This re-arrangement aside, one of the biggest changes has been the way we write our job descriptions.  Our new job descriptions are a more accurate portrayal of what your average day/month might look at PG.  We have moved beyond the traditional listing of skills and key-words and have tried to portray a more vivid picture of the kind of work you will look to do at our workplace.

If you have any comments or thoughts or if you felt something was missing, give us a yell.

Some of the pages you may want to take a look at:

Join us,  how we hire, things we’ve done,  people @ pg

Check out the celebrations at the HQ!

Oh and yeah, the winner Sukita had an astounding 17 pieces of clothing on her.  Oh and yes, people had to wear all of these and head to dinner at a restaurant

In his book, he identifies the following very clearly.

Old Myths:

1. People go into HR because they like people.
2. Anyone can do HR.
3. HR deals with the soft side of a business and is therefore not accountable.
4. HR focuses on costs, which must be controlled.
5. HR’s job is to be policy police and the health-and-happiness patrol.
6. HR is full of fads.
7. HR is staffed by nice people.
8. HR is HR’s job.

New Realities:

1. HR departments are not designed to provide corporate therapy or as social or health-and-happiness retreats. HR professionals must create the practices that make employees more competitive, not more comfortable.

2. HR activities are based on theory and research. HR professionals must master both theory and practice.

3. The impact of HR practices on business results can and must be measured. HR professionals must learn how to translate their work into financial performance.

4. HR practices must create value by increasing the intellectual capital within the firm. HR professionals must add value, not reduce costs.

5. The HR function does not own compliance – managers do. HR practices do not exist to make employees happy but to help them become committed. HR professionals must help managers commit employees and administer policies.

6. HR practices have evolved over time. HR professionals must see their current work as part of an evolutionary chain and explain their work with less jargon and more authority.

7. At times, HR practices should force vigorous debates. HR professionals should be confrontative and challenging as well as supportive.

8. HR work is as important to line managers as are finance, strategy, and other business domains. HR professionals should join with managers in championing HR issues.

Now that this  is articulated, makes our life a lot easier for the next time we are hiring. Thank you David!

Now we are this small(?) but efficient company who thinks capital efficiency rocks and the marketing team went onto thinking how it could make all of the above things possible and still end up not spending any money.  Ok, so that meant we were going to do a placement drive, market PG Apply, travel across to 7 or 8 cities, administer tests, reach out to around 4000 students and do all of that without spending money from our accounts. Never to shy away from a challenge, the team came up with a solution that was brilliant, extremely well executed and gives further credence to the fact that by hiring the way we do – magic happens.

We were looking to hire for marketing and technical positions – so the team ended up creating a marketing case study that they expected the students to solve. The marketing team found sponsors for the case study booklet and incorporated their names into the case study – the sponsors loved the fact that we were reaching out in a targetted manner to final year engineering students in such a targetted manner across multiple cities.  So while we created a case study that would filter for us who to hire, we found sponsors who could fund the operations and we had our marketing team on a roll. The travelling was tiring, challenging and a logistical challenge – but all is well that  went well

At Bangalore the crowds were phenomenal as you will see in the pics below. The two folks on the stage heading the event had joined us around a month before the event and are 23 or younger years of age.  I told you we have an insane hiring process didn’t I?

PS: We actually came out of the event profitable. So let us recap – one marketing event + one placement drive + 6/7 cities + 4000+ resumes during selection and recruiting the very best of them and we actually turned that event into a profitable event. I can’t wait for next years placement challenge

PPS: We thank all the participating institutes for being so helpful and resourceful all throughout to help us manage an event of this scale

PPPS: As of this stage, we’ve shortlisted 36  people (26 tech  & 10 marketing) from the event for final round of interviews and hoping that some of them would qualify for a final offer.

We’ve updated the list of positions available with us on the join-us page.  We hope to hear from driven & talented people interested in working with us.  At the end of the month our team size would be just around 25 – we have doubled our gang in the last year and hope to keep adding more phenomenal people to the mix. ]]> http://pagalguy.com/slog/2009/04/12/positions-updated/feed/ 1 http://pagalguy.com/slog/2009/02/19/the-handbook/ http://pagalguy.com/slog/2009/02/19/the-handbook/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:45:38 +0000 pagalguy http://pagalguy.com/slog/?p=213 This was produced a couple of months ago by the gang at the HQ.  This is the PG HQ Handbook which we hand out to all new joinees. What do you think?

PG Handbook

We floated this new statistic around at office and well, I expected to see surprised faces, but for some reason everyone seemed to know this rather well. With a knowing sigh, everyone got back to their work and then back to hiring. For a lot of people who we interact with – they find the statistics to be damning. At some point they don’t hesitate to tell us that we are nuts and no company should spend so much time hiring. We disagree .

Contrary to the way regular companies operate – i.e. of having a few great people at the top and then driving work to the below hierarchies, we are focussed on making sure people who work with us are capable of achieving phenomenal things on their own and we are obsessed about it. If you don’t want to do something great in your life and solve complex problems – we don’t see how you would enjoy your stay with us. As a motley bunch of people we realize there are infinite problems to solve and as you continue to keep solving them you start realizing the need to continue to work with awesome people. The ‘best workplace’ doesn’t exist and not are we sure we can create it. But we are keen on solving some parts of the problem – how do you create an organizational structure that works for such driven, talented people – how do you create systems and processes that are absolutely non-intrusive so that you focus on things you want to do.

Although the problems might sound alarmingly simple, the truth is they are extremely complex and tough to crack. Some changes might need major changes in the way the company operates at this point. To ensure we don’t shy away from doing what we need to – we keep asking ourselves tough questions. Heck, obsession is not a bad thing after all

As for the patience – it does get on your nerves when you do the 500th interview and realize this person is not the ‘one’. But well, do we really want to work with people we are not terribly sure about – that is a HUGE ‘NO’. I do hope we grow fast enough to hit the tipping point where we are able to work with more awesome people as we continue along. Until then, we will just get by admitting just over 0.1% of the folks who apply to us. Statistics be damned.

In order of oldest to newest:

Where is the Money, Honey?

Humans as a resource?

Spreading Insanity over Konkan

Openings at PaGaLGuY – (Highest commented post)

Mom, I wanna be a pilot!

Peek-a-boo – the PG HQ

Some HQ Updates:
We have been growing up at a fast clip and are looking to move over to a new office. We intend to more than double our team in size and are now looking to hire for regional positions as well. If you are interested in any, just send us an email at jobs@pagalguy.com with your resume and a cover letter.

1) Spend only 4 days (Mon-Thu) per week on developing products for PaGaLGuY.

2) Friday is a working day but you can spend the entire day on anyone of your side-projects (open source projects or your own product idea or anything).

3) If your side-project needs some resources like hosting etc or incase you want to turn it into a proper product we are glad to help you out with some much needed resources.

4) If you want to host some events like Devcamp etc or just invite some hackers to code and discuss your side-projects on sundays, we shall offer our office for such purposes and mostly sponsor pizza or something for food.

Honestly we are inspired by Google’s “work 20% of the time on your own project” principle. But we didn’t stop at that. we took few more steps to create an ecosystem around side-projects.  we aren’t blindly following someone either, we did this because we truly believe in the importance of one’s own side projects.

Consider this, most of the hackers are those whose side projects ended up shaking the software world. Like David Heinemier Hanssen of Ruby on Rails fame, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and many more. One cannot deny the importance of their side-projects and the importance these hackers give to their side-projects in becoming who they are now.

To quote Chris of github fame ” You should always have a side project. Side projects give you an outlet, provide a useful distraction, let you explore new ideas, learn new concepts, and generally give you the freedom to be unaccountable. You don’t have to worry about your boss, or your coworkers, or the damn commentators on Reddit. Just have some fun. Treat yourself.”

“Work on your small project for a few Sundays, declare it complete then move on. Learn another language, or write something else in your new language. Pick up a new web framework or work on flashy effect number two. Add concurrent task execution to your Rake. The more acclimated you get to this process, the more creative your ideas will be. It’s the whole 10% inspiration 90% perspiration thing, and it worked for me. My plea to you today is to start a side project. Scratch your own itch. Be creative. Share something with the world, or keep it to yourself.”

We believe in becoming a place where you can work with the very best on the very best problems. We are now thinking about how this would work across content, graphics, marketers and others. To be innovative is to be leading from the front and this is just one the many more ways we intend to build a rockstar workplace.

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.