Interview Pattern - India vs. Singapore

[Sai Surya]

Dear All,

I work for an asian services company in Singapore. Recently, my company fired many people, out of these many firing stories I happen to fully understand 2 stories.

- Fresh chinese graduate joined couple of months back and my management placed him at client's place. I am sure absolutely he doesn't have client interaction skills (my company worships their clients). So, someone from client palce assigned him some work and this guy said he is busy and cannot do the work right now. He got fired based on client feedback that his attitude is bad.

- Two indian guys joined couple of months back from various companies in Singapore with Java background. They even succeeded in writing code and executing it in interview (some JDBC, JSP, SQL and Servlet stuff). A week back management fired these two guys after giving some tasks to them. The tasks they assigned were writing java mail client to send mails and simple java programmes to do sorting (they can use collections). They still failed to do these even after taking code from Google.

- In fact, the guy who was assigned java mail work took code from Google and he need some .jar file to compile the code. He started downloading the code. Download took around 45 minutes. The time they gave to finish the task is 2 hrs. Finally, manager came to him and said they cannot deliver project on time if he works like this and their HR will talk to him soon.
He got fired on the spot along with other guy who got sorting problem.

- The guy who was assigned sorting problem came to me and started asking me how to code that. I told him that I have no authority to help him atleast in this regard since he is under some assignment which decides his future in this company.

Considering all this my observation is, in India interviews are tough. People face typically average to tough questions and once candidate joins the company his life is almost happy. Here in Singapore interviews are dead easy to win, however, once inside, tough to survive.

I still don't understand why those two guys and fresh graduate were fired. Management should know that fresh graduate needs training to handle customer presence. why can't these management guys take some 50% precaution (not 100%) while interviewing people. After all, its playing with someone's career.

I welcome your views on this.

[Rambo Prasad]

The company has a crappy work culture...The situation is like a knife hanging over your head...Why hire them then administer some tests and fire them...???Instead make the selection tougher....In India Companies drill you during interviews but once you join a company they treat you with respect and don't do such senseless things...After all people have lot of things like loans and family to care about...One cannot have a secure feeling and a cheerful mindset working in such companies...

Another reason could be the condition of job market...Here in India companies are desperate to retain the employees...If my coworker is fired for such trivial reason the first thing I would do is to start looking for a better job...If the Indian companies start doing this then the already high attrition rate could become much worse...Other thing could be the the typical chinese communist mindset where employees are expected to be like slaves...
[ November 15, 2007: Message edited by: Rambo Prasad ]

[Arjun Shastry]

I agree.After hiring them and firing them after sometime shows company faulty hiring practices.One possbile reason could be candidates must have said "YES" to every question during interview.One of the best way to hire is call the candidate on week end for entire day and ask him/her to deisgn,draw the diagram, write the pseudo code and write/talk something on his past.

[Mark Herschberg]

This has the potential to be an inflammatory topic given the title. Hopefully it will remain civil.

As to your actual comments, they are irrelevant to your topic. You describe 4 examples at one company, and use this as the basis by which to judge the industry of an entire nation? That is statistically meaningless and generally just silly to make such as judgment based on a single company. It could just as easily be a result of the company culture, a bad executive, poor HR processes, etc.

--Mark

[Jignesh Patel]

Originally posted by Mark Herschberg:
That is statistically meaningless and generally just silly to make such as judgment based on a single company. It could just as easily be a result of the company culture, a bad executive, poor HR processes, etc.

Truely said, in India also you will find this kind of companies if you ignore hot market conditions, as I have been pass through one of this kind of company 2001, who just hired people in the anticipation that work will come without thinking that what if work will not come how to pay them. No neeed to say that company is closed now.

But that doesn't mean that in India all companies are like that.

And if you are comparing interview point of then I would say interviews are much tougher in US then India of course not for contracting positions.
[ November 15, 2007: Message edited by: Jignesh Patel ]