Hiring on current competence v/s future potential
Hiring, as always, continues to remain a challenge for us. Somehow, requirements always increase faster than we can hire - which btw, is not a very bad problem to have!
Sometimes I come across candidates who are competent enough to fill in a position that we might be currently trying to hire for. However, at the same time they may not show much signs of growing into a higher job role in the future. For example, a candidate might satisfy most competencies expected from a software engineer but might not display any characteristics expected in a senior software engineer. Such situations are somewhat tricky to deal with. On one hand, there is an urgent vacancy that needs to be filled in. At the same time, you don't want to bring in somebody who you do not see growing in role and responsibility in the future. After much thought, I have concluded that it is not correct to hire a candidate in such a situation. It is actually unfair to a candidate to bring them on board if you don't see a career path for them in the organization. It can only lead to frustration and stagnation in the long run. This is not to say that one can not choose to remain an "individual contributor" without having to take up management responsibilities. I am all for it. But the "individual contributor" (IC) is a very specialized role meant for people with deep technical insight who can continue to provide leadership without having to explicitly take up management responsibilities. ICs were fairly common in Microsoft though I have yet to come across this concept in the Indian software industry.
Meanwhile - we continue to look for the best and brightest! If you are looking to work in an exciting fast paced environment, please check out our careers page!
Comments
I found hiring quite a challenge too. The biggest problem for us was getting enough good people into the funnel. I agree with you though. Much better to be picky about candidates. Its better for you and a lot fairer to them as well.
Posted by: Siddharta | February 4, 2007 10:11 PM
I don't know much about your business, but aren't there slots in your organization that are best filled by people who would plug away at a known job indefinitely? There are many good potential employees who do not want advancement. In return, they offer stability and consistency that can come only from long-term employees.
While an organization must have a core group of upwardly mobile A players, it also needs a base of stable contributors. Usually they are older. Look at large organizations and you will see these old war horses performing a very useful function.
Posted by: Sarat | February 5, 2007 05:22 PM
I don't know much about your business, but aren't there slots in your organization that are best filled by people who would plug away at a known job indefinitely? There are many good potential employees who do not want advancement. In return, they offer stability and consistency that can come only from long-term employees.
While an organization must have a core group of upwardly mobile A players, it also needs a base of stable contributors. Usually they are older. Look at large organizations and you will see these old war horses performing a very useful function.
Posted by: Sarat | February 5, 2007 05:24 PM
I don't know much about your business, but aren't there slots in your organization that are best filled by people who would plug away at a known job indefinitely? There are many good potential employees who do not want advancement. In return, they offer stability and consistency that can come only from long-term employees.
While an organization must have a core group of upwardly mobile A players, it also needs a base of stable contributors. Usually they are older. Look at large organizations and you will see these old war horses performing a very useful function.
Posted by: Sarat | February 5, 2007 05:25 PM
Well Indian software organizations work from a very different perspective they are not looking at individuals to take up career paths leading to management positions but follow two different types of hiring. One to create a track of IC which keep on increasing their skill base and specialization instead of leading upto a management role and on the other hand hire people for managerial role which they term more as administrative task in nature. Though this approach is not advisable for small firms where every hand is accounted for. Lets brain storm more on whats suitable better for startup environment as if i was you would have filled the critical position for now and formulate strategy for forward integration.
Posted by: Siddharth Puri | February 6, 2007 06:12 PM
Sarat - while such positions do exist in the software industry where one can just keep doing the same job for years, such positions are hard to find in a young organization like ours. Morover, most people that we hire are very early in their career when they actually want growth. So it seems unfair to hire somebody knowing they will not grow beyond their current role.
Siddharth - I dont know if the IC role is really that prevalent in Indian companies. Unfortunately, the mindset is still geared towards considering management position as a benchmark of career success.
Posted by: Gaurav | February 11, 2007 01:07 AM
Hiring is a tricky thing - especially in the job market/climate India is facing today. Investment of time, energy, and money into a new hire can be taxing (pun intended) and the ultimate outcome might end up being a washout because the hire may end up defecting to another organization after just a few months.
The challenge that we face as employers (in India) is to sniff out workers who demonstrate the potential and craft them into who we need them to be. Going for a golden apple may be worth the time - but present not only a challenge in hiring but retaining the worker who knows he's so valuable.
If you run a company that runs on innovation, each employee is valuable and deserves the special attention to optimize their contributions when they're on the job. I've got two employees right now that do a fantastic job but they never work past 6:30pm - they say they're passionate about what we're doing but leave sharp a day-end. From a myopic perspective, one would call them fleecing and decide to let them go. But, that would be premature and inappropriate. Instead, it would make more sense to cultivate them and extract the value you can based on their performance keeping in mind this one particular "weakness" so that if/when they were to come discuss salary levels, you have at least one solid point to throw back at them to think about.
Posted by: Roj Niyogi | March 10, 2007 02:48 PM
While an organization must have a core group of upwardly mobile A players, it also needs a base of stable contributors. Usually they are older. Look at large organizations and you will see these old war horses performing a very useful function.
Posted by: Rohit kapur | August 8, 2007 12:57 PM
Hello guys thats nice blog i like this....enjoys..
Posted by: Article Directory | April 7, 2008 12:40 PM