John Linton In a few hours we will head to the airport to make our fourth trip to Sri Lanka in just on 12 months. The principal reason for this trip is to hire a Sri Lankan national to become Exetel Sri Lanka's General Manager but we will also do the final interviews for a further four support engineers and look for an additional programmer. One of my last tasks yesterday was to send the letters of offer to another two graduate sales trainees having already offered jobs to two others over the previous few days.
So in less than 10 days Exetel will be have hired an additional ten people increasing by almost 25% the number of people employed by Exetel in both Sri Lanka and in Australia. A somewhat unusual circumstance for an Australian company in these interesting financial times and an unheard of personnel acqisition number for Exetel over the past five years over which period we consider adding two people in three months a rapid increase in our employees.
An interesting side note, particularly for those members of the political correctness gender police, is that all four of the graduate sales trainees are female! This increases the number of Exetel female employees from two to six - the highest absolute number and percentage ever! Though perhaps I will now be accused of gender discrimination in the opposite way to previously.
I have never found that female sales personel are ever any less capable than males and, in some ways, were often better because, irrespective of the gender police' moanings 'God' did genetically program males to respond to females more openly than, with some lower percentage of exceptions, he/she ever did to males. Not something the gender police can ever get round in their politically correct 'arguments' - take it up with 'God'.
However this isn't the major, or even the main, reason that applies when hiring recent graduates. The major reason, also something 'God' has put in place which is, of course, that a female of 21 or 22 is so much more mature than a male of the same age. Both reasons are generalisatons and it just happened that the four best candidates (in terms of the qualities we were looking for) just happened to be female - but I thought I'd point it out to those people who got so upset at one of my previous ramblings on the reasons for the gender imbalance in Exetel's staffing.
As I always am when hiring in Sri Lanka, I was very impressed with the resumes of the 'short list' of people provided by the recruitment agency we used to do the 'job search' for a general manager. I wish I could be presented with such a short list for an Australian General Manager. I suppose twelve people isn't really my idea of a 'short' list but the search company had to be 'persuaded' by Annette to reduce their original suggestion of 19 as being far too many. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that they had well over 150 applicants for the position. Based on the resumes any one of the twelve would be more than suitable for the position and there are, at least on paper and based on the search company's interview/assessment notes, three outstanding candidates - one of whom coincidentally Annette and I met on our first visit to get the set up of the company under way last February.
In some ways I think we will actually have a problem in finding the right person as, at least in my view from only reading the resumes and the accompanying notes, the candidates are over qualified for the job and may find the limitations of the duties 'boring' as the company is so small and limited in its current scope and will continue to be that way unless/until we can persuade the Sri Lanka Board Of Investment to allow us to widen the scope of the activities we undertake in Colombo - something I will begin to address next week but, based on my previous dealings, will take a considerable time to accomplish if it can be accomplished at all.
It will be a very busy week in Colombo with also a great deal happening in Australia over the next few days with the training and 'integration' of the first four corporate sales trainees and our 'last throw of the dice' to convince some 15,000 ADSL1 users to 'migrate' to ADSL2 services as well as getting our fring replacement VoIP over HSPA service fully functional and the PSTN number to VoIP capability put in place as well as...........
.........Lucky we aren't also suffering from the enormous pressures of a recession with all these new projects to occupy our time.