Quick thread on Hiring and building a small but very efficient team.
Hiring right people is mostly trial and error, sometime you get it right, sometime wrong. There is no way to know a person until you actually work with him.
However there are certain things we do make sure you make the right call more often than not.
1. Don't believe anything they say.. People lie all the time. specially in interviews.
2. Don't believe anything they wrote in their CV... They write things they were just a small part of and
claim skills they just know the names of.
3. Don't believe anything their references say, its a rigged game .. the only references people will give you is either there friends or someone in the company who will speak positive.
4. Don't care about their educational background or degrees. Most often its not a true indication of their skill sets, plus most degrees here is useless.
So how do you know what they are capable of ? Get them to do things you would hire them to do.
If you are hiring a designer, give him a brief about a small product and get him to do the UI/UI.
If you are hiring a UI dev, send him an actual sketch file from “your” product and let him send back a functional code.
If you are hiring a backend dev, give him the most complex part of your system and let him come back with how to solve it with a quick n dirty prototype code.
Now for each of these things, it will take time for them to do it, and thats OKay. You let them know that you will be paying for the tests if they are not hired, so they don't feel cheated or otherwise taken advantage of.
And no matter what your decision is, tell them if they are not hired, they have invested time into you and its your responsibility to let them know the result so they can improve.
I come from a small village in Bihar, lost my father at the age of 3 and then raised by my Mom. She worked as a tailor.
2/ Mom wanted me to do at least graduation, but we couldn't afford it so at the age of 17, I left studies and came to Mumbai looking for a job.
In Mumbai I learned computer hardware & networking for 6 months and got a job at a MNC.
3/ Technology fascinated me and I learned everything I could get my hands on, performed really well in the company and for the next 6 years I went from being a trainee to leading a team of 60 engineers, managing over 20 Lakh servers across 15,000 different customer locations.