"THE A TEAM – Recruiting staff part1"
entrepreneurship blog – Post 9
Entrepreneurs are often seen by those around them (and even by themselves) as a modern version of the old time renaissance man.
Even before they set foot in the world of entrepreneurship, they are endlessly curious and naturally attracted to all kinds of things, they are never satisfied with just one occupation and area always looking for new areas of interest and want to learn about all kinds of human and technological systems, communications media etc.
The transitional stage between the idea and the actual venture requires all kinds of skills that are not generally called for in daily life. The entrepreneur must become by turns a programmer/ technician, founder, leader, manager, businessman, marketer, with knowledge of company law, finance and more. When Sagi and I sowed the first seeds of our venture, we didn’t imagine we’d have to deal with such a variety of subjects.
Just like our first hesitant steps working with programmers overseas (remember the dramas of the “Indian way” in post no. 7?), we found that the process of recruiting staff for the venture was complex and challenging.
Much of this was due to our lack of experience, shortage of funds and schedules that were too crowded and unreasonable to do a proper job of recruitment.
Contacts in the relevant community are vital. Sagi and I both had a background in design. Our network revolved around product development and design, participating in exhibitions, academic studies of art, and so on. The knowledge and contacts required, for example, to recruit a technical person are quite different.
Our search for a technical person to lead development was our first baptism of fire. The first thing we learned was that in order to find the right person, it’s not enough to look at his abilities. You have to go a little way into his world – where does he operate, how does he work, how does he build contacts and so on.
Since there is a lot of demand in the market for system programmers using the special language PHP, we had difficulty finding a development manager of the caliber we wanted. The only solution was to send out details of the position to as many places as possible. We found out which forums and sites were likely places to meet the right sort of people and left notices there about our needs.
This method, of trawling as many sources of programmers as possible, proved to be the right one and that’s how we met Nadav, our chief programmer, through a site called “Programmer Meet a Designer, which puts programmers and designers in touch with each other.
At our very first meeting Nadav was very enthusiastic about the idea, and decided to take part in the venture. The work on the site got off to a good start and everything seemed to be on track. The picture changed a little when we discovered that Nadav had been recruited by a leading Internet company. After that we decided that he would manage the technical side of the site and most of the work would be done by an additional programmer.
Reasons for working with PHP: this was a very early decision we made after consulting lots of people. PHP has many advantages – the language is very powerful and modular, it is open source – programmers can share information and components, with low operating costs (since the platform is free, unlike Microsoft). But there are also some serious disadvantages – we didn’t realize that the availability of PHP programmers in Israel is very limited. In fact, in the course of the work we found out that in this area Israel is lagging behind countries like the USA.
Once again we found ourselves looking for programmers on the web and meeting some of them. In the end we put together a team led by Nadav, with two other talented PHO programmers, and carried on working towards the launch…
*** If you are a PHP programmer, we’re still looking for a development manager and talented programmers. All inquiries welcome.
