“Nothing ever becomes real till it’s experienced” Shameem at RIAFY Technologies

17^th century English Poet, John Keats summed up 21^st century millennials in this one line. For my generation so known for instant gratification, we can never be OK with being on the sidelines.

Realizing our urge to be always occupied, our college made sure that we had an outlet to channelize this energy and get a taste of life as we might know in couple of years, once we graduate.

70% of our batch (2019-21) came to XIME, right out of their grad school. In today’s job market, where corporates expect you to have 21 years of work experience by the time you are 18, this was a huge challenge! As they say necessity is the mother of invention, folks at the helm realised if drastic measures are not taken, this would mean disaster come the placement season. That’s how the “Live Project” was conceived. 

The idea was to provide the batch with an avenue to get real world job experience, in liaison with the Kerala Start Up Mission (KSUM). We visited KSUM, where many companies pitched their requirement and we were given the opportunity to pick and choose the roles we wanted to experience.

RIAFY Technologies, a 7 years old start-up with a penchant for creating amazing mobile apps (they have created 40+ apps) and 30 million users, had an opening for HR Generalist Intern. All I was looking for was a platform to test the theories we studied in class. The interview was quite straight forward and thankfully I landed the internship.

When I showed for work on day 1, I was not clear as to what to expect since this was going to my first start-up experience. However, I was sure that I was going to have a whale of a time, given I was going to amidst a bunch of bright minds in an organisation where the average employee is less than 25 years old!

Couple of days and few cups of coffee later, I was given a list of tasks which outlined my role there, however to my pleasant surprise was to be an open ended one!

During my time at RIAFY, I have fiddled across the function of HR. Being a startup with the essence of utilizing the skill-sets of their employees to the maximum; I knew I was going to get more than the usual “Get Coffee and Get this Xeroxed” out of my role. I realised that’s a myth! I was always bought coffee by the folks!

My primary objective was to assist in sourcing talent. However, this was going to be a task, as my lack of technological background, made me a mere spectator in lot of early conversations. Few sit-ins with the team of developers, testers, and architects I got a hang of the jargons, which helped me a lot in prepping up the JDs. Once I got a hang of that, I progressed to posting the roles on LinkedIn as well sourcing candidates from various job portals. The next transition was going to have the first level discussion with the candidates, which I loved and kind of forged my resolve of following the path into talent development and recruitment, was the right one for me!

Gradually the role blossomed into planning the interview schedule, facilitating the tests, arranging the face to face interactions with the founders and finally closing the role. I was lucky enough to dwindle into the analytics aspect of HR as well, which is the buzzword of today. The weekly sessions on how well were the responses on various job posting, across different portals, numbers we screened, numbers we called up, how many showed up and finally how many roles were opened out. These sessions helped me put into perspective, the importance of taking a step back and looking at the chalked out action plans. 

Overall the experience at RIAFY has only strengthened my decision to pursue a career in HR. The opportunities that I was provided with here, to explore the world of recruiting and talent development is something I am extremely thankful for. So is my gratitude towards the college for arranging an experience like this through the Live Project!

Shameem Cina Thomas

HR Intern – Recruitment

RIAFY Technologies Pvt Ltd.

8121749729 | shamythomas26@gmail.com