Idea Stage

Having made the decision to build our product development centre in Sri Lanka starting with employing the first senior PHP and Drupal Developer, I thought it might be useful in capturing my experience so far, at least for my own reference. In my previous post, I spoke about the challenges we face at edocr.com due to lack of development resources. By March 2011, I decided to park my attempts to bring on board a technical co-founder on equity and concentrate on recruiting a developer from Sri Lanka.

Friendly Recommendations

The process started by inquiring from few Sri Lankan friends whether I could hire a senior developer for the monthly budget I had in mine. Whilst the budget was not high enough to attract the very best, the feedback was, it was sufficient to attract good developers. In April 2011, a Sri Lankan friend highly recommended an ex-employee, and I entered into the interviewing process previously discussed. The interview came to an end, when the applicant refused to work during rain due to the fear of possible lightning strikes.

Unexpected Threat

Now, who would have thought “rain” would be a critical factor in recruitment. At this point, I consulted Guy Fraser, CEO of Techcelerate Member, Adaptavist.com, who has been recruiting staff from across the world successfully to learn few more peculiarities of hiring from abroad. In Sri Lanka, it rains none stop during the monsoon season. I simply cannot have staff not completing their work load every time it rains. Whilst the applicant promised to work extra time on sunny days to cover for lost time due to rain, I knew this would lead to poor employer-employee relationships, and therefore not something I was prepared to go ahead with. At this point, I started to enquire from my Sri Lankan friends to understand whether this is the norm in Sri Lanka. And it seems, quite a number of people who worked from their homes would simply stop working during heavy rains. However, this is not a problem for those who work from offices due to surge protectors installed in high-rise buildings. Those who are brave to work during rain from their homes, already had access to a laptop, a UPS and surge protector. 

Advertising

On 2nd May 2011, I advertised on the most popular job board in Sri Lanka, topjobs.lk for 14-day period. At the mid way point, I have received 30 CVs. All have been rejected due to lack of sufficient experience, except for 2. Most of those rejected were from those with less than 1 year experience or those who will graduate in this Summer. They have also adopted a shotgun approach, i.e. just sending the CV without a single word in the covering email. Not the best way to attract a job. Instead of ignoring, I replied to each one of the CVs I received, in some cases with feedback.

Opportunists

At this point, I realised that I cannot simply rely on topjobs.lk to produce the candidates I require. I started to look for talent through Linkedin with the support of Twitter and Facebook. Soon I realised that Sri Lankan developers are becoming business owners whilst been employed, i.e. most of them work for the local branch of an overseas company, in most cases headed by a Sri Lankan, and then during non working hours, they are either freelancing or running their own web development agency.

The problem this creates for me is that they are contend with their current predicament. The day job gives the security they require whilst the evening projects generate enough revenues to give them a better lifestyle. Of course, not everyone falls into this category. The large recruiters such as Virtusa pays higher salaries and attract the best in the market. They as well as other leading firms recruit direct from the universities, targeting the best raw talent and then mold them into the type of employee that is suited for large Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) contracts. Who wouldn’t want to have their CV littered with names of blue chips, such as BT, etc? Having sucked up the top talent, then the smaller companies compete for the second best.

Building brand awareness

In these circumstances, we almost have no chance of attracting the right talent for us without building brand awareness in the local market. With this in mind, we signed for 12 months co-sponsorship of Refresh Colombo, an initiative similar to early days of GeekUp in the North West of UK.

Tech Startups in Sri Lanka

Whilst we are competing with BPO companies and traditional software houses in Sri Lanka, there is a small number of tech startups that seek similar talent to us. At this end, I have discovered Curdbee.com, Creatly.com and WSO2. Both Curdbee and Creatly CEOs have helped me understand the market bit better.

Educational Institutions

I also discovered during this process that one of the leading education institutions is founded by a business contact I have known for a while. And most of the rookies who applied with a shotgun approach came from this Institution. A quick email resulted in a long conversation with his son who runs their operations from the UK. He was kind enough to further explain how the recruitment process works in Sri Lanka.

Way forward

Based on various advice received, the way forward for us in Sri Lanka might be to recruit a senior developer on part-time basis in addition to recruiting a young graduate on full time basis. Ideally, I am still looking for the right candidate on full time basis. But whilst I look for the ideal, the clock is ticking, which is not something we can take a risk on. I will report back in couple of weeks to share my experiences.

Of course, as usual, love to hear your experience of recruiting overseas labour, and especially from Sri Lanka.

Image taken from http://www.therethink-group.com

At edocr.com, we never had it easy! I have changed teams many times over the last 4 yrs. At the beginning, I had a great team, but due to various issues, the team under performed. Then there was a period of about 15 months where no real development took place. In 2008, I outsourced complete development to an Indian company. This relationship also came to an end in 2010. Since then I courted with two individuals. These relationships ended well before they got going.

Not ready to give up, once again, outsourcing looked promising. But having to work through project managers and detailed specifications continued to put me off. So I have decided to try a new tact, employment, but with a twist!

So what is the twist? I want to make sure this falls inline with our long term strategy, which is to build a strong in-house team. I also want to ensure this strategy does not result in hire and fire if our finances dry up. With this in mind, I have started to seek a developer from abroad, starting from Sri Lanka.

image from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Having thought about this in great depth, I cannot wonder why it took me this long to try this out. So how do you proceed with recruiting an overseas developer as your first employee? I was planning to try a job board recommended by a friend, which would have been a long drawn out process. In the meantime, another friend suggested an ex-employee, whom he put me in touch with. But how do you make sure s/he is the right fit for your startup?

This is the process I have devised:

1. Email interview – questions and answers
2. Skye interview – strengthen the email discussions
3. In person interview with a friend who happens to lead a software development company
4. Develop a mini module and test it for quality of coding and speed of delivery

Then a three months probation period on full salary. What I am not sure at this stage is about the international labour laws. I was not going to blog about this, but my friend, Joel Gascoigne of Buffer twisted my arm, so here I am sharing my current challenges, once again!

I love to hear your experience of hiring overseas developers as employees, to work from their country of residence.

I do not normally speak about personal life here, but as I already published the holiday video in YouTube, I must as well publish it here. So here goes,

I had a great three weeks in Sri Lanka whilst my family was there for five weeks. Met lot of relatives and few friends. My brother and sister also came from New York and London respectively, so it was a long awaited reunion. We visited Colombo (I am 16 miles from Colombo), Kandy (wife’s from there), Anuradapura (Sri Lanka had a highly developed civilisation thousands of years ago when Western world was just waking up – see the stone bridge I was walking on, massive religious master pieces, one of the oldest trees in the world – over 2000 years, and so on), Nuwara Eliya, Kataragama and Negambo.

Music is by Iraj who my brother introduced me to whilst in Sri Lanka, a young hip hop artist who mixes in Sinhalese, Tamil and English breaking ethnic barriers.

We may also get involved in my wife’s family business, jewellery. Starting with Sterling Silver rings with real gems. Authenticity, Quality, Design and Service. Registered lankanjewels.com whilst in transit at Doha airport