I am finally moving towards my dream of putting together a team in Sri Lanka. This also automatically means that my dormant company (which I registered about an year and a half back) is being resurrected.
Hiring people is a tedious and cumbersome process. I tried to do away with the complexity of hiring unknown people by offering a couple of people that I have worked with and known for sometime. These were people who had earned my respect and regard. One of them turned my offer down straight away. He was happy where he was and was earmarked for a promotion, etc. and hence didn’t want to make a move.
The other one, considered my offer and I thought I had him (almost). He felt obligated to his current employer and when the current employer offered to give him some added responsibilities that he was yearning for, for years he also decided to stay back and try and leave his mark on the his current company. I wished him well.
Then I turned to looking for options to get my vacancy advert across. I had published them on a blog, an industry forum, tweeted it, but it didn’t yield much success. I got one response that was worth considering. Then I placed a paid advertisement in a local jobs website.
I started getting resumes in my mailbox starting from within the first hour of the ad being posted. To be honest, most of the candidates were not of the caliber that I expected to hire. I think these web sites are frequented by those who do not have a job. But to be fair, I got a few good ones as well.
I wanted to tread the hiring path with caution. I read somewhere that it is good to NOT to hire one good candidate if your not 100% sure rather than to hire one bad candidate in haste. I have personally seen how one bad apple can breakdown the team morale and bring highly capable teams to total mediocrity with their negative rants. And such one bad apple can make or break my operation. It can mean the success or the failure of my new venture.
Therefore I designed the hiring process to be somewhat longer, with a few interactions with the candidates to allow them to sink into my system and to test my comfort levels with them. Since I am starting operations in my home office, it was imperative for me to hire the right people.
To cut a long story short, I have now zeroed in on one candidate. I will be making him an offer tomorrow. Then within the next couple of days I will be zeroing in on one more candidate which will make up my initial team of two programmers. Hopefully, if all goes well, I will be launching operations of my new company, on the first week of next month.
4 comments:
You know machan, I never quite had the guts to do what you do; Move into freelancing completely and then start off a base here. Best of luck man!
There was a time when I also wanted to do what I did, but held myself back because I had a cosy job and a didn't really have a reason to take the risk. I was very comfortable with what I was doing, with the people I was working with, etc.
But then in my last day job, I worked for the shittiest man on earth, which really made me walk out. And at that point in time, I was so fed up of working for others, I just wanted to give freelancing a try. It hasn't been a bed of roses, but I try to look at everything with a positive frame of mind.
There is only one advice I can give you. Just do it! I walked into the wilderness, without any savings or a safety net, with a young family in tow.
Do you have to pay taxes as an offshoring business?
For the revenue you earn in dollars I think you get tax concessions.
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