TheRodinhoods

The Hazards and Hungama of Hiring in Hindustan

***Hi Rodinhoods, below is a reblog of my last post on my startup’s blog. Would love to hear your feedback, since I’m sure everyone handles the issue of hiring differently!***

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be focusing on expanding our team with people who can help us connect with current users and bring on brand spankin’ new ones, and continue to build our product. Right now, we’re looking for a PHP + chai lover, drop us a note if you’re interested (or know someone who is!)

This is the third time we’re going through this process, so we thought we’d share our learnings from previous experiences. We take team building very seriously at DFT… it’s been ingrained into Dhruv [FBPay cofounder] and I for over 5 years now, back from when we tried to build a team to lift a giant plaster dome onto a Taj Mahal we built in college!

1. SEEK OUT [good] APPLICANTS

Friends and family are  always step one. A referral candidate is not only pre-vetted by a trusted source but more likely to share the job posting with friends. After we garnered a couple strong applications it was off to the online races and oh man, SO many platforms to manage! Here is where we posted and our results:

It’s clear that there is no end-all hiring site or service in India yet so referrals are still the strongest form of finding great candidates. Hence why we think the FB and Yahoo advertising was so successful as the connection to candidates is far more transparent – in both directions.

2. FIND WHO FITS

 “Weeding Out” – Pic by ColinBroug / sxc.hu

When we were looking for our communications lead (Sabaa), received about 50 odd applicants from all of the platforms above and weeded that down to 30 via the following process:

We followed a slightly different process while looking for our front end dev lead (Siddhant)last year. We received over 400 applications on Naukri.  All we had to do was send a simple test (see it here: https://bit.ly/1dO3L4C made with www.balsamiq.com) to easily get 4 qualified candidates! (they were the only ones who responded) However, that alone doesn’t always work. When I worked at Deloitte Consulting in the US we often hired development resources from India. Applicants regularly cheated on tests by having more skilled programmers take them. When we started doing Skype interviews with live tests, candidates had experts in the room feeding them answers!

3. INTERVIEWS!

 “So Lonely” – Pic by pmdash / sxc.hu

This is where the real hungama came in and the major differences between hiring in the US vs India was seen front and center.

We were left wondering why we had such a miserable turnout. After some discussion with our team and other founders we pinpointed a couple reasons:

  1. Our Address! https://mapjam.com/fbpay
    Our office is in Delhi Blue Apartments. People were immediately thrown off that the office might be in a residential complex and thus didn’t show up. Found this funny because at least we were a startup fortunate enough to have an office…
  2. Lack of Interviewing Experience
    Many freshers have never been through an interview or had interview/job hunting training. At CMU Dhruv and I were prepped nonstop by either our college’s career center, business classes, or the company websites where we were applying
  3. Already have a job
    With so many interviews scheduled many of these candidates might have already taken an offer elsewhere
  4. Extra Effort from our End
    We didn’t call every customer the day before and an hour before the interview to confirm they will be there – will definitely do that next time

Still none of these really justified to me why people didn’t call or email or text or send an owl that they weren’t coming! They burnt a bridge and for what exactly I still don’t really know.

We did get to meet a lot of interesting people (thank you for taking out the time to meet with us), refine our pitch (harder than pitching to investors, for sure) and realize that we need to publish a lot more content about ourselves ASAP. Hence this blog becoming a weekly endeavor and our FB page getting some color. The final decision was still tough but we made the hire and are happy but all in all it still  was a lengthy process with lots of time wasted.

As we look towards a growth filled 2014 we know hiring will be a key aspect to fuel that engine, and so learning and iterating on this process is just as important if not moreso that lean development of the product. It’s a struggle to find the best but in the end it is kind of fun and to tell you the truth we’re looking forward to it.

We hope this gives you ideas on how to find the right talent for your team, and post in the comments if you have ideas/ thoughts on how we can do this better!