would be dropped for the 1st month initially and will be on from the 2nd month. It was because it would lead to a lot of confusion in the appraisal period. And we did not need the names.

So, there goes all our mehnat in paani….   😦                                                                                                                                                                                               But we convince ourself that all the mehnat was not in paani after all… We used the stairs all along and must have burnt some calories in the process…  😀                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             That was pacifying….                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    And also that, it was a Friday… It was even more pacifying… 🙂

With this pacifying note, I will wind up here…

C  ya with the next…

Till then,   Keep Healthy n Smile Al d Way Thru….  🙂

Week3@Mindfire

Hey friends….   Welcome back !!!

As time is passing by, I am getting to know more about the varied kind of activities that the HR personnel do rather than just recruitment and manpower management.
You just need to widen the horizon of your thoughts…..

This week I proceeded with my work regarding the trainers. I had collected some of the names and email ids of the institutes located in Hyderabad from the internet. I called each one of  them one by one and told them about the requirement of the company asking them weather they can provide us with the right kind of service. The ones who showed some positive response, I got their email ids in order to send them the details of the requirement. There were around 12 of them whom I had to send the mail from around 23.

I got a draft of the exact email that was to be forwarded to the 12 institutions and sent it to the email ids collected.

This week again we had to go on two campus drives on Tuesday and Wednesday accompanied by Sudesna Ma’am.                                            On Tuesday, we went to NMIET and on Wednesday, it was KIST.
The process was just the same as the previous drives. Visit campus, conduct written tests, invigilation, lunch, back to office, check answer sheets, decide the cut-off mark, shortlist students, prepare a list and send it to Sudesna Ma’am.
It was tiring but it kept me occupied.  So, I liked it.

On Thursday, along with Swarupa, I started work on the HR Funletter that was going to be introduced in the Mindfire site soon. Basically what had to be done was search for some exciting names for the title of the funletter and along with that the titles of the sub-sections in it.
So, with the help of my best friend in Mindfire, Google Search, I started my work.
Both of us listed around 30-40 names that we thought could be used as a name for the funletter. We went through the various sites which listed some nice English words and tried to find out something that could best explain the theme of the funletter. We even tried to merge two words and form a fancy kind of a word as per the demand of it.
It was like enhancing our vocabulary, like we were preparing for GMAT or something….  😉

Friday was also the same almost… We made our search more intense and finally came up with some good innovative prospective titles. We had a discussion with Mr. Subhendu Pattnaik about the names that seemed to be appropriate and stroke out manywhich seemed inappropriate….
We were also told to prepare for a survey regarding the decision of the names. The survey would go out to all the employees of Mindfire and the non-employees as well. We wanted to know what was on the minds of the other people. It would help us to finalise a title at the end.
We had to search some more as many of the names were discarded and then launch the survey in the following week.

Will come up with how we launched the survey and what was the response in the next blog….
Till den, Keep Smiling….  🙂

Week2@Mindfire

Hi everyone !!!
Here I am, once again, to take you further on my journey in Mindfire.

I was left collecting resumes from Naukri.com for the various requirements of the company. And I collected near about 400 resumes to sum it up all. And after that, it was time to get assigned to a new task.

This week I experienced something exciting… It feels good sometimes to build up some suspense for my readers….  😉
Read on and you will find out….

To start with the week, I was called by my project guide and was told that I would do some searching depending upon the immediate
requirement of the company. He showed me the mail that he had received. It said that there were two requirements for the technology “Ruby on Rails” currently.
So, what I had to do basically was to search for resumes of those people who had some amount of experience in it along with a through
knowledge in Javascript and XHTML. Along with that I had to keep in mind as well the fact that the person must be in and around Bhubaneswar as it will be easier to reach him in that case.
I collected some resumes and categorised the people located in Orissa into a separate folder. i was expected to collect some 5-10 resumes… but I had already collected 35 of them before being informed about the number.

It doesn’t hurt to boast off sometimes, does it  ?????

Also, in the same week, I had to contact some trainers based on Hyderabad to get them to the company for the training programmes that were to be conducted. I had to search for them on the net and collect their contact numbers and their email ids, if possible….

On Tuesday, as I was wrapping up my work, Mr. Mainak Mittra came and informed me that, I along with Swarupa, had to acccompany him on a campus drive the next day.

OMG !!!!
I actually was getting a chance to go for some real recruitment !!!

I was throughly excited and could hardly wait………

The next day morning, we went to Ajay Binay Institute of Technology in Cuttack. As we were entering into the campus, there was a huge
hoarding like the ones put up when a company visited in my college. On it was written “Welcome the delegates from Mindfire Solutions” (and that included me too !!!!)

As we reached, the college authorities were there to welcome us. They even shook hands with me. Imagine that !!!!
It was hard for me to digest everything…

We were escorted to their conference hall and were offered refreshments. Along with Mr. Mittra, we were also enjoying the position. I mean, we knew that we were interns…. But they didnt…. 😉

After a short while, we went into the classrooms where the written tests were to be conducted. I was given the charge of invigilating one of the rooms. I announced the instructions, distributed the question papers and the test begun….

While I was moving around in the class, it struck to me that the students appearing for the test were just one year junior to me or of my age. Some were even older !!
I fought a sudden urge to laugh out….

For the first time ever, I was on the other side of the table. I was among the recruiters rather than the to-be-recruited lot.  It was a different kind of feeling altogether……
That day I came to know about the sorrows of an invigilator. Till date, I thought it to be a very easy task, that you just have to stand and look around. But that day I realised that it was not that easy. Standing for one whole hour and being vigilant every second was infact a very difficult job. It was very tiring and my back was aching by the time we completed.

After completion of the test, we were offered a luxurious lunch and returned to the office soon after.

I came to know that the answer sheets were to be checked by me and Swarupa. We started soon as they were more than 150 in number.
After finishing up, I had to again sort out the shortlisted candidates among them and prepare an excel sheet listing their details and forward it to my guide. May sound easy, but was really hectic and tiring…
I mean, first a tiring day in this humid climate followed by a nice lunch and then return to air-conditioned office room…… how was I supposed to keep myself awake, I had no absolute idea…

A sip of coffee came to my rescue and I was finally done with all the work, one after the other….

Then again we were informed of another campus drive on the next day, as well, i.e, Thursday. We went to the Rajdhani Engineering College and this time Ms. Sudesna Nayak accompanied us. The process was exactly the same and before I realised the day was over.

And it was Friday….
Now I came to understand why the abbreviation TGIF (Thank God Its Friday) is such a favourite among the employees in different
organisations….

But Friday was not over still. If you remember I also had to search for the details of trainers who were to come and provide training to the employees working in Mindfire….
So on Friday, I did some Google search about the corporate trainers available in Hyderabad. As a part of my project included Training &
Development as well, this had to be done by me…

I was to collect information, i.e, the names and contact numbers of the institutes that provided corporate training and was successful in
collecting around 23 of them…  I had finished collecting the information well before time and was constantly checking out my watch to go home and enjoy the coming weekend…

Weekends were like the most awaited days now…….

Catch you later with d next blog.  Till den…..
Take care and Be Happy….  🙂