If you live in India, you couldn’t have missed the slugfest between Timesjobs & Naukri currently playing in the newspapers, national television & local radio. While that battle (actually just a media blitzkrieg, for Timesjob’s claims are hopelessly presumptuous) is for the ‘quantity’ dimension in the recruitment wars on Indian soil, there is another front that has been opened to address its ‘quality’ dimension. And this comes straight out of American shores. For, Joel Spolsky (who doesn’t know him) has just launched a dedicated jobboard for Indian tech professionals. JoelonSoftware is easily one of the most popular tech blogs and it gets serious eyeballs from gifted coders & serious hackers. Why am I writing about this seemingly trivial happening? Well, I think Joel has done something quite remarkable; sitting in New York, he has diagnosed a critical problem afflicting technology recruitments in India and is trying to monetize this opportunity. I think this is going to grow into a trend, wherein the blogosphere plays a crucial role in recruiting key tech personnel.

Tech recruitments are tough for all. The big Indian services companies (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Accenture, IBM) which are hiring armies of engineers every year, tackle this issue by having a big corporate recruitment department, with a sizable budget at its disposal. Smaller companies use a combination of recruitment methods, with online job portals being an important part of mix. I have myself used naukri.com frequently and while we were able to hire some engineers initially, Naukri has now outgrown its utility and is of little use. Its ‘signal to noise ratio’ is completely hopeless and searching for good employees is like searching for a needle in the haystack. In fact, the very medium (of job portals) has started acting as a self defeating filter with the most talented people simply not being present there, or are oblivious to these portals.

My own startup must be amongst the early Indian adopters of overseas blogcentric jobboards. Sometime in the middle of last year, we had advertised on the 37Signals jobboard for hiring developers in New Delhi. It cost us 200$ (which incidentally is quite a bit, specially for a small company). The ads resulted in a small bunch of seriously good developers applying to us; while we did not end up hiring anybody from that lot, we still think it was worth the effort. To build world class software, you need world class developers and if the ads are expensive, so be it. (since then, I have received quite a few emails from people contemplating similar ads and wanting to know about our experience).

Clichéd as it may sound, GOOD PEOPLE CAN MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. And as Fred Brooks wrote in ‘The Mythical Man Months’, his all time classic on software project mgmt, the unitary principles do not apply to software development (specially for product companies). Having experienced this personally, I reflected on this issue earlier in this post on my personal blog ‘Nine women cannot deliver a baby in one month’. Here’s a quotation from the book that will explain this best – “..what is of immense relevance to smaller software teams, is an obvious implication of the Brooks’ Law i.e. it will be more productive to employ a smaller number of very talented programmers on a project than to employ a larger number of less talented programmers, since individual programmer productivity can vary by a factor of ten between highly talented and efficient programmers and less talented programmers….”

So if you are a Indian technology company looking to recruit the best developers, managers etc, give the following jobboards a serious thought. All these jobboards are hosted on very high traffic & globally popular blogs. And a sizable chunk of their readerships is from Indians, either in India or abroad, with many of them (to use another cliché) being the ‘alpha amongst their species’. Thus the blogs will behave as an automatic filter and ensure that you get a small but meaningful set of resumes to act upon.

You’d need to pay 50$ per post and can pay by credit card. Good for developers, coders, engineers etc.

It costs 200$; this could work if you are looking for engineers, marketing folks, startup founders etc.

This will set you back by $300; good for developers, designers etc

This costs $200 per post; give Gigaom’s focus, this would make sense for telecom professionals.

And that’s not all, you now also have jobboards on Indian blogs like ContentSutra, Alootechie, Watblog.

I am happy to announce the summer edition of Proto.in to Webyantra’s readers. This is slated for 21-22 July at Chennai and is in continuation of its first edition that took place in January earlier this year. For those who came in late, Proto is intended to be a springboard for upcoming startups in India. Modeled on the hugely successful DEMO that is held in Silicon Valley, Proto is organized by the Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit body started by a group of like minded tech enthusiasts.

The first edition of Proto was a good stepping stone. We did some things right, while there were some areas where we could have done better. We intend to leverage on its learnings and make sure that the second edition is a more compelling experience for all participants- startups, technologists, investors, media etc.

So how will ProtoSE be different?

– For starters, the event is being thrown open to startups from other Asian countries; we expect participation from South East Asia.

– There would be a better representation from the investor community; we already have confirmations from quite a few VC firms- Sequoia, Clearstone Ventures, Canaan, NEA-IndoUS Ventures, Gabriel Ventures, Mentor Partners, Ventureast, SVB, Plus Ventures, Matrix Partners, FootPrint Ventures & Bluerun Ventures.

– Prominent industry stalwarts have offered their support for the event- Samir Sood, the head of Google India M&A in the region, Ashim Roy of Comat, Subho Ray of IAMAI, Sean Blagsvedt of Microsoft Research besides associations like IAMAI, TiE, TeNeT, ASES (Incubation Cell Network based out of Stanford University), The Technopreneur Development Division of Malaysia (TeDD), IDA of Singapore.

The format of the event otherwise is likely to be the same as before – anybody can nominate, but only 30 chosen startups (selected by a expert panel) will get to take the stage during the event. The nominations are now open, so if you are a startup wanting to tell the world what you have created, go file your nominations right now. There is a participation fee of Rs 10K, but only if you are in the final 30. Registration for attendees will open shortly. The website for Proto SE07 is currently work in progress and should be ready in a week. We are also looking for event sponsors, so if that is you, drop me a mail.

Looking forward to a rocking PROTO SE 2007. See you there!

Earlier on Webyantra about Proto I
Proto…gets off to a solid start with its first edition
Proto.in…can it rival Demo?
PROTO…showcasing the best Indian tech startups

Update: My reference to TFK as a non-profit seems to have been met with skepticism from a few folks, hence this issue needs to be clarified. I don’t think I can explain this better than what Vijay has done in comment no 16 of this post; so please go through it to understand the correct picture. Other than that, I can vouchsafe that nobody from TFK is benefitting personally from this event; thats what I meant by stating that TFK is a non-profit.