Vibe Vault India

BEYOND THE RESUME: THE SHIFT FROM DEGREES TO CAPABILITIES

Is the person resilient? Curious? A team player?. A resume can't answer that. But someone's life journey might! They called out how the workplace itself has evolved.





As the workplace transforms at an unprecedented pace, one fundamental question is forcing HR leaders to re-evaluate traditional hiring approaches — should pedigree still matter, or is it time to prioritise skills above all else?



At the Economic Times Nextech Human Capital Summit 2025, HR leaders unpacked the complex, yet timely question: Are degrees losing their power in hiring? As companies pivot towards digital transformation, the consensus from the panel was loud and clear — skills, not pedigree, will determine the future of talent.



In an energetic session titled 'Hiring for Skills vs Pedigree in the Transformative Era', leading voices from the industry debated the foundational shift in hiring philosophies. The session was moderated by Bhavya Misra, CHRO, Godrej Capital, and featured Sunder Natarajan, CHRO, IndiaFirst Life; Arti Dua, Partner & Talent Leader, EY; and Ruchee Anand, Senior Director, LinkedIn India.



Why resumes are not enough anymore



Panelists brought a consulting perspective to the debate, stating that companies have actively moved beyond traditional resumes to assess people based on attributes and personas.



They ask — is the person resilient? Curious? A team player?. A resume can't answer that. But someone's life journey might! They called out how the workplace itself has evolved.



“Careers are no longer linear. The definition of competence is fluid. So how can our hiring be rigid?," Panelists discussed.



Skills are the new currency



Anand of LinkedIn India weighed in with platform-level insights.



“We’re witnessing a hiring evolution across industries. Earlier, your college or company name was your calling card. Today, your skills and what you can do speak louder.”



According to her, organisations that continue to over-index on pedigree risk missing out on vast, skilled, non-traditional talent.



She pointed out how younger professionals today are gaining credibility through certifications, project work, and content creation. “You can see someone’s knowledge in action on LinkedIn. Their posts, problem-solving approach, and collaborations are public proof points,” she said.



“And hiring is becoming more democratic — the barriers of brand names are falling," Anand added.



The ground reality: Attitude matters more than academics



Bringing in a frontline HR perspective, Natarajan shared how, at IndiaFirst Life, employability is increasingly defined by willingness to learn and tech adaptability rather than academic achievements.



“When I meet our sales teams across India, I don’t ask what college they went to. I ask them, ‘What’s the last new thing you tried to learn on your phone?’ That tells me more," he said.



He added that in sales, communication, customer empathy, and energy matter more than any degree. “A graduate from a modest background who understands human emotion can outsell someone from a top B-school.”



Rethinking identity at work



Misra took the conversation to a deeper level, nudging HR to rethink how people are perceived and valued at work.



“You’re not just a qualification or a job title,” she said. “You may be a solo traveller, a daughter, a dog mom, a poetry writer. These identities shape how you lead, collaborate and show up at work.”



She noted how some of the best hiring decisions are made when managers consider the whole person, not just the role. “When we bring in empathy, openness, and inclusivity into the hiring room, we see potential we might otherwise miss,” she added.



From resume to reskill: The rise of lifelong learning



Dua mentioned that EY is doubling down on upskilling — not just for new hires, but across the employee lifecycle. “We’ve launched an AI Varsity, have 900+ learning journeys, and encourage cross-role mobility,” she said.



She also highlighted that candidates with outdated mindsets — no matter their degrees — may become redundant unless they invest in continuous learning. “A fresher who is learning cloud, blockchain or generative AI today might outshine a decade-old expert who stopped learning.”



Sunder agreed, saying that performance today is about relevance. “Degrees are a start, but adaptability is the future,” he said. “We don’t need the smartest people. We need people who want to stay relevant.”



Misra also posed a sharp question to the panel: What is one mindset HR leaders must let go of in 2025?



Dua said the template mindset. We can’t run 21st-century teams with 20th-century ideas. One size doesn’t fit all. Anand added that we must let go of the obsession with conventional paths. The best candidates often come from unexpected backgrounds!



Further, Natarajan concluded with a practical reminder: “Stop over-intellectualizing hiring. Get into the field. Watch, listen, observe. Talent is everywhere — not just in top colleges.”



The Verdict? Potential > Pedigree



The debate may have been titled “Skills vs Pedigree,” but the message was more nuanced: hiring is no longer about where you come from — it’s about where you’re going, and how willing you are to grow.



As industries face disruption and talent becomes borderless, CHROs and business leaders alike will need to rewrite their playbooks. And at the heart of this new narrative is a simple truth — talent is more than a degree. It’s an evolving sum of attitude, adaptability, and ambition.

7 months ago | [YT] | 0

Vibe Vault India

10 ESSENTIAL GMAIL ‘EXTRA’ FEATURES I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT



Are you using Gmail to its full potential?



Launched way back in April 2004, Gmail has now been around for over 20 years — and it boasts lots of great features that many users, for whatever reason, still aren’t taking advantage of.



While Gmail is fundamentally built for the sending and receiving of email, its various features can make that entire process work better for you. If you aren’t using the following Gmail features, consider starting today. You might be surprised by how helpful they can be.



Smart compose:

Smart Compose is designed to help you write emails faster by writing your emails for you, saving you the hassle of wasting time or brainpower. The feature uses machine learning to predict what you intend to type, with Gmail offering real-time suggestions as you compose an email.



Smart Compose is turned on by default unless you’ve opted out of smart features and personalization. However, it’s easy to toggle Smart Compose by navigating to Settings > See all settings, then scrolling down the General tab until you see Smart Compose.



The standard Smart Compose feature offers predictive writing suggestions as you type, but you can also enable Smart Compose Personalization to have these real-time suggestions personalized to your own writing style based on all the emails in your Gmail account.



Schedule send:

Are you the type to write your emails ahead of time? If so, you probably draft them up then let them sit in Drafts until you’re ready to send. But this can be risky because you might forget about it… and is there anything more frustrating than thinking you sent someone that email only to hear back that you never did? Ugh!



That’s why you need to be using Gmail’s Schedule Send feature. When your email is typed up and ready to go, you don’t have to send it right away — you can instead set a date and time for the send. To do this, instead of clicking Send like usual, click the drop-down arrow next to Send and then click Schedule Send.



By default, you can opt for “tomorrow morning,” “tomorrow afternoon,” or “Monday morning” (which is great if you’re typing up a work-related email on the weekend). But you can also Pick date & time to select any specific date and time for sending it out. Never forget again!



Undo send:

Gmail’s Undo Send feature is pretty self-explanatory. It gives you a grace period after sending an email to change your mind, allowing you to cancel the send so you can make further changes, or postpone sending to a later time, or just withhold sending altogether.



Undo Send is really useful when you accidentally send in the middle of composing the email, or if you forgot to attach those files, or if you spot a typo after the fact, or you mistakenly CC’d instead of BCC’d, etc.



Undo Send is enabled by default, but you can change the duration of the grace period for undoing the sending of an email.



Navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the General tab until you find Undo Send. You can then set the timer to anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. I recommend setting it to 30 seconds because there’s really zero downside to having that extra time.



To undo an email after sending it, look for the Message Sent notification in the bottom-left of your screen and click Undo. If you’re quick enough, the email will revert back to Draft status without ever actually having been sent to the recipient’s inbox.



Search operators:

While the basic search function in Gmail is as easy as typing what you’re looking for into the search box, the results aren’t always that great.



If you’re tired of irrelevant or excessive results when searching through your entire Gmail archive, start using Gmail’s search operators to better filter the results. This is especially useful if you have tons of emails filling up your inbox and it feels like searching for a needle in a haystack any time you have to rummage through for a particular email.



There are too many Gmail search operators to list them all here, but some of my most used ones include from: (used to filter emails to only those that were send from a specific person) and subject: (used to filter the search by email subject lines and ignore body content).



I recommend checking out our article on essential Gmail search operators worth knowing. To go even further, you can see a full list of all Gmail search operators on this Gmail support page.



Snooze emails:

Snoozing an email is a bit like snoozing your alarm clock in the morning — Gmail temporarily removes the snoozed email from your inbox for however long you decide to snooze it.



By default, you can snooze an email until “tomorrow,” “this weekend,” or “next week.” But you can also pick and choose whatever date and time you want, allowing you to procrastinate to your heart’s content. When the snooze expires, the email pops right back into your inbox.



To snooze an email in Gmail, hover over the email in question and click the Snooze icon on the right-hand side of the options. You’ll see a bunch of default time periods you can snooze the email for, but if none quite work for you, click Pick date & time to set your own. You can also snooze multiple emails at once by selecting them all and doing the same.



After snoozing emails, you can then view all of your snoozed emails under Snoozed in the left panel, and you can unsnooze any emails early if you want to deal with them ahead of schedule.



Email templates:

If you find yourself sending the same email over and over — or at least similar emails that contain very similar structure and content — then you should absolute utilize Gmail’s Email Templates feature.



As the name suggests, Email Templates allow you to create and save different templates, which you can then use in the future to instantly start with a baseline email that you can edit, instead of having to draft your emails from scratch every single time.



To use templates, navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll across to the Advanced tab and find Templates. Click Enable, then Save Changes. Once Gmail has reloaded, you can create a template.



To create a template in Gmail, compose an email as normal, but instead of sending it, click the three-dot menu > Templates > Save draft as template. Then, the next time you want to send a similar email, just click the three-dot menu > Templates > Insert template.



Spelling and grammar suggestions:

To have Gmail check your spelling and grammar as you write, navigate to Settings > See all settings. Scroll down the General tab until you see the option to toggle grammar suggestions, spelling suggestions, and autocorrect. Experiment and find what combination works for you.



Inbox categories, labels, and filters:

If you send and receive a lot of emails, Gmail’s basic organization isn’t enough to keep you sorted and tidy — at least not without a lot of manual effort on your part. Fortunately, Gmail has advanced organization features that can help automate a lot of that and keep you straight.



For starters, Gmail’s inbox categories exist to automatically sort your email by intent. These inbox categories include Social, Promotions, and Spam, and Gmail automatically processes incoming emails and sorts them into these categories for your convenience.



Beyond those categories, you also have labels. A label is like a custom tag that lets you manually categorize emails however you want. Each label is like a folder, except you can mark an email with as many different labels as you want. Labels are navigable in the left-side panel, and labeling makes it easy to browse and find emails by type. For example, you might have labels for receipts, bills, work projects, different hobbies, etc.



One step further, you have filters. A filter is a custom rule you can create, which automatically does things to emails as they enter your inbox. To create a filter, click Show search options to the right of the search box, enter your search criteria, and then click Create filter.




Confidential mode:





When an email is sent via confidential mode, you can set it to have an expiration date and whether it should require an SMS passcode to open. Confidential emails can’t be forwarded, copied, printed, or downloaded by recipients. You can also revoke access to the email later.



To send a confidential email, when composing a message, click the Lock icon to toggle confidential mode. You’ll then be able to set the above mentioned features for that email. Safe!



Keyboard shortcuts:

While Gmail is, by default, extremely user-friendly, you can end up wasting a lot of time if you only navigate using your mouse cursor. The more time you spend reading, writing, and organizing your email, the more you can benefit from the use of keyboard shortcuts.



You have to enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, but once you’ve done so — and after you’ve learned the useful ones enough that they become second nature — Gmail will become so much easier to use and you’ll end up saving a lot more time than you thought possible.



To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the General tab until you see the option to toggle Keyboard Shortcuts.



Gmail offers a large number of keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and it may take some time to wrap your head around all of them. Once keyboard shortcuts are enabled, you can always see a full list of them by typing ? while Gmail is open.



If you aren’t happy with the keyboard shortcuts as is, you can customize them however you want. Navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the Advanced tab and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts.

7 months ago | [YT] | 0

Vibe Vault India

Does college still have a purpose in the age of ChatGPT?

Artificial intelligence is changing college life. Students are using AI for assignments. Professors are also using AI to grade. This raises concerns about learning and academic integrity. Colleges need clear AI policies. More in-class assessments are necessary. Technology may help detect AI-generated text. Shaping campus norms is crucial for the future of universities.

For many college students these days, life is a breeze. Assignments that once demanded days of diligent research can be accomplished in minutes. Polished essays are available, on demand, for any topic under the sun. No need to trudge through Dickens or Demosthenes; all the relevant material can be instantly summarized after a single chatbot prompt.

Welcome to academia in the age of artificial intelligence. As several recent reports have shown, outsourcing one’s homework to AI has become routine. Perversely, students who still put in the hard work often look worse by comparison with their peers who don’t. Professors find it nearly impossible to distinguish computer-generated copy from the real thing — and, even weirder, have started using AI themselves to evaluate their students’ work.

It’s an untenable situation: computers grading papers written by computers, students and professors idly observing, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege. At a time when academia is under assault from many angles, this looks like a crisis in the making.

Incorporating AI into college curricula surely makes sense in many respects. Some evidence suggests it may improve engagement. Already it’s reshaping job descriptions across industries, and employers will increasingly expect graduates to be reasonably adept at using it. By and large this will be a good thing as productivity improves and innovation accelerates.

But much of the learning done in college isn’t vocational. Humanities, in particular, have a higher calling: to encourage critical thinking, form habits of mind, broaden intellectual horizons — to acquaint students with “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. Mastering Aristotle or Aquinas or Adam Smith requires more than a sentence-long prompt, and is far more rewarding.

Nor is this merely the dilettante’s concern. Synthesizing competing viewpoints and making a considered judgment; evaluating a work of literature and writing a critical response; understanding, by dint of hard work, the philosophical basis for modern values: Such skills not only make one more employable but also shape character, confer perspective and mold decent citizens. A working knowledge of civics and history doesn’t hurt.

For schools, the first step must be to get serious. Too many have hazy or ambiguous policies on AI; many seem to be hoping the problem will go away. They must clearly articulate when enlisting such tools is acceptable — ideally, under a professor’s guidance and with a clear pedagogical purpose — and what the consequences will be for misuse. There’s plenty of precedent: Honor codes, for instance, have been shown to reduce cheating, in particular when schools take them seriously, students know precisely what conduct is impermissible and violations are duly punished.

Another obvious step is more in-class assessment. Requiring students to take tests with paper and pencil should not only prevent cheating on exam day but also offer a semester-long incentive to master the material. Likewise oral exams. Schools should experiment with other creative and rigorous methods of evaluation with AI in mind. While all this will no doubt require more work from professors, they should see it as eminently in their self-interest.

Longer-term, technology may be part of the solution. As a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation found last year, tools for detecting AI-generated text are still imperfect: simultaneously easy to evade and prone to false positives. But as more schools crack down, the market should mature, the software improve and the temptation to cheat recede. Already, students are resorting to screen recordings and other methods of proving they’ve done the work; if that becomes customary, so much the better.

College kids have always cheated and always will. The point is to make it harder, impose consequences and — crucially — start shaping norms on campus for a new and very strange era. The future of the university may well depend on it.

7 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 0

Vibe Vault India

YOU CAN NOW CREATE CHATGPT AI IMAGES USING WHATSAPP AND HERE'S HOW

Making AI images has never been simpler

You can now create and modify images using ChatGPT’s AI chops inside WhatsApp without having to use the ChatGPT app at all.

WhatsApp, the MetaAI-owned messaging app, caused more than a little controversy recently when it added a new Meta AI button to its interface that was impossible to remove.

The new button caused outrage from WhatsApp users, many of whom felt like they were being forced to use AI.

“Why do they have to slap that stuff on everything?” said Reddit user Special-Oil-7447. “I'm in the EU and it’s just been dumped on me. I am going to uninstall WhatsApp today after I have loaded Signal. Vote with your feet people”, said user BrainCell 7.

But Meta has not backed down, and the unpopular MetaAI button remains.

Tapping it will initiate a conversation with the MetaAI chatbot, however, it's not the only AI chatbot you can use with WhatsApp.

Accessing ChatGPT:

If you’re a fan of AI, then there’s nothing stopping you from chatting using ChatGPT in WhatsApp so long as you know how, and what’s more, you can now use ChatGPT to generate AI images right inside WhatsApp. You can even upload a picture and get the AI to edit it, all from within WhatsApp.

It’s easy. All you need to do is set up ChatGPT as one of your contacts in WhatsApp - as if it’s a person.

Just add ChatGPT as a contact with the number 1-800-CHATGPT (that’s 1-800-242-8478). If you’re outside of the US, then you’ll need to add them as a US contact, which I've written about before.

Now you can chat with ChatGPT as if it were one of your friends. When you start a chat with ChatGPT, you can simply say “Create an image of...” and add some details. Sit back and let ChatGPT do its AI magic.

To upload an image that you want ChatGPT to edit, tap the + button, then Photos, and upload the image.

ChatGPT will ask you what you would like to do with the image, and you can just use natural language to describe what you want to do.

If you reach your limit for a free ChatGPT account, but you’ve got a Plus account, then WhatsApp will throw up a link so you can link to your Plus account and get more images. It couldn’t be simpler.

7 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 0