Business Rules use-cases and other stuff

Whew! I am done with the recruitment process for the year, and am finally back in town / office!!

First things first… we did follow the methodology I wrote about earlier and we did manage to recruit a few people from the Indian Institutes of Technology. One of the things I noticed about the successful candidates is that all of them seem to have some kind of a hobby or the other - video games, sports, dancing, music, biking, wildlife, etc., etc. - which should keep the office an interesting place for at least another year. Does the fact that we chose to select people who are good at teaming up have a bearing on the fact that everyone has a hobby? I certainly think so…

Second… I seem to have attracted a rather long, and unnecessarily acerbic, comment to my post on the recruitment methodology. By “Mr. Anonymous” too, at that… am I that terrifying in person that people are scared of telling me their identities? I wonder… maybe I should grow a beard + mustache, dye them florescent blue, and wear red contact lenses to look more human and less terrifying?

Whatever… the comment seems to be based on the fact that we are choosing firefighters [so sorry, Mr. Gates, you have no clue about strategy ] and not strategists. To answer the valid points in the comment, though:

1. The ability to test sustained learning. Yes, this methodology does not test for this ability, thoroughly. On the other hand, I am forced to choose 3 - 5 people from 60 - 100 IIT-ians [supposedly brilliant / genius - by definition - right?] in a single session of 4 - 6 hours. So how can I go about it? Is there a way to do it? What is “sustained”? 6 hours of learning? 8 hours? I can argue that sustained learning for a whole month is also no judge of this ability - since careers last 45 years! So, I don’t know - anyone with ideas, please feel free to tell me how…

2. This whole mish-mash about choosing strategists over firefighters, etc., etc. On the one hand, you need strategists for a company to grow and prosper. On the other hand, there is an old aphorism about “Too many cooks…”. So the question is, how many do you need? And what should they be doing? The corollary to that one is, if the strategists are in the wrong place in the hierarchy, what would happen?

From my perspective, we hire fresh college graduates for developer positions - not to tell the CEO how to run the company. I would rather test and select people who can write some code and have a life outside of office - rather than, say, creating a HR nightmare by selecting “visionaries” [@ 21? Right!] who will crib and complain about being made to write code. Thats my perspective, and as the recruiter, my prerogative too.

So where are the strategists going to come from? Well, for one thing, lateral hires at a senior level [CxO, VP, Product Manager, etc., etc.]. Second, home grown talent that rises in the organization by hard work and perseverance - at a minimum, it will take 8 - 10 years for the newly recruited candidates to even start thinking about it… which is plenty time to learn “strategy”.

The argument against those statements could be - strategists / visionaries are “born”, and not “made”… Really? For sure, you’ll have people who have this uncanny business sense right from the word go - in any field, there will always be geniuses. On the other hand, most people who get to be CxO at some company or the other get there by going up the ranks - they are the ones with talent that has been honed by sheer practice.

So, thanks for the suggestion, but I’ll go with firefighters who may turn out to be good visionaries in the end - I’ll worry about it if none of these guys are getting there after spending 10 years in YASU Technologies.

Aaah! Its good be back blogging!!