John Linton .....was very positive in all respects.....getting the second week 'right' will largely determine how successful the other 50 weeks will be.
The 'high light' of week one was residential ADSL sales which will finish the first week at over 200% of the first week of 2011 and all other residential services (VoIP, Mobile, Fax, SMS, hosting) all finishing over 150% of orders received at this time last year. We also completed the large amount of 'maintenance/re-organisation' work on our network without incident which was both a great relief and a tribute to the skills and dedication of the network management and engineers responsible for doing it. So we can tick of the first week of the fifty two this year as being very, very successful which is not that common for the first week of January in my commercial experience.
Although I have gone in to the office each 'working day ' of the past week for a few hours I am still taking advantage of the 'holidays' to relax more than is possible at other times of the year though I didn't manage to get to the cricket and didn't even manage to watch more than an hour or so on TV for all sorts of reasons. We will have a busy next week going to Sri Lanka to participate in the sales and technical training and for Annette to do the quarterly personnel reviews which, with close to 100 SL personnel, have become very demanding. We will also need to take some time to attempt to get some press/media coverage of our partnership with AAPT - not to gain any commercial 'presence' but to help us in recruiting the large numbers (in our terms) personnel we will need over the coming months. We will use any coverage we may achieve to 'persuade' the universities to add us to their prospective employment lists for their better graduates. We will also use it to select up to three recruitment agencies to help us find the right people for these positions.
We also used the 'Christmas period' to recruit additional engineers and trainee sales people for the Australian operation and they will begin to join the Australian teams from next week onwards. It is always exciting to add new people by going through the interview processes to determine whether each of the applicants are likely to be both successful and a positive influence on the people they will work with (and that the people they will work with will be a positive influence on them). We have been very 'lucky' over the years that we have been in business in that we have hired very few/almost no people who have not instantly fitted in and quickly become very productive 'assets'. Part of that comes from the quite careful approaches we take to hiring but mostly it appears to be because of the 'culture' and operating 'atmosphere' within Exetel.
Although we have been very successful in our recruiting over the past eight years we have obviously never had to recruit the large, for us, numbers of people we are planning to do over the coming year. We could leave all of our current recruiting processes in place - they have produced very good results for a very long time - but we will need to make them better and recognise that they will now involve different people managing the overall process than in the past. As the success of any commercial enterprise depends on the quality of the people who operate every aspect of it there can be no more important task within any company than the selection of new people. It is so obvious that it shouldn't need stating. I don't know how we will do this over the coming months but it is something we have to get very right.
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