Deven Kalra’s Weblog

India has been in the limelight in the context of outsourcing of software development jobs for many years now. The outsourcing process started with business process outsourcing (BPO) with the activities like call centers. It expanded later to outsourcing software development, maintenance and QA jobs to India.

As more and more companies moved to India, a major issue has been and still is being felt in the areas of hiring and retaining good people. Culturally, Indian engineers have gravitated towards larger companies like IBM, Oracle, Google. And due to the huge demand for limited talent, typical engineers have developed a knack for jumping jobs to gain increases in their compensation packages. In this context, smaller companies including startups are finding it hard to acquire good people.

I am experiencing similar issues in the hiring for people for my company, Arlak. We develop web applications hosted at infodoro.com. I have had some early successes. The strategy that has worked for me is to hire people who are early in their careers. The key is to look for people who are hungry to grow and hungry to learn. Find people who have the fire in their belly even though their skills are still not yet up to par. Then, nurture them, mentor them and educate them just like you would a young engineer in the US. Treat them with respect as people and as professionals. Give them challenges and important work, not just work that you don’t want your US engineers not to do. In one of my previous jobs, we outsourced mundane work that we wanted to protect our US engineers from and the low quality of people and the work produced was a reflection of this attitude.

In some ways, the selection of enthusiastic and willing people for small companies is a self-selecting process. Given the current environment, the people whom you will be able to attract to your small company will be the ones who are hungry to grow. You have to make sure that you have the commitment and the will to mentor these cubs.

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