Sucheta Gour

VEN Consulting Help Companies find solutions to the staffing requirement of the Industry

Today, the Indian job market is seeing tremendous change in terms of technologies or timeline in completing the projects with the rightly skilled-resource availability. In the last decade, India has moved from traditional jobs to need-based and skill-based jobs. To help companies VEN Consulting Pvt Ltd. has come up with a solution where it hires skill-specific talent from the industries and designates them to its clients and when the project is completed, they are assigned to the new clients. The company was started as a recruitment company in 2005 by Sucheta Gour and Sanjay Lingadalli. They ventured into Project resource deployment almost 8 years ago. Some of the nation-building projects they were part of: the solar project of Pokhran, Sardar Vallabhai Patel Statue Erection, Coastal Road Project in Mumbai, Transmission Lines in Jammu, Smart City Projects in North-Eastern Project, the metro construction of the majority of cities in India and more. In this special issue, we interacted with Sucheta Gour about her career journey, the challenges she faced as a leader, and more.

Sucheta Gour is a successful HR professional with two decades of experience in the varied sectors of the industry. She is an entrepreneur, a blogger on motivational skills, people management, and life skills. She comes from a middle-class conservative family in North Karnataka. Her career journey was a roller-coaster ride. She did every job in her company as it was a start-up and every entrepreneur is required to know every aspect of the business. She started with a role as a Recruiter in her own company and now she is the Director. The designation remained the same from day one. But the roles changed from Recruiter to People Manager to HR Generalist to Business Development to Strategist.

The biggest factor that has helped her in becoming successful is her belief that anything is possible. All one needs is to identify what they want to achieve keeping the character and values intact. She believes that anything can be learned and one needs to implement kaizen on oneself. She always intends to travel the path with her eyes blindfolded towards the negativity that any person or situation offers.

The most important decision she makes as a leader of her organization is to analyze the industrial and societal trends which helps her to redefine her business model and strategic planning for implementation of processes. It also helps her in identifying training needs to make the processes error-proof, and in structuring sustainable solutions to suit the needs of the changing industry.

Consulting Industry has Changed Over the Years 

The focus has shifted from long term to short term solutions. Expectations are not clearly defined yet since this Industry is still perceived as only sourcing candidates. Many people with the longest tenure and experience still speak of staffing or resource deployment as hiring or payrolling process and not skill development or cost and time-saving models. “Our industry is still struggling, not being able to command the respect and attention which it could have gained if the knowledge base was focusse upon collectively by industry leaders coming together initiating Corporate Governance for the staffing industry,” says Sucheta.

There are series of things that need to be changed in the industry today. She believes that it takes patience, humbleness, trials, and demonstration to change. Some changes which are necessary for the industry are:

To Create defined guidelines with sufficient analysis of different sectors and geographies.

• To build an inclination of youngsters to aspire to be HR and not just take up HR as a stop-gap or comfortable job
• Building the knowledge base required to make the industry stronger.
• Offering strong solutions that would get better with time to achieve the Client’s Cost, Process, and Time demands, so on and so forth.

Sucheta Gour says that the right skill is not the catch today. The right skill at the right time for the required tenure on the required project is the catch.

Overcoming Challenges as a Leader   

“The only tact to carry challenge as a challenge and not as a problem makes you overcome it. You have Gender challenges which are underlying challenges of our society, Acceptance challenges when you dream the unbelievable, Belief challenges in your vision when you implement something new, Sustainability challenges in people’s thought process towards achieving a common goal,” she says.

“To overcome these challenges, you should be able to convert experience into words and communicate with your team with the content which would convince them. You should be able to demonstrate your experience with your actions. Everyone looks for a solution to their problems in their profession. Only if you can guide them to resolve their problems, add value to their career leading to respect in professional, personal, and social life, which in turn compliments the Organizational growth, you are a good leader,” she adds. A leader has an ethical responsibility to guide teams to the right path and keep them there without deviating their focus, exploring themselves, and adding value to whatever they do.

Talking about the challenge facing female leaders today, she says, that the fact that they are females itself is the biggest challenge. As a leader, ego clashes are a common thing. What generally you can hear from a male Manager will not be heard the same way from a female Manager even in the most decent approach. Raising voice or proving right isn’t easily acceptable when it is a female Manager. I have come across people who accept you without a gender bias too but the societal impacts do exist. Males are more trusted as leaders than females.

At the other end, when you interact externally, you come across people who are too respectful or people who consider you a commodity. Few of them , though being respectful draw a limitation for you because of your gender and few who consider you a commodity, feel you are easily accessible or you are a topic for a loose talk. As our society has a mix of all, many good people believe in moderation too. But the ugly part haunts you if you allow it to. It’s good to be a child at heart erasing unwanted memory carrying ignorance towards whatever you found awkward.

To ensure that she continues to grow and develop as a leader, she is learning with an open mind keeping her fundamentals strong. She is trying to set newer goals for her team, making them believe in themselves, and helping them achieve those goals. Besides, she is also trying to develop more leaders for her organization which will multiply the growth of her organization.