How to hire the right people? Find your best fit

How do you find the "best fit" for your requirement? It's not easy, but its not impossible  either. 

The process for filling any job opening is to source the right profiles, screen the profiles thoroughly, talk to the candidates, interview them and finally get them on-board. The trick is to carry out this whole process both efficiently and effectively.

Sourcing is considered one of the easiest by many, but it is also the first step towards hiring the right resource. So its imperative that the multiple sourcing channels are employed based on the requirement specifics.

Screening of profiles is the second step, and is equally important. Have a keen eye for gaps in experience, key skills mentioned in projects, size and status of the projects, roles and responsibilities of the candidate in the current organisation.

While talking to the candidate, ensure that you introduce yourself and the company you are representing, the need and the objective of the call. Make the candidate comfortable before validating all the points mentioned in the profile.

The Interview process can have multiple rounds, but the interview should validate the skills and experience claimed by the candidate as the first part, but more importantly, the attitude and efficiency of the resource. From my personal experience people can be taught skills, when they have the right attitude towards work.

Happy Hiring!

The 10 commandments for a successful career

The 10 commandments for a successful career in any domain. These are the things that everybody should follow to be successful in their career. These are also the primary building blocks for setting up KRAs for performance review and appraisal

1. Integrity
2. Responsibility
3. Planning
4. Smart Work
5. Hard Work
6. Quality
7. Punctuality
8. Team Work & Co-ordination
9. Communication
10. Pro-activeness

Online Shop - The IT Aspect

Alright, so you have decided to take your idea of an Online Shop to the market, Good! Here's what you should have already done.

Think through every step and work on the finer aspects of your plan, build a business strategy, do a SWOT analysis (don't ask me what that is, you should know already, if you don't then just google ;-) , identify competition and analyze their business, their operations and their numbers. Then ask yourself if you should STILL do it. (More Here - My first article on eCommerce and starting an online shop)

Assuming you have chalked out a good business plan and are all set to get things going, your first task is to identify and sign-up with the key stakeholders, whether they are partners, vendors, staff, service providers,... whoever you need to bring your shop to life. You don't have to get them all on-board, but you need to identify them, talk to them and prepare them for when they need to get in.

One of the key stakeholders at this point are the people who will put your online shop together. They could be your partners or vendors, but make sure you have the right people. Here's what you need to look for

What you need to look for in a IT Software Team

1. Your IT team should be able to understand your business plan, the numbers, the backend / offline process, everything.
2. They should not be passive listeners, but should actively contribute to finding solutions, they should be aware of trends, and follow best practices.
3. They should know when to suggest and when not to interfere. Wrong inputs can waste a lot of time and impact your thought process.
4. Make sure you will get support when you need it, to keep things going you would need them to be available. More so after the shop goes live.
5. The ideal team would comprise of

• Business Analyst - Understand your business and translate them into functional and non-functional requirements. If the Business Analyst doesn't get it right then the rest of your team will be heading in the wrong direction. The BA should also be able to suggest the best practices.
• Architect - A good architect to design the application, whether you go with Open Source eCommerce Platforms, Licensed Applications, Applications built on Proprietary Software or Develop your platform from scratch, your architect will be the key.
• Project Manager - You will only see your shop go online if the Project Manager is able to get the developers to implement the architecture and design accurately and on-time. The project manager needs to understand the Requirements, the Architecture and Technology.
• Development Team - Your development team should have a good UI Designer, UI Developers and a bunch of good Programmers
• Testing Team - The testing team has to be involved from day 1 of your project life-cycle. These are the people who will ensure your shop  functions as per the defined requirements in all the possible situations and environments targeted.

So, now that you have a good team who can build your shop, here are some key aspects to keep in mind while designing your shop

User Experience

1. This is like your shop window. It can be a make-or-break in more ways than one. You need to get things absolutely right, Visual Appeal, Organized Layout without clutter, Quick Links to important information, and most importantly Showcase Products that customers are most interested in buying.
2. Make your customer recognize your site by just looking at it and not reading the logo. With most of the eCommerce shops being just a list of products thrown onto the homepage, I feel this should be a primary focus / instruction for the UI Designer.
3. Your customer needs to get to the product of interest as quickly as possible, i.e. with a maximum of 2~3 clicks.

Architecture

1. A good architecture should not only fulfill your current needs but also consider the future enhancements and the scope to scale as your customer base grows.
2. A flexible architecture that would help you integrate your shop with the numerous online services from social media integration to payment gateways and more would take the shop a long way.
3. Always consider options to let others integrate to your platform quickly and easily, whether it is your vendors or partners or affiliates, at some point or the other you would want some integration to get them onto your platform. APIs are key here.

Development Environment

1. Choose a development environment that is popular in the market. Going for something exotic could become a pain to maintain, specially with the availability of the right resources are a problem these days.
2. The environment you choose has to be cost effective, secure and reliable. The first you should already know is required for you to competitive in the current market, the security aspect has to be analysed and taken care of, most environments are not secure by default and steps have to be put in to make them secure. Reliability is a key issue as some environments are more stable than others.
3. Personally I'm comfortable with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack, its open source, can scale, has to be made secure (that can be achieved) and is reliable.

Hosting Environment

1. Hosting environments are a dim-a-dozen. Identify the right one. Apart from the usual costing, configuration and bandwidth package. Its important that you look at the support options. When things go wrong, you need quick response to get things sorted out.
2. Look for servers that cater to the region that your shop is most likely to service. It now does make sense to have a server located closer to the geographic location of your biggest market. If your traffic is spread across the world, then look for a service provider who can give you the options to choose mirrors across the world. One such service provider would be aws - amazon web service
3. With could service offered by a number of players, it makes sense to start with a package just enough for you and scale the environment as you go.

Payment Gateways

1. Payment gateways operate in many different ways. Consider the options that the gateway provides for integration - you could process the transaction details on your site and then trigger the payment through the gateway (requires https and you need to make sure that your site is secure and complies with all security tests) or let the payment gateway handle the complete transaction without you having to collect card or account information on your site.
2. Choose the payment gateway and the package based on your transaction volume, both in terms of number of transactions and the average amount per transaction.
3. Look at what are the payment options your customer gets, i.e. payment through Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Net Banking (which banks are tied up), Wallets.

Analytics

1. There is only one way to find out if your online shop is doing well, and that's with analytics. With proper analytics in place, you will have a continuous feedback mechanism that tells you everything from who are your customers, where are they coming from and where are they heading, when are they visiting and when are they leaving, what is turning them on and what is turning them off.
2. With analytics tracking in place, you also need somebody to make sense of the data that it generates. Make sure you have a good analytics expert or partner who can look at things from a business perspective.
3. Don't even think of going live without analytics!

Support

1. The basics for good customer relations, you need to help your customer to navigate, choose products, buy, pay and help them track their products till delivery. Once delivered, you need to ensure that the customer is satisfied and if they are not, how do they return or get a refund? You need to engage with them to get them on your side.
2. From the day you launch your shop, make sure that there is somebody at the end of a line waiting to take customer calls. You will need to help any customer who has any trouble using your platform. Without support in-place the customers feel let-down instantly.
3. Although a call-in support is definitely a must have, support need not be only call based, you could also engage the customers through online chat, email, forms or sms.

Each of these taken care, you must be able to build a good platform to then take it to the next logical step of actually rolling out your shop to the market.

In my further posts, I will talk about the other aspects that need to fall-in-place.

Until then, get that shop in order and get it online!

Starting an online shop is easy, but should you?

Because of my long association with the On-line world for nearly a decade and a half, I have come across many different people, clients, vendors, friends and strangers, who think that setting up an online business is like setting up a shop on an upmarket street or CBD. The truth is you are really far from it.

With the current on-line shops raising funds in millions and billions every other day, everybody is eying a share in the market. Flipkart, SnapDeal, Myntra, BigBasket are all raking in money left-right-and-center, albeit from VCs and not profits. Online makes it look easy to go from zero to hero in just a few years. It's a snap from the outside, but a trap from the inside. Most of the entrepreneurs trying to jump onto the bandwagon have all their basics wrong. My view is the Online Shop or eCommerce Stores are the eCom bubble right now, just as in the dot-com bubble that we saw during 1997 - 2000.

A whole bunch of these online shops are already online, a few dozens are joining everyday, soon you will have hundreds and thousands. By 2017 - 2018 we will see all that collapse or consolidate to the survivors. This is when the separation of sheep from the goats, or wheat from the chaff, or men from the boys will happen. Understanding this, if you still think you have a great idea and a good value proposition that will sell, you will have to consider these questions.

So "What does it take to setup a successful on-line shop?"

Well, for one the, the question itself is flawed. What you should be asking is "What does it take to run a successful online shop?", for setting up an eCommerce website is easy, but running it successfully is another ball game altogether.

Firstly, you need to understand that this is a valuation game. You are not going to be profitable for atleast 5 years, many would probably be loosing money even after 8-10 years. As is the case in many of these online poster boys, i.e. FlipKart, SnapDeal, etc., So be ready to pump in money, sell yourself to Angel Investors, then to Private Equity and then VCs and then to the general public themselves.

That apart, if you are still keen on starting a venture, consider these fundamentals;

1. eCommerce Shop - The IT aspect of it

2. Vendor Management - The procurement part of it

3. Warehousing and Packaging - Getting things ready to send out

4. Logistics - Sending it out

5. Support - Customer Relations and keeping them happy

6. Sales and Marketing - Strategy, Go-To-Market

7. Retention - Value adds, loyalty programs, referral programs

Without any of these thought through and worked out meticulously, your most likely to fail even before you start. Each of these require different skills and expertise. Ideally your team should consists of experts in each of these fields, how you get them on board is a call you need to make.

Many a times, setting up the eCommerce Shop is the easiest part, however if you don't intend to just put up any other shop, you will have to work hard on this aspect as well. This, I believe, is a differentiator that could really make or break sales. A plain Vanilla Online Shop is longer appealing to the masses, they have seen it and done that.

Above and beyond all this, make sure you have deep pockets to bootstrap the venture, and sustain. You should be able to run the show until the period you can appeal to an Angel Investor, from there on you are on the valuation and investor roller coaster.

Happy Shopping or Selling! which ever is your calling!

How to write a good resume

Resume writing can be a very mundane task for many, specially for the tech breed. Just putting together words describing what they do on a day-to-day basis or what they have done can be a big challenge. 

So, how do you write a resume? Here are a few tips and a structure for what to put in place.

1. Introduce yourself
   What you do when you meet somebody for the first time?
   You Introduce yourself.
   So put in the basics, i.e. your Name and Contact details (phone, email, address). Then you need to summarize yourself in not more than 3 lines. Write about what you do and what you have achieved and what you wish to achieve, use your own words. Use Summary instead of Objective. Objective makes you want push a high level statement, and in most of the resumes I have seen these are either lofty statements which are out of this world or are copy-paste from a standard template some guy wrote about two decades ago.
   
2. List out your Achievements
   How do you chose a paperback novel?
   You look at the ratings and reviews at the back of the paperback.
   Make a bulleted list of significant milestones and achievements in your career so far. Achievements that talk actual stats in terms of numbers go a long way, than general statements of achievements. You could also include achievements from your education, but put the work-ex first and then your academia. 
   
3. Summary of Technical, Management and Process Experience
   Can you judge a book by its cover?
   No, but the the index gives me a good peek at whats in it.
   Put in list or table of Technical, Management and Process Knowledge and Experience.
   
   • Technical Skills / Expertise
   • Mention Technology skill sets that you have expertise or have worked on.
   • Use acronyms but also mention the full names for the technologies where they are still not mainstream.
   • List the ones that you are most proficient with on top.
   • Management Skills
   • Mention Management Roles and Responsibilities handled or capable of handling. examples of skills could be, project costing, co-ordination, people management and so on.
   • Process Expertise
   • Mention Process Areas in which you have experience and you can work on. These are typically Life Cycle related activities, such as design, architecture, validation,...
   • These could also be related to QA and Compliance, i.e. processes for ISO or CMMi Compliance.
     
4. Your Work Experience
   So what have you really done?
   Well, this is for you to answer.
   Follow a defined format - for the companies list and the projects list. You may give a summary of the companies and then a separate section on projects, but ideally, I would want to look at company and projects at that company. These are some of the attributes for companies and projects that you should have
   
   • Company
   • Company Name
   • Location
   • Designation
   • Duration
   • Description of the company (2~3 lines - Optional)
   •  Projects
   • Project Name
   • Client
   • Project Duration
   • Team Size
   • Roles and Responsibilities
   • Challenges / Achievements (Optional)
   • Technology Environment and Tools used
   • Project Description (Describe the project and not the client.)
     
5. Academics
   Academics are important for an employer to understand the learning capability and your performance over a period of time. Here a standard format would include
   
   • Institution, Location
   • University
   • Graduation Type
   • Year of Graduation
   • Marks secured 
   • Specialization (Optional)
     
6. Extra Curricular Activities These can add value in certain jobs where the person is expected to take on multiple responsibilities. Don't mention the run-of-the-mill activities which you don't really perform. Rather use this to talk about your interest and serious hobbies.
   
7. Personal DetailsThese are pretty much standard and would have your Sex, Date of Birth, Nationality, Languages Known, Passport Numbers, PAN or Tax Numbers, Address.
   
   
8. Read what you have written
   How do you to ensure quality?
   You test the output.
   Read your resume completely from the first letter to the very last. Read it every-time, when you prepare it, when you edit it, and every-time before you send it out.

General Guidelines

1. Most Recent On Top and Most Important On Top
   
   • Always list experience, projects and academic certification, in reverse chronological order. i.e. most recent company on top, with earlier companies following it. Same applies for listing of projects and academics.
   • In case of skills, technologies, management and process areas of expertise, mention the most important ones or the ones you are most proficient with, first.
2. Keywords and Technology
   All Keywords and Technologies that you have knowledge or expertise of need to be mentioned in the resume, this an important part for both search and visual validation while somebody screens your resume.
3. Check Spellings
   Spelling mistakes are the most neglected part in many resumes, spelling mistakes are an eyesore. Make sure your read every word in your resume carefully. With all the document editors having robust spell checking options, it should be easy.
4. Format is very important
• Mark your headings - use bold, caps, band,... anything to make the headings more prominent
• Consistent Fonts - Use a single font throughout with variations in font size, styling and color.
• Separate sections with a line, space or heading so that its easy to view.
• Align all the lines
• A comma has no space before it, and always has a space after it.

With this, you must have an outline of where to start and end with. 

Happy job hunting!