Hiring millennials just because they are high-horsepower?

The preparations for the walk-in had started several weeks back. I was expanding my start-up from 2 developers to 6… that’s 3 times! The plan was in place — JD, venue, screening questions, aptitude test, advertisement, use of social media and everything else was all set.

Almost 30 walked-in within 6 hours. Thought I had expected more but this was still not bad. I had just started. I was not an HCL in Bangalore to have 8000 people turning up for a walk-in. After 3 levels of interview, I selected 2 candidates. One was a fresh graduate. Why did I pick a fresher, a millennial? My startup was developing e-commerce platforms using the latest javascript framework. There were scarce supply of developers in that technology. So, I was open to accept freshers and train them. The selected candidate was intelligent, energetic and had a quick innovative answer to every question.

Zina joined in 1 week. The other developers were impressed with her passion and zeal. She started learning the new framework. I gave her a week, then 10 days and then 2 weeks before she could create a sample. I thought of giving her some more time but when in spite of putting all the efforts she was not able to bring minimal outcomes, it started bothering me. She would come in early to the office, stay till late, was reading, experimenting, coding and trying to give her most and best. But somehow she could not understand the basics of the framework and the domain. She was impatient, wanted to pick up quickly. Seniors in the team mentored and coached her but no results. Finally, at the end of the second month, I had to take a tough decision and ask Zina to move on.

6 months later, I put up the requirement for developers on a startup group on Facebook. This time I was sure to pick someone who had worked on the framework we were developing on. Among the candidates who showed interest, there was a young graduate. He had already been working in the relevant technology. He had a strong presence and visible contributions on github and stackoverflow. We decided to meet next day at a coffee joint… I remember it was Christmas. We spent 2 hours talking. A fresh graduate, he had not limited himself to the university’s age-old curriculum. He was searching, seeking, learning and contributing to the open source.

Andy joined us the next day. He spoke words that none in the team had heard about. When Andy said something, the team would listen. He had solutions and he was a ball of fire. I was happy. Andy dived deep into the technical problems and would bring solutions on the table. It was going well. However, over a few days, the team noted that the solutions given by Andy were not the long term solutions. The implementations done by Andy would break down sooner or later. An introspection revealed that Andy was always in a hurry to deliver. Also, he concentrated more on technology rather understanding the domain. While the first 2 weeks were impressive, the weeks that followed were full of reverting back Andy’s commits. We tried to make Andy understand the problem area, purpose and domain. Finally 6 weeks later, Andy gave up. He said he could not relate and connect to the domain, the purpose was not what he wanted to align to. And so he decided to move on.

From the above 2 episodes, I learnt not to overestimate raw intelligence. I am an entrepreneur in my 30s — young and energetic, technology lover and a reader. I want similar people along with me in my journey to build something from scratch. But, what I forgot was to evaluate the candidate’s passion in my product’s domain. A candidate might give answers that seem to resonate with my dream but is that true? May be the candidate himself does not know his interests or dreams. A proportion of candidates do not know what they are heading for, the motivations that they speak are not may be what actually motivates them.

I learnt that the key is to find people who have a real passion for the product that I am creating. It’s important that they connect to the purpose. An interview is about knowing the candidate in depth and breadth. And in this process, you might help him know himself better. So it’s also important to identify the passion for the purpose because startups are not build in a day.