Recruitment
I have been a part of a start up firm for the last few years ... I guess it is no longer a start up and is probably a small business. I was the second person to join my company, we had a challenge to build a healthy business. Obviously one of the key parts to building a business was recruitment.
In this post I want to share my journey so far on recruitment, some of my thoughts and experiences in the area of recruitment in India and based on these experiences I want to try to cull out a cunning strategy [Which I hope can be sold to someone for a million dollars :) ]!
The Story
The first few months were actually pretty cool, the time was 2007 ... the season was summer (Read as HOT and SWEATY), people were many to find, I remember the first time we conducted interviews to recruit some sharp java cookies, we used an agency who scheduled about 15 candidates to come and meet us, we were looking forward to getting some great guys and were very motivated, it was the first time I was going to interview some techies and I had to use a lot of common sense to figure out if the chap was up to the mark or not.
My boss and me rented a friends office and decided that we will play the 3 step strategy ... that is, we would conduct a series of tests that involved Java 1.5 and Database concepts and the guys who would score over 50% would be initially interviewed by me in the front room and then by my boss inside the cool big room ... The strategy was wickedly planned and we arrived with our laptops hoping to find our technical gems.
Wake Up Call - Timeliness and Skills People have are not everything
The first shock came in the form of guys arriving much later than us, and the next shock came in the form of the test results where we found that none of them actually cleared the bench mark we expected and as a result we lowered the bench mark ... we did this since Java EE5 was fairly new then and a lot of guys then did not know much about this in the market, this was a way by which we were hoping to attract some talent (hoping that the guys would think ... WOW, EE5, I ain't able to answer any of these Q's, these guys must be wizards in technology, would be fun to work here and learn ...), on completion of the test we sort of narrowed down to a bunch of guys and I did the first level of interviews hoping to rank them in the areas of Communication skills, Ability and interest to learn, Attitude and a few other things.
I filtered a few guys whom I then sent to my boss who did further interviews that were more technical in nature compared to mine, together we finally chose a few guys whom we thought we should settle with.
Looking back today, it was these lot of guys who worked for our business the longest, many more came after them and left earlier. A few of them learned a lot and delivered and a few did just what they knew. There is a good reason for that.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoooop ..... Year: 2010, Situ & Reality Check: Not everyone wants cutting edge technology and interesting work - most people today in India want more and more money and peace-of-mind* (*=Read: less work)
As time went on we had more business and this process of recruitment continued. We got more experienced and technical people who helped us identify more talent to grow the business to some extent.
One thing that could not go unnoticed over the years was the kind of people we were finding, as a business we have very strong values and beliefs, we did not want people who wanted to be in corporates or people who wanted just money and nothing else ... we look for people who want to learn and be a part of a growing business. It turns out that in today's India, these expectations are not easy to fulfill.
People were not willing to compromise on Salaries and were not willing to learn new technologies (some saw it as a threat to their careers!), we offered them work that involved using cutting edge technologies and developing applications (products to be precise) from scratch and most people thought that it was a ridiculous thing to try doing (tells why India has as few software products, doesn't it?).
One incident that a colleague narrated to me involved him speaking to his ex-colleague requesting him to join us, to which he heard something like this
"Oh, you guys are a small company, I ll have to work a lot if I join you, I ve got 2 offers one from Company "C" for 7 Lakhs and one from "T" for 6 Lakhs, I am planning to take up the offer from Company "T" since company "C" demands too much work from their staff and "T" is more like a government job where I dont have to work much.
It explained to me what a mess the majority of software industry is in India today, most people are in it not for the passion of technology and doing interesting stuff but are there for the money it offers. The big wig service companies just make clever use of these people to bill and fill rather than groom talent.
Reaching out to the niche lot ...
Having said those words, there are a few sharp brains out there who care for technology and are in software for the passion rather than just money. The challenge is on how we reach this lot.
Obviously job portals are tough to use and get value out of, they have vast databases and also vast amounts of junk making it hard to find the right people. Some of the tools that I believe may work are as follows
Linked In - Head hunting profiles that show specific interest in new technologies.
Bloggers - Finding profiles who have a decent blog, again, we dont want to end up with someone who has a blog for the sake of having a blog, someone who expresses their views is always better than someone who just copies and pastes code on blogs.
Common connections - getting referrals is the best bet you have to ensure that a candidate stands in your office on the date of joining, nothing else can guarantee that. I have seen senior architects promising to join and not turn up on the date of joining, some turn up and complain that the floor was slippery / no separate room was provided for them and go AWOL.
I think I ll stop with that for now ... else it will become a book.
