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Interview

Meenakshi Thakur
Meenakshi Thakur
CHRO, Bharat Aluminium Company Limited

With over 18 years of experience in manufacturing HR, she currently serves as CHRO –Rolled Products and Head HR Processes at BALCO. Throughout her career, she has focused onbuilding people capabilities, driving HR excellence, and partnering with business leaders to enable sustainable organizational growth.She is deeply passionate about people development, culture building, employee engagement, and strengthening HR processes that create meaningful business impact. She enjoys empowering teams, nurturing leadership capabilities, and fostering workplaces that effectively balance performance with purpose. Her continued focus remains on creating value through people, processes, and culture while contributing to the organization's long-term success and growth.

Q:What advice would you give to working professionals aiming to transition into leadership roles?
A:Few factors help transition into leadership roles -
1. Networking both upwards and downwards. Keep your eyes and ears open
2. More and more communication
3. Start leading and not managing
4. Delegation mode to focus on priorities
5. Shifting towards a strategic mindset from execution
Q:How can professionals effectively use feedback to accelerate their growth?
A:The first step here will be removing all the biases and accepting the feedback with a clean mind. Understand what is relevant and right, assess the gap, and plan the improvement path. You may take help from mentors, experts, or even experiences in life to help here.
Q:How can fresh graduates better align with evolving workplace expectations?
A:The evolving workplace will comprise more of Technology, Agility, ownership, and Resilience. Prepare yourselves for these values. The balance of these values and the right EQ will help you grow.
Q:With evolving hiring trends, how do you see recruitment changing over the next few years?
A:The recruitment will be the outcome of long-term workforce planning. Instead of external hiring the focus will shift towards internal mobility and building talent. The process will be AI-driven and a fast one with a focus on skills rather than degrees. Shift will be hiring through Social media platforms and referrals with strong background checks
Q:From your experience at Bharat Aluminium Company Limited, what HR trends will shape the future of work?
A:The HR Trends will shift from traditional core values to modern values focusing on CARE, AGILITY, AI-centric, Internal talent development, incentives, and flexible culture. Since digitization and AI will take over the transactions, people will be working more on strategy and innovation.