There are always 2 way to build a great product for any startups.
- Assemble team of genius engineers. Give them freedom, trust their instincts and skills. Only thing is difficult to find genius engineers
- Work on your development plan. Find out function points. Break down things into smaller things. Implement quality assurance processes. Problem is it takes away coolness in the startup environment.
Both ways have proven to yield results. It’s your choice whether you want to keep looking for genius or you want to start building with what is available at your disposal.
Process, Startup
entrepreneurship, implementing concepts, Process, startup advice
We are trying out this new method of conducting interviews of experienced technical/non-technical resources. This method is only used for 2+ years of experienced candidates.
What we do is we have a pre-interview with people who have applied (15 minutes) with out much technical questions after a careful screening of resume and reference checking. After this pre-interview we divide short-listed candidates in group of 3-4 people. Now the second round of interview these candidates conduct there own interview in sort of debate/group discussion. So each candidate will ask question to others in the group and they will write down answers to it on paper.
Candidates try to bounce each other of with the cool thing they know about technology which they think others may not. We just moderate the interview after conducting 10 mins of introduction and rules section. This debate (?) is typically for 1.5 hours. Note that we do not give grades to answers, just that we moderate closely and through observation decide who is better.
There are generally 2-4 groups that we form and we select 1-2 guys from each group. This is not a rule, if we like all we will select all! Then winners of groups go through third round of interview again in same way but for 3 hours! We downgrade a person who does not ask questions, but just gives answers. We also downgrade people who are too agresive and want to show off with by asking questions which even they cant answer satisfactorily. There is bunch of observation that we do in this process. And we note down these observations not by pen, notepad or any other thing but using twitter!!!!
Why we came up with this model? Well people can answer questions just fine. There is limit to how much research I can do before going into an interview. There are only so many type of questions that I can come up with. I dont have time to categorize these questions or decide how hard they are etc etc. So I delegate by job on the person who has applied for the job itself 
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We are just trying this model till we see it works or not and then if it does then we will implement it for all senior positions. Do comment if you think there are some things we can try out or if you find any broken piece with this model.
Ideas, Implementing Concepts, Process
HR, implementing concepts, innovation, interview, Process, Startup, startup advice, training
