ASIA FOCUS : All avenues should be considered

ASIA FOCUS : All avenues should be considered

Entrepreneur View: While personal networks remain useful, recruitment firms also have their place.

INNOVASIA

The right manager is essentially someone who can complement the existing talent pool in an organisation. While skills and functional experience matter, the more important aspect is motivation: Will he or she just give up and move to a "normal" job during tough times?

When recruiting managers, Asian entrepreneurs should try to unearth candidates' motivations and their vision for the company.

Evaluating the work values and personality traits of candidates for management teams in Asian ventures should be no different than for other types of recruitment. The process must find the real motivation of the candidate. Reference checks are especially important in Asia, where personal and professional networks tend to be extensive.

While networks are commonly used to source candidates, headhunters can be useful because they can devote full attention to finding the right people within a short time frame.

Ventures generally don't have much time: A business idea must often be proved within a given period, limited by the cash on hand and the burn rate. It is hence better to find the right person sooner rather than later. However, venture founders are busy with day-to-day operations and cannot afford the time to do high-quality searches, and in many cases end up relying on luck.

Headhunters can prove more effective in such cases, but unfortunately they cost money, and few ventures put recruitment costs into their initial budgets.

Once Asian entrepreneurs have found a pool of candidates to choose from, presenting the venture as an attractive proposition is not very different from "selling" the idea to a venture capitalist.

To someone who may be interested in joining one's venture team (usually for a lower salary), one has to clearly articulate one's ideas, demonstrate the ability of the team - including the potential recruit - to achieve the company's goals and explain how the new recruit can make a difference to the team.

Just as with VCs, passion alone is not enough to attract high-quality management talent.

Bangkok Post
Sunday January 14, 2007