There is a gap between what young people want from their careers and what they get. We’ve spent months trying to understand this white space, and we've distilled our learnings into a brand new careers podcast from the newsroom of The Ken ! The first two years of our careers are hard. They are exciting and full of possibilities, but also frustrating and anxiety-inducing. Every interaction, every assignment, and every initiative seems to hold promise and uncertainty in equal measure. Do you have t...
Mar 11, 2024•4 min•Ep. 52
Thank you for tuning in every week. With this episode, Cost to Company is coming to an end. Do tell us what you liked about the show, what we can do differently, or if you have any fresh ideas in the careers space for us. Write to podcasts@the-ken.com. If you liked Cost to Company, we are sure you'd like our other podcasts First Principles and Daybreak . We have newer, bigger shows coming real soon! Stay tuned to the feeds for updates on the upcoming shows. The show was hosted by Sneha Vakharia,...
Aug 08, 2023•3 min•Ep. 51
Each individual episode of Cost to Company is like a part of the elephant in the hands of a blind person. Only but a piece of a much larger story. In this special 50th episode of Cost to Company, the hosts discuss the sum of trends they have observed in workplaces. And what that tells us about the changing nature of the economy, and of work. This episode was produced by Sneha Vakharia , and engineered by Rajiv CN . Cost to Company is produced from the newsroom of The Ken , India’s first subscrib...
Jul 31, 2023•45 min•Ep. 50
Company culture (as we know it) is broken. Seventy-seven percent of the global workforce is disengaged and burnt out, says the latest Gallup report. In fact, there's a new term floating around – loud quitting. These are employees who stay in their jobs and take actions that directly harm the organisation and sabotage its goals. This is a new low, and a huge signal that there is a dire need to change. Companies are looking for innovative ways to boost the morale of the workplace and weld teams to...
Jul 24, 2023•28 min•Ep. 49
We released a survey for working mothers. The objective was to build a collective of the wisdom of working mothers. Ask them for their needs. And their hacks. How can families and businesses best enable working mothers? And how can working mothers enable themselves? As of writing this, It’s been a week since we put out the survey. 630 mothers replied. This is what they had to say. This episode was written and hosted by Sneha Vakharia , and engineered by Rajiv CN . Cost to Company is produced fro...
Jul 17, 2023•41 min•Ep. 48
Failing to plan is planning to fail. But that's not the case with PIPs. Which, more often than not, is planned to fail anyway. In this episode of Cost to Company, I speak to Sharthok Chakraborty (Co-founder, Klaar; Ex-Cipla) Nimesh Mathur (Investor, Advisor, HR Leader; Ex-Haptik), and Sumit Singla (HR Consultant, ex-Accenture) on one of the most contentious tools of the workplace, the Performance Improvement Plan. And why embarking on one is almost always a fool's errand. For both the employer a...
Jul 10, 2023•33 min•Ep. 47
Reverse reference checks. Combative questions during interviews. And employees on why it isn’t the employer’s market yet. With layoffs and recession fears, you would imagine employees are settling for less. You would imagine they are taking up a job, any job, to evade unemployment. Instead, they are making decisions about their next move in the most deliberate and calibrated manner. On today's episode, we will talk about employees striving to take back the position that matters most in their car...
Jul 03, 2023•26 min•Ep. 46
There’s hustle. And then there’s excellence. Startups give their employees abundance of the former, but not as much of the latter. In the long run, this can seriously hurt career prospects. This week, we set out to understand the skills startups give their youngest employees.. The skills they don’t. Where this can land them in their careers. Who is responsible for this. And if you are such a startup employee, what you can do about it. This episode was written and hosted by Sneha Vakharia , and e...
Jun 26, 2023•30 min•Ep. 45
If you ask any tech employee about their dream company to work at, it’s usually a Microsoft or a Google or a cool startup. Nobody aspires to work at a healthcare company or a bank, really. It’s where you end up. Not choose. At least that’s the perception all around. But what if I tell you, you’ve been looking at the talent market all wrong? That the cold sectors of yesterday — manufacturing, BFSI, FMCG companies, and so on — are the hot sectors of today. Companies, across sectors, want to be tec...
Jun 19, 2023•28 min•Ep. 44
How do you evaluate the risks you take in your choice of jobs? The size, stage of the company you’re going to work for. The type of roles you choose. How long you wait in a particular role before you make your next move, look for the next jump. How do the risks we take, and don’t take, shape our careers. This week, we turn to three of the most risk seeking category of professionals, founders. We ask them how to take risks well. This episode was written, hosted and produced by Sneha Vakharia, wit...
Jun 12, 2023•27 min•Ep. 43
The tables have turned. But the mistakes keep spilling over. In this episode, we spoke to Ria Shroff Desai (People and Culture Lead, Blume Ventures); Udayan Walvekar (CEO, GrowthX); Bhakti Dhanak (Associate Vice President - Human Resources, CIIE.CO) to understand some of the unobvious errors that candidates are making while applying for jobs in the 'employer's market' of 2023. Cost to Company is a careers and workplaces podcast from the The Ken’s newsroom. The Ken is India's first subscriber-onl...
Jun 05, 2023•25 min•Ep. 42
For months and months now, there’s a word that’s been whispered among recruiters, founders, CXOs, and executives who are hiring for key positions in their companies. It’s a word used to describe a cohort of professionals whose salaries are out of sync with the reality of the market. It’s a word that is used for people who work in product management, engineering, marketing, and even cross-functional roles. Meet the “unhireables”. They live among us. They work in our offices. Walking around like r...
May 29, 2023•25 min•Ep. 41
Some call them discreet reference checks, some call them back channel checks, some call them ghost reference checks. They're growing rapidly, and recruiters are leaning on them like never before. In this week’s episode, host Sneha Vakharia takes you behind the scenes into why they’re growing, how they’re done, and what you need to do about it.
May 22, 2023•31 min•Ep. 40
This time last year, companies were giving away eye-popping rewards to retain talent. From BMW bikes to sponsoring vacations, they did it all to lure top talent. Times were good. Talent was scarce. And start-ups and companies were flush with money and endless capital. But, not anymore. On today’s show, why retention has gone from broad-based to focussed, open to hidden, and most importantly – equal to unequal. Companies are applying focussed strategies only for select top performers who are cruc...
May 16, 2023•31 min•Ep. 39
The situation has changed. And the equation has too. If the past two years were all about throwing money to attract top talent, 2023 has seen a general sobering up of appraisals and job switch hikes. In a strange turns of events, some employees are okay with taking a cut on their annual compensation in exchange for ‘stability’, in this highly volatile job market. I speak to Saaquib Dawoodani (Head of Talent, Revolut), Abha Khurana (People Success Lead, inFeedo), and Shashank B. (Writer + creativ...
May 08, 2023•31 min•Ep. 38
This week your host Sneha will take you inside businesses at war, through the voices of those fighting in the trenches. We’ll hear how the same war — the war against inflation, a funding winter and shrinking markets — is being fought differently in different businesses. We’ll see how war sharpens, and sometimes disfigures, a business. We’ll see what is martyred and what is protected. This is what a business fighting for survival looks like. Tell us , is your business fighting for survival?...
May 01, 2023•38 min•Ep. 37
MBAs – love them or hate them, but you can’t ignore them. Over the years, they have taken over every business vertical – general management, sales and marketing, growth and strategy, human resources, and even product and technology. Name it, they have been there and done that. But there was one bastion that remained unconquered by the MBAs for the longest. One last holdout – hardcore finance. Sitting at the apex of this pristine castle were the chartered accountants. Crunching numbers and callin...
Apr 25, 2023•26 min•Ep. 36
In the last few months alone, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce announced that they were going to begin the process of flattening their organisations. That they were going to have fewer and fewer hierarchies in their organisations. Fewer hierarchies means fewer managers. The pattern here appears to be that in tough economic times, when efficiency becomes paramount, businesses are rethinking their need for managers. And concluding that they don’t need that many. Because managers are expensive, and the...
Apr 17, 2023•34 min•Ep. 35
You've heard about them. You've worked with them. You've thoughts around them. But have you really heard from them? In this episode, I speak to Kaavyya Kesarwani (Growth & Community, Juno), Sherina Poyyail (Policy professional, Ex: The Quint), Bhavya Narula (Founding team, GrowthX), Sindhu Shivaprasad (Chief of Staff, Obvious) and Shashank Baliga (Writer, a major OTT platform) to understand what the 'new kids on the block' think about careers, workplaces, and whatever else happens in between...
Apr 10, 2023•30 min•Ep. 34
Here are some messages Cost to Company has received over the past months. “I believe working with GenZ is the toughest thing I do at work. They look at their jobs as a means to the next job. This has dramatically reduced their qualitative output, even if their quantitative output is enough. “ “Workplace hierarchy is its absurd with GenZs”. “There is an increasing gap between values of older generation and new generation of knowledge workers”. “There is a huge mismatch in expectations that millen...
Apr 03, 2023•38 min•Ep. 33
A meaty part-time role may seem like the best of most worlds. Your workload is relatively lesser. You have more time to spare. The money might be decent too. One major downside of the part-time experience though is that you lose out on important benefits such as paid leaves and health insurance. Or... do you? In this episode, I speak to Saurabh Arora (Co-founder and CTO, Plum), Michelle P. (Communications professional + entrepreneur), and Naren (Independent software consultant) to understand why...
Mar 27, 2023•26 min•Ep. 32
In this special episode of Cost to Company, the tables turn. Snigdha interviews CTC hosts Sneha and Shreevar about how work and workplaces have changed in the last thirty weeks. The short version: they’ve changed dramatically. This episode is the long version of that answer. Sneha takes us into the evolving relationship between the employee and employer, into how power has shifted in response to larger shifts in the economy, just in the past seven months. And how that has changed the way we work...
Mar 20, 2023•52 min•Ep. 31
Everybody is cutting costs. Not because they want to. But because they have to. A few months ago, edtech giant Unacademy announced that they were making frugality as one of their ‘core values’ to focus on profitability. But can you really be a frugal company if it’s not in your DNA from the very beginning? In this episode, I speak to Somnath Mukherjee (AVP Business, Zerodha), Rahul Deorah (Finance Lead, Dezerv), and Kavya Jain (Product Manager, FreeUp) to find out what its like working in a frug...
Mar 13, 2023•30 min•Ep. 30
Internships are booming. Internshala has been reporting jumps of between 30 and 80 percent jumps in internships listed by businesses year on year, depending on which year you look at. The same data says that more and more businesses are offering paid internships. Demand for interns is going up. And if you ask recruiters, they’ll say that the number of internship applicants is also going up. Supply of interns is meeting its demand. Both sides of the market are growing. And because of this, workpl...
Mar 06, 2023•25 min•Ep. 29
Gone are the days when unions were something that only caught the fancy of the blue collar workforce. After a slew of unending layoffs, white collar employees in the IT sector are finally waking up to the bells of unionisation. But it’s not without a myriad of unobvious roadblocks. The path to collective bargaining wasn’t easy. But no one knew it would be this hard. In this episode, I speak to Sreyan Chatterjee (Lawyer/Researcher; Ex-Reuters), Harpreet Singh Saluja (Founding Member, Nascent Info...
Feb 27, 2023•34 min•Ep. 28
There’s a specific idea we have about moonlighting: a trend that emerged in the pandemic. Engineers tasked with sitting at home and delivering their product saw that their skills were so valuable, that it was possible to extract more money out of them by working in two places at once. So a person would either consult with multiple organizations on the side, or work in more businesses than one, using the skills they had already, to extract more income out of it. But this episode, what we’re talki...
Feb 20, 2023•31 min•Ep. 27
What was once touted as the biggest work trend to emerge from the pandemic, is on its way out. Companies are slowly but surely realising that the 'work from anywhere' model isn't sustainable in the long run. Or even in the short run, in some cases. Meesho, for one, had announced an extravagant WFA policy in February 2022. They scrapped it only a few months later. But it's not just the employers who're putting the final nail in the coffin. It's the employees too. In this episode, I speak to Joel ...
Feb 13, 2023•19 min•Ep. 26
Earlier this month, Cost to Company received a striking message from a Ken subscriber called Uzma Rushdi. She wrote, “Mumbai is suffering from a lack of new talent inflow. Unless there are dramatic changes it will be Calcutta in 20 years :(” Around the same time another thing happened. A group of 35 startups in Mumbai created something called TEAM (Technology Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai), with the the pointed goal to reinvigorate Brand Mumbai. But what happened to Brand Mumbai that it ne...
Feb 06, 2023•30 min•Ep. 25
In 2023, amidst the thick of the layoff season, you'd think that 'employee ghosting' (a phenomenon where prospective employees don't end up joining an organisation without any providing any communication) is a thing of the past. But that's quite not true. Although in a reduced state as compared to 2021, ghosting still exists. Companies and their HR professionals are coming up with some ingenious way to jump the 'invisible gap' that exists between offer acceptance and joining date, where most of ...
Jan 30, 2023•31 min•Ep. 24
A good executive coach with many years of experience, working in an Indian metro city, typically costs between 20 thousand rupees to a lakh a session. There are multiple reasons for this. First, training to be a certified coach is expensive. Second, executive coaches work with such a niche, small, group of clients, so they get to and need to charge to the world. But this, the steep price tag, informs so much about executive coaching. The price tag shapes who gets to go to an executive coach. It ...
Jan 23, 2023•31 min•Ep. 23
