Posted on Friday, 8th August 2008 by pagalguy
Early this week we had a visitor, a batch-mate of deepu (code gawd) , who wanted to work at PG. He was put through the regular hiring process at PG - which works this way.
1) We first chat with people to understand them, their achievements, their goals and make a call on whether PG might be a good fit. This is not a perfect science, but we are adamant that we will not hire people into the team unless we are very sure they can be a good fit.
Now the term ‘good fit’ means different things for different people - at PG, it tends to mean people who are innovative, not willing to back out from a problem, capable, interesting and willing to learn.
2) Once we have an idea and are comfortable with that, we bring them into the office and have interviews scheduled with them. Interviews can happen in a day or over a week or in certain cases over a month. A lot of people are involved in interviewing and we need to be sure that we all want to hire someone.
3) We ask people to work with us for a week. This allows people to see the workplace, us, our culture and decision making systems up close. I believe if someone is going to work for us, then they should take the time and effort to understand why we are the way we are and the reverse is true as well. We want to know people in the workplace and also informally outside.
4) At the end of the week, we take a combined decision on go/no go and if all goes well, a new member is added to the HQ.
At all points of time we make it sure to people we hire that they can call it quits at any point of the process. This is important because people can make decisions at every point of their interaction with us and can realize that we are not a good fit for them.
Oh & coming back to deepu’s friend. At the first interview we asked him what he would like to be doing for a week at the HQ. With some coaxing, he took up the challenge of cloning facebook.com. At the end of the week, he did it. We asked him if he would like to join us. He did. If someone asked me what I liked about him - I’d say - he thought big, he didn’t back away from the problem and hell yeah he proved he was capable.
Oh, and he has been the state champ for playing counterstrike. I guess that now we will have to wire up our systems to play some CS to keep him occupied.
Posted in Hiring, Junta Janardan | Comments (5)
August 14th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Welcome to the clan Raj. Now you have to treat us all
August 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Congrats Raj. Few things can go wrong with the king Deepu in control.
A mere-mortal batch mate,
PSR
August 14th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Deepu was a gaming god too :P. Legend has it that he took a lecture on “how to improve gaming standards in colleges” in a college in Anand where he happened to win the Counterstike competition !!!
August 19th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Way to gooo
August 20th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
That’s a guy you want in a team! Congrats Raj.