Hiring Week

This few weeks I have been trying to hire 4 engineers - 2 Dev and 2 QA to be based either in Singapore or Beijing. As always there were a flurry of applicants, recruiter flooding me with resumes, etc. I take recruitment very seriously as I believe a bad hire is more expensive and damaging to the team than not hiring and losing my headcount. My hiring process involves a technical assessment followed by a face-to-face.

Overarching the whole process, I followed a system called "Selecting Winners". This course is the most useful non-technical course that I have attended in Oracle. It changes certain norms during interviews but most importantly a process that ensures that due diligent is taken during the hiring process. It covers from defining job scope, sieving resumes, coming up with 50 questions, selecting your co-interviewers panel, etc. This process is so data driven that as an engineer - I LOVE IT. However, this process doesn't discount gut feel but encourage to use it to further prepare for your interviews and generate more questions. The process takes a lot of preparation for the hiring manager but I am always 100% at the end of the process that I know if I have a candidate I want in my team.

An additional thing I did lately is to do a personality test. I use Cattell's 16 personality factors. A free online version is available here. It is very interesting and I use this to make sure I have character balance in my team as well.

Putting all together, I usually get the right people onboard and if they accept my offer I look forward to work with them. Key point is NEVER take chances with the new hires.