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!
