ZaLife blog | Read about Kulizans, our culture and the fun things we do

What you know changes. Who you are doesn't

When we meet and interview people at Kuliza we spend each round looking not just at how good their problem solving or technical skills are. We are looking at the type of person the candidate is, what are their values, what gets them excited and if they are a culture fit. We are essentially looking at their attitude and character as much as their aptitude. This is something that Deepak wrote about in an earlier post.

Against this background I had a long debate with the placement cell of a tier 1 university. Their view was that their students are technically strong enough for any company. My view was that that may be true, but interviews are crucial so we get a sense of who the candidates are. After all, what you know changes, who you are doesn’t. They could not understand that attitude, personality and behaviour should determine whether we hire someone. It is a worrisome situation for education if institutions don’t understand the importance of creating not just skilled engineers but also rounded individuals.

Kuliza certainly does not take an extreme and unique position on hiring people for culture fit. It probably says more about the IT industry in general in India than anything about Kuliza. Companies like Southwest, Zappos and ING Direct are known for emphasizing culture and attitude in their hiring process, and even hiring people outside of their respective industries; they don’t want other companies’ attitudes and cultures damaging theirs. Indeed, even Obama may have won the Nobel Peace prize for his attitude and efforts to strengthen diplomacy and cooperation. After all, it was awarded relatively early in his presidency and any achievement will take years to materialize.

The vital first step is to know the type of people you want to hire. The values that we look for in people are:

• Be creative and WOW customers
• Be passionate and impactful
• Be open-minded and engaged
• Be curious and keep learning
• Be humble and sincere
• Be funventurous

The next step is to commit to only hiring candidates based on your values. It is not easy and requires a lot of discipline, but once you have people with the right attitude a lot of other things will fall into place.

Check out our recruitment presentation!

Our new recruitment presentation is ready and you can view it below or on our slideshare page.

We took a slightly different approach. Instead of throwing numerous statistics, growth figures and targets at you, overwhelming you with every detail of what we do and how utterly fantastic we are, we wanted to share the stories of some people at Kuliza and their impact in the company. Some joined us recently while others have been with us for quite a while longer.

We looked at people’s impact in 4 areas:

• Technologies
• Live Projects
• Culture & ZaLife
• Learning & Mentorship

If you want to get to know us go to our Date Us page and tell us what impact you want to have!

A awesome trip to Kabini with team members!

Friday, October 15th 2010, 10am. The Kuliza Hackathon started. It is finally the chance for our team (Suresh, Deepak, Achal, Ravindra) to work on VRoll, an android app we devised that allows users to check out the most liked and voted videos from you Facebook network. We even promoted VRoll.

Monday, October 15th 2010 Demo time.

Monday, October 22nd 2010 VRoll were announced as the Hackathon winners! However, it wasn’t until last weekend that we had the chance to celebrate our hard work. We started the journey from Bengaluru (Mayank joined us instead of Ravindra) early Saturday morning, stopping at Mc’Ds for breakfast before reaching the Serai Resort in Kabini around 11Am. The resort is beautiful, built beside a river in a forest with wonderful hospitality and ambience.

The restaurant in the resort – Flames – was awsome. Egg chilly, chilly chicken and chicken salami are the specialities.

After lunch we went on a water safari. Achal claimed he was bored of safaris so stayed and slept the whole time. I have been on a few safaris before but this was the best one. We visited 3 forests – Nagarahole, Bandipur and Kearal’s Waynad. – and spotted tigers, herds of elephants, dears, sambars, crocodiles, peacocks, and a huge variety of birds. I also got the chance to take some excellent photos of the wildlife.

We had a bonfire in the evening and watched wild life documentary. The next morning I went for the nature walk early in the morning and got a chance to take pictures of few birds and listen to them singing.

We still have time to learn kayaking before a swim. After breakfast we left for Bengaluru and reached home around 4pm.

There were 2 big things I learned about my team members over the weekend:
1. Deepak can actually sleep on a boat

2. Achal can hang in a hammock without breaking it!

Want to be a Kulizan?

We are looking for a QA Analyst to join our team at Kuliza. If you hate to use software with bugs, love the challenge of finding problems that make Developers sweat, and believe that quality is a way of life – then read on!

If you’re interested you can go to our Date Us page and apply.

• Very strong problem solving skills
• Write test cases and create test plans
• Strong knowledge of test automation and frameworks (Selenium, Junit, Neoloaders)
• Knowledge of writing functional test cases
• Create performance and load testing scenarios (Open STA)
• Knowledge of any bug tracking tool (Jira is a plus)
• Knowledge of programming languages – Java, C/C++, SQL
• Knowledge of scripting language (such as Bash, Perl)
• Candidates should have about 2 years of experience

If you think you meet these criteria then apply!

Manjunath's ideas on the CCO role

We have been contemplating for some time creating a role – the Chief Customer Officer – that reflects the importance of customers to Kuliza. As Manjunath is already playing a similar role, he was the best fit to take this on.

The reason we felt the need for a Chief Customer Officer is we wanted to ensure that 1 person is the ultimate authority on customers, has the ability to create and drive a customer strategy in the management and throughout the company, and to create a customer-centric culture.

Talking about why the role of CCO is important for Kuliza, Manjunath said “Most companies start with a big idea; Kuliza started with a big customer. Since then we have been a very customer-centric company. Customers will always be a core part of our strategy and growth so it made sense to have a CCO role to emphasise that strategic focus.”

He believes there are 2 key areas to focus on to make this happen – customer and employee engagement. “Generally an engaged customer is one who actively supports a service or product. Customer engagement is more than just brand loyalty where customers are simply making exclusive purchases; instead, engaged customers are supporting the company by buying more products and services and telling others to do the same. Employee engagement is a crucial ingredient in creating a customer-centric culture. If employees are engaged, their interactions with customers will be genuine, not coerced or forced. Customers recognize and are pleased with such sincere service. As such, one of the major factors in increasing customer engagement is employee engagement.”

Manjunath also talked about how he wants to continue improving our customer focus: “We should focus more on research, continue to develop our internal thought leadership in social technologies, and build on the ideas of customers by bringing in our social technology expertise and come up with the best solution for the end users.”

We all wish Manjunath good luck in his new role.