Did you know that the best job for a fresher is in a startup? Well, it is.
Did you know that the best job for a growing professional or someone who loves challenges, is in a startup? Well, it is.
One of the biggest problems that startups have is in hiring people. During the last OpenCoffeeClub meet that we had here in Chennai, this was pretty much the topic, and after all the questions and answers that were debated upon, and the discussion that goes on in the forum, we have been working on it. It is a very solvable problem, just needs the right partners in place to make it happen and Proto.in has just that – all the right partners you need.
There are essentially three elements, to this problem:
1. Students are not even aware that startups are an option.
2. Startups don’t have the medium to gather mass. Most of them require one or two people, compared to the 800 people that TCS requires. End result, no placement office is all that very keen on small numbers.
3. Students need training on development platforms that make sense for startups.
Point #3 is actually a very nice business proposition. Imagine a centre like Aptech or NIIT which trains people on Python, Ruby, AJAX etc, on project (read hands-on) mode. The business can possibly make money by developing projects for smaller clients, and the very projects could also serve as assignments for the students to practice and nurture their programming talents on. As long as the centre delivers quality programmers, the startups will keep pounding to have more human resources from them, and the cycle will go on.
When I spoke about this to someone, the first thing she mentioned was, get me a centre to do this in Chennai and lets work out a franchisee model to spawn this across to various cities. I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work. It has all the necessary ingredients to make it work. NIIT and centres such as that, should definitely look into such options.
As for #1 and #2, I have been suggesting within the Open coffee club group in Chennai towards forming a group within the startup community so that they can be tackled. There is a large scale solution of this that we are working on, which we will be unveiling during Proto (in January) and will be on fullswing starting february.
Excited? You should be. The Ecosystem is one step closer to being efficient.
I will make a more elaborate post with all the fine details on this regard, as we draw closer to unveiling this. Hold your breathe for a month.
This Post is a re-post from the Author’s Blog.
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Very interesting thoughts.
Venkat, I am not sure I agree. See, I know a startup which actually took “potential” freshers, and trained them. The risk was that some of them turn out to be duds, but the ones that came up fast were fabulous talent. It is a lot of groundwork, I agree but it has been worth it.
While at it, it was their own idea as to why not to do this as a process, and place these guys in other companies should they require it.
The biggest problem with NIIT (and i regret even mentioning them as of now), is that their training doesnt suit a startup. Startups require talent that are quick at their feet, can do much more than coding – have to think, document and execute as well.
I would say that since he is a startup and knows the drive, and also the requirements of another such environment, it would work. But yep, when you scale, you need processes in place and it might not work out to be so good.
Vijay,
Point #3 in your suggestions would only result in all these startups becoming next generation of software factories with an assembly line (churning out servive companies one after the other like we have today).
I’m glad you didn’t say startups should implement PCMM or something similar to streamline their people processes (hire, develop, train, retain etc)
About ‘A-level’ freshers joining startups… How many students are aware that they can be compensated in a startup through equity which, if the startup succeeds, can make them very rich..?
The mass wisdom in college circles typically goes like “Get into a great MNC -> Do well -> Get bonuses/foreign assignments/promotions -> get rich”.
Won’t it be better if students are also aware about this parallel and quite a secret(!?) wisdom “Look out for a promising startup -> Demand a motivating share of equity -> Do well -> either get VERY rich VERY fast or bail out in an year or two if things go bad”.
Theoretical talks apart… i have a dot-com startup and i thoroughly support the idea that startups NEED A-level people (“Animals” as Paul Graham describes here: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html under the ‘People’ section). Precisely due to the ABSENCE of good people willing to work for a startup, we decided to adopt an open source portal framework rather than coding one in-house (We adopted DotNetNuke, a decision which seems extremely fortunate in retrospect).
I am stuck with a similar situation. I am working on couple of websites. First of all I cannot afford engineering graduates. Most of the people I talk to dont even know what I am talking about. So there is no way to pull them in with a sales pitch. People who really know about startups and stock options are the top tier folks whom I cannot offer.
I am not really sure how to proceed. Off-late, I have a bit of success with non-engineering graduates. (atleast with the talking).
Basically, people from NIIT etc who are not from engineering background are willing to listen. I try to convince them that the nature of job is much better than the BPO jobs that are on offer and a couple of years with lesser perks can go a long way in their careers. The responses have been decent.
The other option, I feel I should just go ahead with hiring a coder from a freelancer site.
Some people from Romania etc are damn smart and quite effective cost wise too!
I think everyone is missing one point here. Big companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft will be able to attract best talent not because they are good paymasters, but students passing out of colleges believe in their story.
In my view, what attracts folks to join a startup is the story that the entrepreneurs tell outlining the reasons why they think that their venture will be a runaway success. This is the clincher. The compensation also matters to some extent, but if you can convince the fresher (or I would say brainwash the fresher!) about your venture, then I don’t see any reason why you cannot attract the best talent.