Where are the good resources?

I think this is one of those confusing periods where we read about lot of layoffs starting from IBM to TCS to Yahoo to Mphasis. Thankfully we are not in that mould and a lot of cautious FY 2007-2008 helped us not only grow but our next financial year planning and forecast look great. With all the good things, people say you get good problems and S7 Software is no exception.

With so many orders and with a sales pipeline looking really great (better than any day) we are now facing a shortage of good resources. One of the good things has been that attrition rate is much much lesser than the market rate - can be attributed to many reasons - may be the open culture we have, may be the freedom and empowerment bestowed upon our employees, may be the profit sharing culture (we have open books to all employees and we share the profits during Diwali) or may be the push towards sports especially cricket which we play every Thursday evening without fail - come rain or shine (we have been following this policy for last 10 years - more on cricket in a separate blog entry) - or may be all of it. Our employees (we call S7 Family members) have consistently rated the highest as far as work culture is concerned here. Now the exercise is to showcase all of these and attract top talent to work here.

We interview around 200 people every week but out conversion ratio is very bad (about 2 out of every 100 goes to next round and final selection ratio is anybody guess). We are constantly looking for good resources and technology/skills is not an issue as being in software migration, re-engineering and porting, we are in demand for all kinds of skills but we mainly look for the intelligence and the attitude. As a company we always want the next hire to be teh smartest of all - thats the only way we can lay strong foundation for the company to grow.

Hoping for the best to attract the best talent. If you are the one, feel free to contact me immediately :-)

Manju