Entries Tagged 'Hiring' ↓

As we’ve discussed a number of times on this blog, hiring is a challenge, even for highly skilled and experienced managers. It’s one thing when you think about hiring for roles within an existing and well established business, but it can be even more challenging when you are tasked with hiring within a start-up environment or even a highly distributed global environment.

Sridhar Vembu is co-founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho. He shares some great tips he uses for hiring new people into his bootstrapped organization that it both on the edge of emerging technology, as well as distributed between North America and India.

1. Use internal referrals
The best recruitment source is our own current employees; almost two-thirds of our hiring is done through this route. Rather than relying on monetary incentives for referrals, which merely produce a flood of resumes, we ask referrers to indicate how well they know the candidate and if they would be willing to make a strong recommendation. Referrers build a track record and hiring managers stay in close touch with them, which creates accountability.

2. Evaluate for passion, determination and adaptability
What about the remaining one-third of employees not coming in through a referral? We look for strong analytical and reasoning skills. Crucially, we also look for an ability to passionately argue a point of view, or for a level of enthusiasm and initiative in some non-academic area, such as sports. Particularly in India, where sports is barely encouraged in schools, people have to jump through hoops (no pun intended) to excel in sports. Since we have fairly flexible role definitions, we also look for a willingness to adapt, a key attribute of successful employees.

3. Be willing to train
For a system like ours to work, we have to invest in training. We used to simply have colleagues mentor and coach new hires. We still do that, but we augment it with classroom instruction if we feel that a new recruit has a substantial gap to cover.

The ultimate extension of this philosophy is what we call AdventNet University. In southern India, where colleges are little more than degree-granting mills, we found that college just doesn’t provide much in the way of an education. We decided to offer an alternative, and take students directly after high school.

We have a full-time faculty that devised a curriculum based on a typical undergraduate Computer Science course, with a heavy emphasis on actual programming. (We noticed that our students prefer the practical to the abstract. One reason college students get turned off Computer Science is the heavy emphasis on theory.) The program has been very successful for us, and it has been expanded recently, which has also allowed us to bring in fresh recruits from our Japan office.

4. Be flexible on role definitions
We find that it helps not to centralize job definitions too much, particularly for fresh employees. We have fairly fluid boundaries between development & QA, systems administration, sales and marketing, and so forth. We leave it to ground-level team managers to determine the role/responsibilities that will best leverage an individual’s talents.

5. Be patient
When we do these things right, the rewards are high commitment, high productivity, high job satisfaction and low attrition.

All great tips that can work well in a variety of organizations… big or small.

Via GigaOM!

As you can see from my terrible lack of fresh posts, I’ve been a little busy lately. The reason I’m so busy is 100% related to the fact that business has picked up and we are growing like mad. Part and parcel of that growth is the requirement to staff up. We run a pretty lean and mean team in my organization and when we look to add individuals we take it pretty seriously. My group tends to have rather high standards and that makes it hard to find the right candidates. As a result, we rely heavily on recruiting firms. Since it’s top of mind for me right now, I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve learned about working with recruiters and “head hunters” over the years…

Find a recruiter who gets you and your organization – This sounds like a no brainer but I know a lot of people out there using the wrong type of recruiter. Most recruiters will specialize in a small number of industry verticals. Find the best one for your vertical. Someone who can find you excellent medical technicians is probably not going to be very good at finding web developers.

Along with someone who knows your vertical, it’s also critical that you take the time to build a relationship with your new recruiter. Take the time up front to really help your recruiter understand your organization. Take them on a tour, walk them through your daily routine, have them meet and talk to other managers in your organization. A good recruiter will take the time to get a feeling for the vibe of you and your organization. This relationship should pay off long term as you continue to hire future candidates.

Negotiate a better rate – Just like anything, don’t always accept the first price a recruiting firm quotes you for their services. For those that don’t know, a recruiter gets paid on a percentage of the total salary of their placement. The higher the salary of the new hire, the larger your invoice from the recruiter. With this in mind, always ask for a better rate. It’s not uncommon for a recruiter to charge in the range of 20%, but depending on how hungry they are for the business, many will drop down into the 15% range. You may have to look at an exclusivity deal with the recruiter, or something else to encourage them to drop the price, but always ask!

Know what you are looking for before you call the recruiter – It’s simple, but if you don’t know exactly what you want in a new hire, you can’t expect a recruiter to find you the right candidates. Start with a job description and add as many details as possible. If you are looking for a person with a variety of technical skills, list and rank their desired skills based on priority. The more descriptive you can be and the better picture you can paint about your ideal candidate, the more likely you are to find that person. If you can’t speak at length and in detail about your desired candidate you’re not ready to engage a recruiter. Being ill prepared not only wastes your time looking at inappropriate candidates, but it also tends to make your recruiter less interested in filling the position.

This is by no means a definitive list, but these 3 points have helped me find a number of great people over the last few years. What other good recruiter related advise is out there? Post a comment and share!

I’m going to caveat this entry with a warning that it’s both nerdy and technical. It’s about hiring good programmers, but if you read between the lines there are a number of important points about hiring good people, no matter what industry you are in. Replace “programming” with another field and this will be a worthwhile read for you.

So, with that out of the way, hiring technical people is HARD. There are lots of people who consider themselves developers or programmers, but there are very few that are actually good. In most cases, the ones who’ll go out of their way and tell you they are great tend to be the worst of the bunch. Seeing as hiring and retaining talented developers is a huge part of my job, my colleagues and I have come up with a few good techniques.

First, I’m going to offer up a great list provided by the Daniel over on inter-sections.net. These points all rang true to me when I read them so make sure you jump over there to check out all the details.

Positive indicators:

• Passionate about technology
• Programs as a hobby
• Will talk your ear off on a technical subject if encouraged
• Significant (and often numerous) personal side-projects over the years
• Learns new technologies on his/her own
• Opinionated about which technologies are better for various usages
• Very uncomfortable about the idea of working with a technology he doesn’t believe to be “right”
• Clearly smart, can have great conversations on a variety of topics
• Started programming long before university/work
• Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar
• Knowledge of a large variety of unrelated technologies (may not be on CV)

Negative indicators:

• Programming is a day job
• Don’t really want to “talk shop”, even when encouraged to
• Learns new technologies in company-sponsored courses
• Happy to work with whatever technology you’ve picked, “all technologies are good”
• Doesn’t seem too smart
• Started programming at university
• All programming experience is on the CV
• Focused mainly on one or two technology stacks (e.g. everything to do with developing a java application), with no experience outside of it

Beyond those great bits, I’ve found that resumes are pretty much useless when looking for a good developer. I always ask to see code samples and I make sure I explain that the code sample is being used as part of the evaluation. Good developers will send over well chosen samples that highlight their best work, as well as give you a sense of their coding style and abilities. Bad developers will just send over some random code and not think twice about making a good impression. My team and I will review the code samples and the vast majority of the time we know instantly if we want to pursue a candidate.

Outside of pure technical skill, culture and personality are big points for me. It’s critical to find people who fit the culture of your organization. In my case, it’s all about being a team player and integrating into a really tightly knit high performance team. During the interview this means I’m always on the lookout for people who are asking good team related questions. If a candidate is asking too many “I” focused questions they tend to come off as a “lone gun man” who just won’t work out in my organization.

Never underestimate cultural fit. It’s always easier to take someone with good foundational skills/cultural fit and train them to your specific needs, rather than try and squeeze in someone who might have amazing skills but runs counter to your organizations culture.

At the end of the day, hiring the right people is tough. Hopefully the points outlined above will make the task a little easier. If anyone out there reading this post has anymore tips, tricks, or feedback make sure you post a comment.

Happy hiring…