Hello and welcome back friends,
All in all Infocom seems to have been a great launching pad in India. We had to reorder the developer preview kit CDs and promotional material to cope with the demand. A lot of interesting feedback was received and now we need to start following up on all the contacts generated through the event.
Today was an hectic day. I was trying to sort through the 400 odd resumes we received at Infocom 2006 and also had my team collate the various responses, comments and feedback received from the developer community and end users.
I am expecting Prateek’s video and our stall photographs along with the scanned images of the newspaper articles to come in by the 15th of November’06. Then i will be able to share them with you all. In the meantime we have short listed about 40 odd candidates and have invited them to take the challange and kick start/rejuvenate their careers.
As a policy we have 4 rounds of screening:
1. Online Aptitude test
2. Matching the Candidates skill sets to our Requirements (based on the resume)
3. Telephonic Interview
4. A round of orientation and up to 3 personal interviews along with team based activities.
Some of the key personality traits that are important to us are:
1. An inquisitive mind open to research and learning
2. A sense of team spirit
3. A keen sense of humor
4. Willingness to shoulder and fulfill responsibilities
5. Desire to go the extra mile and ensure that the work is not just completed as per expectations but is actually exemplary
6. Laziness – This ensures that the code you write will be lean and mean and always reusable!
7. Focus and commitment
On our side we know that if you dole out peanuts you will at best get monkeys! So we ensure that employees have:
1. A healthy work life balance, have a comfortable work environment,
2. Users have 2 monitors instead of the usual 1 to maximize screen real estate.
3. Flexi time is the norm.
4. Free lunch is provided to all employees on Saturdays.
5. We believe in constant improvement and learning throughout life so we play videos from the leading universities/ websites and have regular training sessions.
6. Meeting milestones implies that the employees get time off to relax, unwind and even play games on the Xbox against each other on the projector!
7. We believe in the 70:20:10 rule and all employees get 10% of their working time and company resources to follow their dream projects!
Now I guess its time for me to get back to inviting the short listed candidates to take the test on our site. If you are one of them then I would like to wish you all the best! If not then no worries, it was a pleasure to have you come to my weblog and your comments and feedback are welcome.
Cheers!
Abhishek Chamaria
