(Here's another golden oldie from the India archives, circa July 2007.)
Setting up business in a foreign country/culture means you have to recalibrate what you think of as normal. The last couple of weeks I have been learning a lot about the recruiting and hiring process here, and it's been...interesting.
For example, it is considered perfectly normal and acceptable to arrive to meetings, including job interviews, 15 or 20 or even more minutes late, without apology and typically without a call to alert you of the delay. This seems to be a combination of cultural attitudes and the realities of living in a megacity with unpredictable traffic, transportation, and weather.
Now, back in San Francisco, if a job applicant shows up 20 minutes late for an interview, that person had better have a spectacular excuse involving, oh I dunno, a herd of rabid boar loose in the BART tunnel and an exploding clown on Market street, including photographic and preferably video evidence to back it up. AND a note from a doctor. And the person had better have called me to tell me he or she would be late. Only then would a 20-minute delay not warrant summary dismissal as a potential hire, because, dude, it's a job interview. If you can't make it in time to that, why should I believe you can do anything at all on time? But here in India...not so much.
Another thing that fascinates me is the kind of information that is included on resumes. You almost always are told the person's date of birth and marital status, and often you are helpfully provided with the applicant's passport and/or driver's license number. My favorite, though, is that people usually list a few of their hobbies. Cricket is often mentioned (the sport, I mean; I have not seen any resumes from entomology enthusiasts so far), and, oddly, table tennis (not that I would ever turn down a good game of table tennis, but I'm just sayin'--who the hell is that into ping pong that they can't even refrain from mentioning it on their resume?). The very, very best is when people put things like "Vivek enjoys the movies and listening to soft music," or "Ritu likes to read and watch TV."* You are trying to impress someone into hiring you for a director-level position AND THE BEST HOBBY YOU CAN COME UP WITH IS WATCHING TV??" I give up.
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and also I can't remember any of their actual names at the moment.
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The ping pong (sorry, table tennis) thing is apparently BIG. The company I work at now is at least half Indians and ping pong is very important. There is currently a company-wide doubles tournament that EVERY person in the company MUST participate in, and when there's a new hire, one of the questions he/she must answer in their introductory email to everyone else is about their proficiency in ping pong. Otherwise, working there is pretty nice.
I'm also reminded of the number of resumes which included (a) the applicant's religion and/or (b) their father's military rank.
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