Green Rootz is leading service provider of recruitment solutions for the Internet, Ecommerce, Media and Mobile Apps industry. Green Rootz was set-up in year 2007 and since then it has done path-breaking work in its domain. With its exclusive focus on the New Age Media & Internet space, Green Rootz has developed enormous competency in helping companies’ source right professionals.
Other than providing recruitment services, Green Rootz has also taken up turnkey projects. Green Rootz does extensive work in the field of salary benchmarking, organizational structuring, compensation structuring among others.
The company has been named Green Rootz because Green is the color of life and Roots are the reason for growth. Thus, all endeavours of our company are focused on Growth of Life. ‘Z’ at the end of Rootz signifies ‘new age; with the time’ attitude of the company. Thus, relevancy is at the core of our beliefs.
Harish Jain, Founder – Green Rootz on the HR landscape, the business innovative during COVID 19 and way forward.
You started Green Rootzin in 2007. What made you start an HR consultancy from being a marketing manager at Zapak and Radio City, Times… and why a specialized HR consultancy for the M&E sector particularly?
I personally do not look at Green Rootz as an HR centric company. It’s unfortunate that people have a very myopic view of what HR does. I believe is supposed to be the center of any organizational business performance and their strategy, but people do not do that. It has always been considered as a support function.
People in organizations ask HR to do paperwork. The recruitment people are like the doorkeepers to keep track of who is coming in and who is going out. And this has not evolved for a very, very long time.
At Radio City I still remember, was already an established radio network, Zoom and Zapakwere startups. At Radio City at that time, the second phase of licensing had just got announced in 2005. As part of my project at Radio City, the mandate was to set up new stations, wherever we had acquired licenses. So, all of these companies, were going through, building the whole team strategizing as to how to take the business ahead, which meant they had look at everything from sales, marketing, programming, to getting people on board, so on and so forth. So everywhere interestingly, by the virtue of my deep interest in seeing how businesses really grow, I had worked very closely the business heads or the CEOs of the respective companies.I got a good bird’s eye view of their perspectives and that’s why they put me in touch with the HRs as well.
How has the vision and mission of Green Rootz evolved since 2007?
Very few companies in the media and entertainment space have been able to evolve with time and have been able to create business, with these scenarios changing. You have the Times of India which has been one of the biggest companies they missed the complete entertainment television but when Star wanted to come to India, so they did not really put a foot in and for that matter, when the whole digitization happened. Most of the products that they created were all me too products.
People who are inward-looking and cannot see how the business is changing and the landscape is changing and find it difficult and be too late in the game to do something as well and not create me too products.
To see how Green Rootz as a company has evolved is the first thing we do is complete market intelligence. We don’t just send resumes. When a mandate comes to us we explain to the client as to what are the kinds of people that will help and benefit the business and actually drive growth.
We educate and inform the companies a lot about the changing market dynamics. We meet people, and we try and obviously understand their profile, much in-depth, to figure out the lateral movements that are possible.
I have noticed that whenever there is a downturn or the market dips, we overall do a much better than what we would have done in a normal market condition. Companies start talking to us. You know when this frenzy anybody can talk to anybody because they just wanted people on board. But when it gets tough and then you know, you want the right sort of people to really come and fit in positions and not go wrong at all.
What is your team structure like?
We have a very flat structure; we do not have any hierarchies. Most of the people work as business managers who talk to clients. A total of 24 people across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.
How has the business been for Green Rootz in this current COVID situation?
April was very bad, because you know, in March the lockdown was announced in every company absolutely in the same sense he decided to stop everything. From the time lockdown was announced to me last week of April, the work was like, quite little. Once everybody realized that the consumption of media is not going to stop, people going to continue to consume content and more so when people are at home,it is time for them to keep on growing. For us the work load was very high from May onwards. And then obviously the mess happened whereby, all Chinese companies were banned.
What are the new or various other new sort of roles that you see emerging in this space going forward?
The Media and Entertainment space is primarily getting redefined by digital. So, it is not because of COVID there are new sort of rules that really have come. All those things started happening since the last three years. I mean, earlier you never had such rich data about the consumer. Today you have that you never had the kind of distribution you could really imagine. Then you need to have television, reaching through the distributors in every home, then only you will be able to see, to have to go to theatre, and the theatre has to be the inner city in the vicinity for you to be able to watch movie. Roles related to data science and data analysis will be very crucial.
Roles related to core product will also be in demand. In digital every six months or one year, probably you will have a new updating push through and the way you are really browsing through the app is when ready to face so a different set of people you know who are working every day, the same guys working every day. Content guys are working every day, engineers are working every day.
All of this is changing in a very, very, very crazy manner in a very, very fast forward way. And that is where you will have people who were outsiders earlier who can come and make their mark because you need to learn things too fast.
All of this means only people who are really smart, really updated, people who are really hungry, and who are evolving continuously, will be needed and which means you can have all sorts of people coming in also, you don’t have to worry about a specific person has previously done something like this or law enhanced, you know, it comes down to the point where a resume can tell you what one has done in the past but it doesn’t talk about one’s capability for the future.
