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.

Hiring people

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.