Tech companies and founders are known for thinking outside the box. Tijmen Vos, CTO of Panasonic Cameramanager, which was acquired two years ago by Panasonic, created Nubo, the world’s first 4G mobile monitoring camera. When building a team, he needed to go beyond standard hiring practices.
When he and his partner, CEO Rishi Lodhia, founded the original company back in 2004, they found they had a lot of issues choosing the right talent to bring aboard. After much trial and a lot of error, they decided to do away with skills and experience as the most desirable traits and instead focus on individual character traits.
At the recent IFA technology show in Berlin, Vos described to me how they now seek out the so-called "perfect catch."
So what is the perfect catch and how did it come about?
Rishi and I have introduced a corporate culture into our company because we had difficulties with recruiting people. We thought we needed to do something different, and we decided we’re not going to look at their resume and say ok, you can program Java so give yourself a 9+ and let’s hire. We decided to start looking less at specific IT skills when recruiting people and more at informal skills, so we found a term called “The Catch.” Each letter stands for something.
C is for Creativity and Entrepreneurship
My partner and I are entrepreneurs, we like to start new projects, new businesses, so creativity and entrepreneurship is the number one trait you should have. And that’s everyone; even with the programmer or the administration or the clerk at the front door, everyone should have this entrepreneurship in their own way.
A is for Ambition
In your daily life or business, you should be ambitious in everything you do.
T is for Team Player
This is important; you cannot make a successful business if you’re not working in a team.
C is for Customer Driven
You should have a proven track record working with people, working with customers, working with others even inside your company, so you should treat them well.
H is for Humble
We like people we can speak to who are really humble, really honest, even if you have to bring bad news. You should be honest and bring it, otherwise you get delayed projects and you have to make sacrifices later on.
How did this CATCH culture come about?
We were drinking a beer and really thinking about it. We’d had a lot of trouble recruiting good people and we didn’t like trying people for 6 months, firing, hiring someone new. We found out if we start recruiting on informal skills, how people act in their daily life, even at home or at school, if you ask the right questions you know how people are, and that’s way more important than just the skills you have on paper.
How do you figure that out?
We’ve made the mistake of recruiting people based on their skills on paper, so we have set up some interview scenarios, questionnaires. Also within the interview, you can see a lot about how people behave, how they walk in, you look at the way people present themselves.
At our company we look at everything. A programmer can be shy, but still he needs to be communicative. We’ve made this program that brings us the perfect CATCH. At least we try. These are values we as founders think are important and if you attract people who share those common values you can achieve much more as a team.
What advice do you have for candidates on how to become the perfect catch?
The first C in catch is most important. My motto is if you can think about tomorrow, you can differentiate today. To differentiate today, you need some sort of entrepreneurship, you need some sort of creativity because if you lack those two skills, you’re basically going to do the same thing as anybody else. So do something unique and something that really adds value to the lives of people. You need to be creative, because just copying what somebody else is doing, you can do that to make a living, but the way I look at it, if people want to achieve something in their life, they should be entrepreneurial. They don’t need to become one, they just need to have the characteristics and traits.
If you are a C++ or a Java programmer and you come to my desk and you say, 'Tijmen, I’ve been thinking about those rubbers on the bottom of the Nubo and actually I don’t like the color, it should be purple because Nubo is purple', even for a programmer, that’s creative, so don’t sit behind your PC or desk and only do your programming and not care about the product that you’re programming for, and think out of the box.
