Recruitment & HR

India’s green economy is growing fast but LinkedIn data suggests green talent is growing even faster. The LinkedIn Hiring Rate (LHR) for green talent — defined as professionals with green skills, green job titles, or both — is now 59.7% higher than for the overall workforce. This means green-skilled professionals are significantly more likely to be hired than their peers, underscoring the growing demand for sustainability-focused roles. “The prioritisation of green talent by Indian companies is being fuelled by an interplay of policy reforms, rising consumer consciousness, and the need for deep business transformation,” says Neelima Burra, Chief Strategy, Transformation, and Marketing Officer at Luminous Power Technologies. “Government initiatives like the PM Suryaghar Yojna, National Solar Mission, and Smart City Mission, combined with the growing mandate for ESG reporting — are also pushing companies to recruit sustainability experts, carbon auditors, and ESG strategists to meet regulatory and investor expectations,” she adds further. Operational efficiency has emerged as the top skill across the top five industries increasingly hiring for green skills, as per LinkedIn data. In contrast, precision agriculture skills lead in farming, ranching, and forestry — highlighting how sector-specific green skills are evolving. “Operational efficiency offers the fastest route to tangible returns. It moves the conversation beyond regulatory compliance to net profitability, ensuring we can do more with less energy and fewer materials,” says Venu Nuguri Managing Director and CEO at Hitachi Energy. This surge in demand aligns with broader economic trends. Green jobs in India have grown over 10 times in the past five years, with Gen Z accounting for 63% of applicants, reports The Economic Times, citing a report by WeNaturalists. The projections are equally ambitious. India’s green economy will generate 7.29 million jobs by FY28 and 35 million by 2047, as the sector scales toward a $1 trillion valuation by 2030 and $15 trillion by 2070, suggests another report by The Economic Times, citing a report by NLB Services. The message is clear: green skills aren’t just good for the planet — they’re becoming essential for employability. As India accelerates its climate and economic goals, the workforce is already adapting. The question now is whether education, training, and policy can keep pace. Read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g873CzHT #COP30 #GreenerTogether Source: The Economic Times: https://lnkd.in/d-3bShQP  The Economic Times: https://lnkd.in/dSUMFS58 

Louder for the people at the back 🎤 Many organisations today seem to have shifted from being institutions that develop great talent to those that primarily seek ready-made talent. This trend overlooks the immense value of individuals who, despite lacking experience, possess a great attitude, commitment, and a team-oriented mindset. These qualities often outweigh the drawbacks of hiring experienced individuals with a fixed and toxic mindset. The best organisations attract talent with their best years ahead of them, focusing on potential rather than past achievements. Let’s be clear this is more about mindset and willingness to learn and unlearn as apposed to age. To realise the incredible potential return, organisations must commit to creating an environment where continuous development is possible. This requires a multi-faceted approach: 1. Robust Training Programmes: Employers should invest in comprehensive training programmes that equip employees with the necessary skills for their roles. This includes on-the-job training, mentorship programmes, online courses, and workshops. 2. Redefining Hiring Criteria: Organisations should revise their hiring criteria to focus more on candidates’ potential and willingness to learn rather than solely on prior experience or formal qualifications. Behavioural interviews, aptitude tests, and probationary periods can help assess a candidate's ability to learn and adapt. 3. Partnerships with Educational Institutions: Companies can collaborate with educational institutions to design curricula that align with industry needs. Apprenticeship programmes, internships, and cooperative education can bridge the gap between academic learning and practical job skills. 4. Lifelong Learning Culture: Encouraging a culture of lifelong learning within organisations is crucial. Employers should provide ongoing education opportunities and support for professional development. This includes continuous skills assessment and access to resources for upskilling and reskilling. 5. Inclusive Recruitment Practices: Employers should implement inclusive recruitment practices that remove biases and barriers. Blind recruitment, diversity quotas, and targeted outreach programmes can help ensure that diverse candidates are given a fair chance. By implementing these measures, organisations can develop a workforce that is adaptable, innovative, and resilient, ensuring sustainable success and growth.

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US: noncompetes will be banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. This is very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions). But it's just as relevant at other companies that (outside California) added noncompetes to contracts. Other countries should take notice. The FTC has correctly determined that noncompetes is bad for the economy: although undeniably good for businesses that want to keep wages lower, and enforce lower attrition. If you read the ruling closer: there is an exception where noncompetes can remain for executives. The regulation defines as an executive as those making more than $151K/year AND being policy makers. Many senior-and-above individual contributors will make more than this (especially in Big Tech). But they are not policymakers/execs! That's usually Director-and-above. The regulation is expected to be in effect in a bit over 4 months' time. During this time, organizations can sue the FTC to get this reversed: and the US National Chamber of Commerce has immediately announced they will do just this. Still, there's now a very real chance that soon, noncompetes will be a thing of the past for almost all US workers. We've seen what happened in states that did this earlier: California is the hotbed of innovation and startups. It also has a ban on noncompetes. Coincidence? The FTC doesn't seem to think so. Other countries (that still have noncompetes allowed) could well take notice. The FTC ruling source: https://lnkd.in/dFeVcXwr

I’ve had 4 legal battles since starting my business. Could I have avoided them? Probably. But to be honest, I didn't have the funds to pay a proper lawyer, or the network of founders to ask the right questions to. I don't want that to happen to you. Here are 5 clauses I put in my contracts that might help you protect your work, your business and most importantly.. your sanity ↓ #1 Non-cancellable, non-refundable contracts. This shouldn’t even be an issue if you qualify your clients properly. BUT if someone signs, onboards, and then ghosts? We still get paid. And so should you 🤗 #2 Immediate or short payment terms Most businesses accept 30-to 90-day payment terms. I don’t. You wouldn’t work for 3 months without pay—so why should your business? Cash flow is your business’s lifeline. Protect it. #3 While we’re on payment terms… Your contract should include: → Interest on late invoices. → A clause that stops work if invoices aren’t cleared. → A guarantee that if a client delays the project, you still get paid. Your time isn’t free! #4 Your IP stays YOURS. Anything we bring into the agreement at Klowt stays ours. Anything we create for you is yours. Simple. I once ran a training session, and the client recorded it—then tried to sell it behind a paywall. Now, our contract states a £10,000 fine per breach. (And for that particular case, per breach = per view. 😅) #5 Don't work with d*ckheads. This isn't a legal clause, more legal... advice? 🤣 If someone is giving you red flags in any way at the beginning of your relationship, do not work with them. This could include but not limited to: - Focusing on immediate ROI. - Cost or discounts being a primary concern. - Pushing for work to kick off before contracts or payments. - Reaching out at inappropriate times - or in inappropriate ways. - Delaying initial payments. Legally binding contracts are a good insurance policy, but they're lengthy and expensive to implement if you actually have to go to court. So the best LEGAL advice I can give you as a 2x founder is, don't work with d*ckheads. And learn from my mistakes. It's a lot cheaper than learning from your own... trust me 😂. Was this helpful? 💜 I write a 2x weekly newsletter for founders and freelancers on topics like this. Join us here: https://lnkd.in/ejDbD94R

You don’t just marry a person. You marry a potential career advantage. A Washington University study tracked 4,500+ couples for 5 years—and found your spouse’s personality can influence your job satisfaction, income, and promotions. 🧵 1. The Big Idea: Disciplined and dependable partners don’t just make good spouses. They quietly help their partner succeed at work. And the effect holds for both men and women. 2. The study tracked: ✅ Job satisfaction ✅ Income ✅ Likelihood of promotion ...and matched it against each spouse’s personality traits. One trait consistently stood out. 3. The secret sauce? Being disciplined and dependable. Partners with these qualities predicted: -Higher income -Greater job satisfaction -More frequent promotions Even after controlling for the worker’s own personality traits. 4. How does it work? The researchers found 3 key ways this plays out: -Outsourcing – They take on more of the home load, freeing up mental space. -Emulation – You start mimicking their good habits. -Stability – A calm, organized home improves your focus at work. 5. What about other traits? Being nice (agreeable) or emotionally stable had less impact on career outcomes. It wasn’t about charm—it was about consistency. 6. And this wasn’t just for traditional households. Dual-income couples showed the same benefits. Even when both partners worked full-time, having a steady, structured spouse made a difference. 7. Bottom line: You bring yourself to work. But your partner shapes how well you show up. If you’ve got someone who’s steady, reliable, and disciplined—thank them. They’re helping you win behind the scenes.

A barrier to faster progress in generative AI is evaluations (evals), particularly of custom AI applications that generate free-form text. Let’s say you have a multi-agent research system that includes a researcher agent and a writer agent. Would adding a fact-checking agent improve the results? If we can’t efficiently evaluate the impact of such changes, it’s hard to know which changes to keep. For evaluating general-purpose foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) — which are trained to respond to a large variety of prompts — we have standardized tests like MMLU (multiple-choice questions) and HumanEval (testing code generation); the LMSYS Chatbot arena, which pits two LLMs’ responses against each other and asks a human to judge which response is superior; and large-scale benchmarking like HELM. These evaluation tools are invaluable for giving LLM users a sense of different models' relative performance. Nonetheless, they have limitations: For example, leakage of benchmarks datasets’ questions and answers into training data is a constant worry, and human preference for certain answers does not mean those answers are more accurate. In contrast, our current options for evaluating specific applications built using LLMs are far more limited. Here, I see two major types of applications. - For applications designed to deliver unambiguous, right-or-wrong responses, we have reasonable options. Let’s say we want an LLM to read a resume and extract the candidate's most recent job title, or read a customer email and route it to the right department. We can create a test set that comprises ground-truth labeled examples with the right responses, and measure the percentage of times the LLM generates the right output. The main bottleneck is creating the labeled test set, which is expensive but surmountable. - But many LLM-based applications generate free-text output with no single right response. For example, if we ask an LLM to summarize customer emails, there’s a multitude of possible good (and bad) responses. The same holds for a system to do web research and write an article about a topic, or a RAG system for answering questions. It’s impractical to hire an army of human experts to read the LLM’s outputs every time we tweak the algorithm and evaluate if the answers have improved — we need an automated way to test the outputs. Thus, many teams use an advanced language model to evaluate outputs. In the customer email summarization example, we might design an evaluation rubric (scoring criteria) for what makes a good summary. Given an email summary generated by our system, we might prompt an advanced LLM to read it and score it according to our rubric. I’ve found that the results of such a procedure, while better than nothing, can also be noisy — sometimes too noisy to reliably tell me if the way I’ve tweaked an algorithm is good or bad. [Reached LinkedIn's length limit. Rest of text: https://lnkd.in/gQEDtSr7 ]

I don't know who needs to hear this but the best thing you can do for your employer brand is: - pay really well and give people regular increases - give your employees remote or flexible hybrid work - offer great PTO - foster a culture where people are treated like actual humans at work - create pathways for growth and internal mobility Believe me, if you're doing this then your employees will naturally tell their friends and talk about it online and leave you great reviews, and people will want to work for your company. So many companies will build teams for employer branding and spend hours crafting the exact posts about how "authentic" their culture is that employees all need to post at the same time, or paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get ranked on a pay-to-play list, or posting pictures of foosball tables and fancy happy hours. But I promise you, what top talent wants is money, flexibility, respect, recognition, and growth. Give them that, and they will brand your company as the best place to work without you needing to spend a dime or lift a finger.

Treat your recruiting team the way you'd want them to treat your candidates. Your recruiters can only deliver what you enable them to deliver. No clarity from hiring managers means no clarity for candidates. Here's what this principle actually means: 1. Give them real ammunition, not job descriptions Recruiters can't sell what they don't understand. Yet most hiring managers hand them a JD and say "go find someone." Then wonder why candidates aren't excited. Do a real kickoff. Create an intake doc. Brief your recruiters like you'd brief your sales team. Why does this role matter? What will this person actually build? Show them the real impact. When recruiters understand the mission & the role, candidates feel it. 2. Stop making them chase you for answers Imagine if you applied somewhere and waited a week for every response. That's what recruiters face internally. They message candidates "we'll get back to you soon" while waiting days for your feedback. They look incompetent because you're not responding. Every delayed decision is a recruiter losing credibility with a candidate who has three other offers. 3. Your urgency becomes their urgency When a CEO personally joins a recruiting standup or sends a quick note about why a role matters, everything changes. Recruiters move faster. They push harder. They believe more. Send emails on their behalf. Jump into nurture sequences. When hiring is treated as "HR's problem," recruiters feel it. And so do candidates. The energy you bring to hiring is the energy candidates feel in the process. 4. Let them shape the process, not just execute it Recruiters see hundreds of interviews. They start to see which questions actually predict success. They spot patterns you miss. Too many companies treat them like admins. Include them in designing interview loops. Let them flag when your process is losing good people. They're your early warning system if you actually listen. 5. They're selling your company 100 times while you're building it Every recruiter conversation is a brand moment. Every rejection handled poorly is a Glassdoor review. Every candidate who feels respected tells ten friends. Even your rejections matter. Give real feedback. Close the loop. Your recruiters are having more conversations about your company than anyone except customers. Treat them like the frontline brand ambassadors they actually are. When recruiters feel like partners, candidates feel it too. When they feel like order-takers, your hiring shows it. The best companies don't have recruiting teams. They have talent partners.

“We don’t use agencies or consultants because I had a bad experience with one several years ago”. That’s what a Director of RevOps told me yesterday. It’s like saying you’re never going to a restaurant again because one time you had a bad meal. I used to think the same way when I was young, naive and inexperienced. I took so much pride in thinking I knew everything and could do it all myself. But then in 2013, despite me arguing against it, the company I worked for hired a Strategic Marketing Consultant named Andy and it fundamentally changed my career. Andy taught me all the really important things about Marketing that most people don’t talk about - how to conduct customer interviews, how to create a business case, how to run a beta trial, how to build a differentiated strategy using product, price, distribution, and promotion all together. Then again in 2017, the company I worked for hired a Category Design Consultant named Robin who taught me everything about category design, positioning, narrative design and strategic communications. Then again in 2018, the company I worked for hired a Creative & Branding agency who totally transformed our website, sales decks, and advertising assets and taught me everything I know about the creative process and how much it matters in properly communicating your message to the market. A lot of my skills, experience, and success in entrepreneurship can be directly attributed to these experiences working with external experts that taught me specialized knowledge, processes, and ways of thinking. ___ External experts (agencies, consultants, fractionals, etc.) have distinct advantages that simply can’t be replicated by in-house employees: -They’ve worked with hundreds or thousands of companies to solve the same problem  -They’ve developed processes, automation, and other forms of intellectual property that accelerate projects and initiatives  -They’ve seen some companies succeed and clearly know what "success" looks like and what it takes -They've seen many companies fail and know how to help you avoid common mistakes and missteps. Not leveraging external experts to complement the skills of your in-house team, accelerate key strategic initiatives, avoid common missteps, and help you identify internal blindspots is simply not smart and is based on a false sense of ego and pride. I know because I thought that way for a long time and now realize how naive and misguided my thinking was. Not using external experts just because you had one bad experience with one is like saying you’re never going to a restaurant again because you had one bad meal. Restaurants don’t all suck - you just picked a bad one. Pick a better restaurant next time. Or be naive and prideful trying to cook all the meals by yourself - eat a bunch of poorly cooked meals, have it take 10x longer, and waste a bunch of time and money trying to be a self-taught Michelin Star Chef. #strategy #b2b #marketing #sales

#CfD & #PPA - both buzz words used a lot recently. And both clearly favoured by EU Commission to boost #renewable electricity. But how do they interact?! This isn’t analysed and understood well yet. I discussed this with government representatives from across the EU in the 9th Plenary Session of the Concerted Action on the Renewable Energy Directive (CA-RES4, https://www.ca-res.eu/) in Sophia/hybrid last week. In my talk (slide extract below), I pointed out that… 🔷 … a government Contract for Difference (CfD) constitutes state-aid to de-risk and support the penetration of renewable energy. Accordingly, a MWh of renewable electricity eligible for a CfD cannot be sold under a renewable merchant Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), with which customers such as data centres or steel factories would fulfil their sustainability targets. That would be "double-counting" in a state-aid law sense. 🔷 … PPAs and CfDs can co-exist on a market level, though: competitive projects enter into bilateral "green" PPAs with customers, while those projects/techs where costs exceed customers' willingness to pay (but that governments still want to materialise) can bid for a CfD. Which is what has happened in practice in many countries. With market conditions tightening, though, there is widespread concern that merchant PPAs get crowded-out by government support CfDs, reducing market liquidity and increasing support needs. 🔷 … there is increasing thinking into how a single renewable plant (e.g. a wind or solar park) can benefit from the de-risking of a CfD while still providing an offering for customers in the PPA market. One option is to not let the CfD start before X (e.g. 5) years after Commercial Operation Date (COD), incentivising the operator to secure revenues for the first X years on the market, e.g. via a PPA. Another option is to let the operator split its park into one part receiving a CfD and one merchant part selling PPAs. Both come with pros & cons and challenging implementation questions... 🙏 Thank you very much for a vivid discussion, it was super interesting to hear how different EU Member States think about this! And many thanks to Leonardo Barreto and the team of Austrian Energy Agency for the invite & organisation, and my Frontier Economics colleagues Lyuba Ilieva & Stephan Schmitt for their prep support!