Hiring people - update 1

It has been an eventful week. Last Sunday, at this time I was putting together an employment contract to sign up my first employee. Fast forward a week now I have an employee, scheduled to start in a couple of weeks.

I cannot say that my recruitment campaign is a complete success. I am still on the search or my second employee. I have a couple of potentials, but I am not 100% convinced of either of them. The problem is that their skils are highly skewed. Not the kind of all around skill set that I want to have on my team.

I want to build a team that posses all the skills needed to build modern web sites/solutions. While our core technology is going to be ASP.NET and I am primarily seeking ASP.NET developers I still want them to have decent ancillary skills like Javascript and HTML/CSS. I want a build a team that can take up a full project.

Specially when it comes to ASP.NET devs we tend to ignore front end skills like HTML/CSS an Javascript, a shortcoming I myself had a few months ago. I think partly the blame should go to ASP.NET itself as from the start it ignored these technologies by promoting server side validations and also validation contols that generate the server side markup. But with the rise of MVC framework the spot light is falling on those technologies and we find that the asp.net developers are grossly unarmed. Javascripts steep learning curve and lack of debugging and IDE support in the visual studio adds to the woes.

Stepping aside from technical nitty gritty, a point that I had raised earlier as well is the lack of quality people in Sri Lanka. I am not even remotely implying that we don't have such people, it's just that those people are comfortable in thier jobs and majority of our technical community is happy to be mediocre.

Out of about hundred resumes that I went through, during the past week weeks there were very few which were screaming out the skills and the talents of the applicant. Most of them were just a template with the personal particulars changing. When a recruitment ad is specific about the skills that it seeks in the candidates sending a templates resume which does not highlight any of those skills are a sure fire way to not to get shortlisted. At least make and attempt to highlight the relevance in a cover letter.

The next is if you recieve a communication from the company, protly respond furnishing any information that is required. Please keep in mind, the hole recruitment process is used to evaluate you. If you are slacking in the process, it is not going to reflect good on you.

In the end, I didn't hire the most skillful people who gave me the impression that they were just fishing around. I was looking for people who were passionate about what they were doing and about the technologies. Another factor was how comfortable I felt with those people.

Finally my company is taking shape. Come August we are graduating from being a company with no employees to a company that is staffed, even though it is going to be one staff member. By the eng of August I think we may grow to about a team if four, myself included. Looking forward to doing some cool things in the months ahead.