Don’t hire prima donnas. Look for "team players". Weed out the egotists. The cowboy era is over – be careful of software programmers who don’t know that yet. It’s the new age HR philosophy. But here’s one new age company with an old-style HR ethos.

"We look to hire prima donnas. The emphasis is not so much on teamwork as on people whose career goals comprise of excelling in their technical skills. We aim to hire engineers with extremely strong coding skills, who can think out of the box, and are not necessarily concerned with man management," says Rekha Menon, country manager and vice president of the people department at Talisma.

Why? Some of it likely comes from the outlook of this three-year-old company’s promoters themselves. Some of it is of course because Talisma is still a small company—with a total of 154 product development engineers on its rolls. But a large part of it most likely comes from the fact that Talisma is a software product company.

That’s perhaps the most crucial difference between hiring for a product company and a project company. For a company that gets its bread and butter out of projects, the ability to work within that project team, to manage it as a project leader, and the dynamics of that teams’ relationship become important to how well the project goes. In product companies on the other hand, most people are islands of work—each managing his own individual features or sets of features. There are no other dynamics than the one between the programmer and his work.

Question is—why would anyone want to join a small product company where the traditional "managerial" growth paths are not available? Especially since larger, better-branded companies like Infosys and Wipro can offer far better salaries.

The egotist
"We do not promise trips to the US or Iceland. And are cafeteria may not be great. But damn it we have other things to offer," says Menon. Those other things include a promise to let your individuality flourish, a promise of continuing youth—or the feeling of it—and a unique learning experience.

While both project and product companies look for excellent coding skills a product firm looks for something more in a prospective employee—a certain egotism. A certain drive to own.

"In a product company like ours, the engineers have the mental satisfaction of creating something tangible at the end of the day.

Working on a product is a very exciting process. The engineer is expected to take ownership of a particular feature of a product and he gets the bouquets and the brickbats for that," says Bharat Ahluwalia, Director program management at Talisma.

And that is really one of the fundamental drivers "The feeling of ownership is something that only product engineers can enjoy and that attracts people," adds Ahluwalia. There are other lures. The unique experience of working on a product and the Peter Pan complex that most good software programmers suffer from—a refusal to grow up and enter the adult world. Talisma takes care to indulge that. "The average age of our employee is 25 years and most of them are just out of college. For an engineer joining Talisma, it’s just an extension of their college life," says Ahluwalia. And since the company hires a lot from IITs and Regional Engineering Colleges, new recruits often find themselves working with their seniors in college. "They come here to find that the party and work atmosphere is the similar to what they enjoyed at college," says Ahluwalia. Which is all very well, but how does a small company like Talisma manage in an industry that has traditionally suffered from high attrition rates and professional job hoppers?

The pampered
"When you hire a prima donna, it is very important to keep him happy. When we recognize an engineer as a star, we treat him like one. We let him know that he is special. The people around him must know about the special status. Stars deserve special treatment and that keeps them going," says Ahluwalia. To please a ‘star’ can be a very demanding proposition as Ahluwalia has come to realize.

"We have had instances of some of our best engineers wanting to go to the US because most of their batch-mates are there.

We try to sit down and explain why a trip to the US may not be the best thing for him. But if he still insists, we send him on a maintenance job. But at the end of the day, it can be worth the pain because these guys can really perform" he adds.Talisma also follows a system of mentoring where a ‘star’ is actively encouraged to find mentors. The idea is that the employee finds for himself a role model with whom he can talk to about his professional and sometimes even personal problems. Apart form easing the learning process, this creates a bonding and loyalty that traditional HR policies cannot often create.

The touchstone of this entire HR philosophy is—does it work?

For now…
Consider some facts. Talisma is a ‘day zero’ company at the IITs. For a small company it did quite a job hiring a good 35 IIT and 10 REC graduates last year. The attrition rate in its product-engineering department is ‘nearly zero’. All of which in itself is quite amazing.

The true milestones however are still ahead of them. Frankly, the thrill of owning a feature can wear off. People grow up and out of college lifestyle fixations, and there are a bunch of new MNC development centers that are beginning to offer software product development experiences at much better salaries.

Plus, the joy and curse of growth is probably still to come. Like people, companies grow up. Some also grow old—a little more "process oriented", a little less free-spirited, a little more conservative. This small product company’s true test will lie in how far it can withstand that.

TV Mahalingam