This is a guest post by Sreekar Kothamachu, founder at Nesa Medtech - an investee company of Malpani Ventures. We are grateful to Sreekar for sharing his learnings with us !

“Hiring!” is an extremely important aspect of an organisation’s growth. For a company its a process to find a candidate who fits in rightly to the company’s culture but also brings the required skill set  for the company to grow and for a candidate with abundance of hope to find the right job with lots of learning opportunities to shape up their future.

In my experience heading a deep tech startup over the last few years and working with corporations for more than 12 years, the standard hiring procedure frequently produces results that are excessively skewed. When it comes to time and effort, this can sometimes be quite detrimental to a startup. A typical playbook followed for hiring by large corporates giants involves

· Written tests (for lesser than 5 Yrs)

· Technical Rounds (at least about 2 )

· HR Round and

· Manager/ Director Round.

Throughout the entire process, the team would scarcely have any opportunities to interact with one another for more than a couple of hours, and most crucially, in such a formal setting, it would be quite easy for them to try to outdo one another. The main emphasis throughout the entire process is on technical skills; the HR and managerial rounds are typically seen as a namesake. In my experience, I have hardly seen any candidates getting rejected in these rounds.

After hiring many candidates through the traditional process and working with them. Some of the best colleagues and contributors to the company were not the best technical skill but the ones with great ATTITUDE and basic technical skills.

At, Nesa has a very distinctive hiring procedure that has helped us choose the best individuals. Especially for the lateral hires. To begin with

· CEO Meet-up

· Technical Discussion

· Half a Day access to Office & Team Lunch.

· Core Team – Collective decisions

As a CEO I would be the first person to speak to them. An important aspect of this interaction is no technical questions at all and understanding the candidate's expectations.  Most important is to give a perspective on the company, but not before. I simply evaluate ATTITUDE & EAGER to WIN aptitude. If all goes smoothly in this round, we'll conduct a technical meeting online to verify that everyone has the very minimum of knowledge.We next invite the applicant to our office for a series of discussions with the team responsible members, followed by a product demonstration, and an online evaluation test. Furthermore, lunch with the rest of the team will follow thereafter. As the CEO, I ultimately compile comments from the entire team and speak with the candidate to determine whether it's a YES or NO. By doing so we get to be more familiar with the candidate as the team would have spent time with them in both a formal and informal environment. More importantly, the candidate also understands the work culture of the company and also knows their prospective colleagues too. This entire process makes it easier for the company and also for the candidate to understand if both are good MATCH.

HOPE this helps in refining your hiring process to find the best MATCH for your team.