Hiring Tech Talent in India

Today we have our first guest blog post from Anthony Rodio, chief operating officer of SupportSoft. Check out his post about his company's operations in India and the challenges of hiring there:

Earlier this month, I traveled to India to visit SupportSoft’s operations in Bangalore, India. Our biggest challenge in Bangalore is finding the right talent. We’ve worked tirelessly, reviewing over one million resumes and doing over 10,000 interviews to hire our 108 employees there.

While many companies use workers in India for tech support, we do things differently at Support.com, our division that offers online PC support for consumers and small businesses. Our tech support folks work from home in North America but the patented software tools they use to help take remote control of consumers’ computers were designed and developed in our Bangalore operation.

Our team in Bangalore is strong with senior leaders that manage projects independently. We started in Bangalore with one person over five years ago and now have 108 employees across almost every function including engineering, product management, user experience, hosting, and HR.

It’s easier in Bangalore to find so-called freshers, engineers who are just out of college. What’s harder is finding architects, user experience and design people and product managers as expertise in these areas is still emerging in India. A lot of candidates do not meet our technical standards. Also, engineers in India and Silicon Valley find different things attractive in a job. Great engineers in Silicon Valley tend to care most about how interesting the work will be while engineers in India care more about the scope of the position and how many people they might manage.

India is also brand sensitive when it comes to employers and people want their parents to recognize the name of the company where they’re working. While most of our business is in the U.S., we do PR in India and sponsor some Bollywood events so that the SupportSoft brand means something there. We don’t spend a lot of money but it matters that we have some brand awareness so that candidates can impress their parents.

Early on we were losing some people after a couple years and that cost was high. We wanted to find people who we think will be there in 3 years or 5 years so we changed what we look for in candidates. We now look for entrepreneurial characteristics, for people who are self-aware and are willing to take risks. One way we get at that is by asking candidates to tell us about their biggest failure. In India, failure is not something you talk about but we’re looking for people who are willing to learn that taking risks and making mistakes is a good thing.

We also deliberately target people that were in America and are coming back to India because they understand how people in the U.S. work and how to communicate with them. Americans seem like cowboys to a lot of people in the rest of the world – we’re very direct.

Have you faced hiring challenges in India? If so, let us know how you solved them.