Interview at Vietnam's most successful internet company

There are tons of rumor about top tech corporations in Vietnam, but how is it actually like in the nutshell? I got tired of rumors already so I decided to take a look into that world by myself, I applied to the most successful Internet company in Vietnam.

The recruitment information on the Internet in general was very smooth. From the website I was able to learn about open vacants, benefits and perks, and the hiring process. However the sheer size of a 2000-people corporation shows signs of departments stepping on each other foot. The company favors project teams over feature teams. Each team is then responsible for its own vacants. This ends up in numerous job descriptions with the same title "Senior Software Developer" and different human-incomprehensible ID such as 12-WBM-1369 or 13-WTE-1504. Perhaps for insiders, these two codes are as different as e-commerce and social game development, but what I perceived was a confusion (and I didn't fully understand there were different IDs until after the interview).

The application required a CV and a cover letter, which are pretty standard. Mine were written 3 years ago and had never been actually used before (I got my first job via, uhm, word of mouth network). I quickly revised them and submitted the application around midnight. Late afternoon the next day (Thursday), I have got my interview scheduled and confirmed for 9AM next Monday. My phone was accidentally out of battery and I really appreciated that the HR girl patiently tried to reach me 4 times before I could pick up. Though it wasn't a job hooping season, I was still pleasantly surprised.

The night before the interview, I got unconsciously excited. Given that I had interviewed close to a hundred of applicants at the point of time, the excitement was hard to understand. In fact, I got too jumpy that barely could I sleep and that upset my stomach the next morning. 

Couldn't enjoy my breakfast much I came to the company 15 minutes early. When I arrived, the motorbike park and elevator were both crowded. I guess these people don't start a day at 10 like I do. I managed to find a place in the elevator. Standing in a box with other strangers, don't know what to say and what to do with your body was really awkward. I never enjoy sharing the elevator with strangers and I would have took the stairs if the appointment hadn't been on the 13th floor. As the elevator went up and people got in and out, I could see the company offices occupying not one but several floors in this building.

The half of the 13th floor that I was in seemed to be a big meeting area, it was packed with multiple glass-wall rooms named after major rivers over the world. Mekong was the first and Yangtze the last. The company logo and slogan printed on transparent decal were on every walls. I proceeded to meet the receptionist and grabbed a chair next to a few coffee tables in the hall, waiting for my interviewers to come. A big monitor was showing latest K-Pop hits meanwhile. Brochures and posters were scatted every where around the hall. They look really professional. Yet it reminded me of Valve's employee handbook. Of all organizational artifacts, an employee manual served as such a compelling form of global PR for the shift from an industrial biz model to a knowledge management/humanistic model. Brilliant awesomeness was still hiding.

When I was about to finish the third brochure, one of my interviewer, Ms. Tuyen, showed up and took me to a meeting room. It was a little room at the end of an lobby running across the hall. Walking down the dark lobby, I asked whether I would be interviewed in English. "Vietnamese", she replied. "So why the email was in English?". Many Vietnamese companies, most of them, practice this half-baked communication style, English for writing and Vietnamese for the rest. People ended up with some sort of Vietlish that I am allerged to ("Khang oi, can you help me", "Regards em nhe", etc.) Tuyen redirected my question elegantly, but I could tell that Vietnamese was the only language here. I wasn't surprised. In fact it reminded me of Summer, my former employee who couldn't blend into Cogini English-speaking culture.

There were places for 6 in the room. The first impression was the noise of the AC attached to the outer wall of the room. I don't think the noise was that bad, but when I am worried, every external signal seems to be amplified ten fold. The AC was no white noise generator and somehow I started to like the waiting hall better. There was instruction to use VoIP for conference in the room, but I didn't find any devices. The room has a good view over the main street and flower boxes on the pavement but I wasn't left alone in the room to explore the view. The interview happened right afterward. 

Tuyen was an HR staff, she needed someone else to test my technical skills. So she started the interview by talking about the potential project that I would join if hired. "Not launch yet", "Similar to what is happening out there". I couldn't help but think about an e-commerce system, which this corp hasn't succeeded yet, despite of its number of attempts every year. 

Before she finished her last sentence, two men entered the room. The older looked quite casual, actually his outfit looked a bit slipshod and his hair obviously needed some touch. The other guy had tan skin and looked quite sporty. He was very quiet during the interview, in fact, he didn't ask me a single question.

I was asked to give a short talk about myself. Ha! Just like Cogini! And yet I managed t deliver a below average introduction. Knowing the question and listening to countless answers don't make your answer better. The interviewers showed concerns when I expressed my interest in getting a masters degree and being a lecturer in the next couple of year. For a moment I saw my reflection from the other side of the table. 

We moved on through some technical questions, from data structure to database and web server engines, and scaling techniques. The questions had nothing to do with my CV. I didn't mention these skills in my CV and technically database was the only part I know thoroughly and put into my CV (rule of thumb, only put what you really know into the CV). My technical interviewer clearly was asking his concerns, not checking the skills I possessed. I couldn't help but wonder, how can these people detect a candidate that doesn't fit for the position he is applying for (due to the confusing job descriptions) but a true gem for another team right within the company.

The questions were randomly selected, I think, because he didn't have any note with him, just paged through my CV. That gave me an impression that he didn't read my CV before hand. Despite of his randomness, all questions and explanations focused on only one single thing: scalability. For every question, he wanted to know if I knew the implementation and algorithm beneath. Having its success root in online game distribution, the company has a vast number of loyal users. So focusing on scalability make a perfect sense to me. Though, my interviewer had the tendency to go a bit too extreme, I believe he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, not being a big fan of revert engineering, I must have passed 3 questions that related to things behind the curtain. However, after all the interview that I did, I developed a thick skin and defended myself through his questions quite well.

As prospect products and vision are important assets here, we weren't allowed to talk much about those. We went on to have some discussion about software development process and daily activity. The point of view of my interviewer was that processes (he didn't state which) are helpful for outsourcing companies as they indicate what are the steps and what need to be done in each; for in-house projects, processes served little value and yet seemed to create too much bureaucracy overhead (?!). He then went on explaining why multitasking is normal. Their work come from multiple sources, on-going projects and support for live products. The code base also goes through constant rework as "This is the Internet, thing changes fast. The right user experience is unknown and experiments are needed", he said. As we continued to talk about technical work, it appeared to me that his team biggest achievement was to be capable of implementing their own version of world-class libraries and frameworks such as SQLite or jQuery. Couldn't restrain myself, I asked for his opinion about the open source community, about Q&A platform like StackOverflow and Quora. The situation sounded just like the movie "300" to me, just that the Spartan were no better than Persian.

The last couple of minutes at the end of the interview was some casual chit chat about working environment and job description. As far as I could understand, engineers are only given really technical work. My seek for a position with the balance of management and technical work was blocked by the bureaucracy of the 2000-people organization. There weren't many new facts in this last minute talk, but enough for me to confirm that the most successful Internal company in Vietnam has a firm hold on its human resources. Though my time to work for a corporation hasn't come yet, I wish it live long and prosper.

Do unconventional interview questions work?

Whether today's ever-more-polymorphous interviews succeed in identifying better employees is an unanswered question. The use of peculiar questions and arbitrary tests may seem to go against one of the few rock-solid percepts of today's human resources profession. This holds that any method of selecting job candidates should be as closely related to the work as possible. Most HR people place the most faith in work sampling, where the candidate is asked to perform or simulate work similar to which he'd be doing if hired. Statistical studies of work sampling (a famous one was done by AT&T from 1956 to 1965) showed impressive predictive ability.

The usual justification for "creative thinking" riddles and personality assessments is that they test broad, general abilities, not tied to a specific set of skills. Whether they do that is hard to say. What's certain is that "pet" questions take on a talismanic quality for some interviewers. Just as athletes don't change their shirt during a wining streak, interviewers keep asking the same questions because of a few remembered instances where it supposedly "worked". That fact that many of the most admired, innovative companies use such interview questions seems to speak for itself ("You can't argue with success").

It is far from clear that either season holds water. The human resources profession is full of customary practices of no demonstrable value. The psychologies Daniel Kahneman tells the tale of a test once used by the Israeli military to identify candidates for officer training. A group of either recruits, stripped of insignia, was instructed to carry a telephone pole over a wall without letting it touch the wall or the ground. The point was to observe who tool charge (the "natural leaders") and who fell meekly into place behind them (the "followers"). "But the trouble was that, in fact, we could not tell", Kahneman said. "Every month or so we had a 'statistics day', during which we would get feedback from the officer-training school, indicating the accuracy of our ratings of candidates' potential. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. But the next day, there would be another batch of candidates to be taken to the obstacle field, where we would face them with the wall and see their true natures revealed."

Similar tactics are alive and well throughout corporate America. In today's overheated job market, a common test is to seat a group of candidates for the same job around a conference table for a "group discussion". They know that only one will get the job. The discussion becomes a little reality show, with the recruiter quietly noting who takes charge. It's doubtful that it works any better than the Israeli army test did.

Proving that a hiring technique works - or that it doesn't work - is a complex exercise in statistics. Were once to demand that a hiring criterion be 100 percent reliable, employers would have to hand out jobs at random. There aren't any 100 percent reliable criteria - not work history, not grades, not anything. Hiring is always a game of chance. Many job seekers complain that some talented people do poorly on today's unconventional interview questions - ergo no one should use them in deciding whom to hire. This isn't a compelling argument for the reason given above. But psychological studies indicate that people are apt to view almost any criterion as "unfair" when it's used to decide who's hired or promoted. The sense of unfairness is greater when the criterion is unfamiliar. A traditional job interview is a conversation. The job offer or rejection comes days or weeks later, affording a certain emotional distance. Creative-thinking questions often bring the rejection right into the interview, right in your face. If you fail, you generally know you've failed. That feels worse than a rejection days later. Admittedly, this attitude may not make sense, but when have emotions ever had to make sense?

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William Poundstone. (2012). Punked and Outweirded. In: Are you smart enough to work at Google?. New York: Little, Brown and Company. p48-50.

How do you write a job ad.

Wrapping up 2012 in preparation for Tet holiday brings back many cheerful memories. I had a chance to rewind things have gone by and numerous lessons the job has taught me, many in the hard way. I ran across this little job poster that we made back when there were 6 people in the team.

Cogini Vietnam first job ad 2011

The poster looks nice, but it fails all the current standard of us, mostly fails to envision the job and motivate potential applicants. But it was fun, crawling in the dark for a path. As we all grow up and get wiser, our approach becomes more methodical and less ad-hoc. Time goes by and there are a couple of things about job ad that I would like to share. To support my points, I crawled sample job ads from famous local and overseas tech firms.

Job ads

A well-written job ad helps a candidate screen him or herself in or out for the job. A job ad template typically consists of

• Main attractor
• Deliverables and activities
• Essential quality, preferences, and skills
• Contact information

Major attractor 

Major attractors define what will attract potential candidates. This is the most important pitch that sell candidates on the company. It is a common belief that this is the place to show off. I agree. Reading job ads, candidates are constantly asking themselves "What's in there for me?". Answer that one question right out of the gate will grab people's attention and keep them engaged. Skunkworks addresses itself as a Silicon Valley startup in the heart of Saigon and takes pride in the work environment it has to offer.

Our team is everything, so at Skunkworks.vn we pay close attention to the work environment:

• 100% product/innovation-focused startup company with experienced founders

• Flat organization - don't come to work for us if you want minions working for you!

• Open communication - we listen to our team

• Friendly, flexible, and fun culture 

But I also agree that bullets are a very ineffective way to deliver information intended to be recalled and acted upon. Images and stories are way better communication means to deliver the sales pitch.

Each company is a unique combination of its people, fields of expertise and culture. Any passionated employee can go rampant about the story of his company's genuineness. However it is well established that we can only hold small amounts of information in short-term, or "active", memory. Among all the possible number of key message points one can make, three (3) emerges as a magic number. Studies showed that the number of items we can easily is between three and four. In reality, number three is more common than four. Every great movie, novel or play has a three-act structure. Comedians know that three is funnier than two. The rule of three is one of the most powerful concepts in communication theories. 

Google and Twitter follow the rule of three closely. Each provides candidate three key messages about careers, with the third point prompts for action.

Google's Job Page

And Twitter's

But as programmers are spoiled these days, firms are going all their way to attract top-notches, there are more to say about the offer than just main attractors. Other benefits and perks are developing upon money (present and future), career growth, work/life balance and working environment (Have you ever turned into a green-eye monster just by looking at Google's office? I have). This is one of a few areas where bullet points are proven to be useful in attracting people attention. Bullet points are specialized in paralyzing readers with information. But the list is filled with benefits and perks, it leaves the candidate with an overall impression of "many good things".

I find Dropbox's job ad delightful

Deliverables and activities 

Deliverables and activities effectively describe the kind of work the hire is expected to perform. I usually construct this part with the same strategy used on main attractors, start with a short paragraph and follow up with bullet points to cover more details. A short paragraph describing the nature of the work is not something common among local tech firms' job ads. But as jobs are getting more diverged from each other, the need for a story to enable candidates to envision themselves in the work is receiving more care. Bullet points are hard to avoid in this section, but make sure that you have someone scan the list to make sure it reflects the actual job.

KMS' job description is pretty lengthy, but after all doesn't reveal much about the work

Dropbox once again scores with nice combination of story telling and bullet points

The more high level the position is, the more sophisticated the preface paragraph should be and the fewer bullet points. This is simply to reflect the fact that a senior position requires a completely different set of skills and responsibility from a entry-level job. At some point, the criteria of evaluation is no longer doing what one is told well and on-time, but the ability to take on unassigned work and responsibility, and deliver what one's firm values. Even though I am not fond of Rocket Internet as a business model and a company, I am convinced that its job ad for CTO in Vietnam is a well-crafted piece of work.

As our CTO you are a well-rounded strategic thinker responsible for establishing, executing and communicating the technical vision across all aspects of software development. You will be leading a top-flight technology team while overseeing research, development and quality management. Furthermore, you will be responsible for the establishment of an appropriate architecture and technology for our innovative projects. By embracing a culture of continual improvement, passion for technology and cross functional collaboration and communication, you will play an integral role in the company's strategic direction and growth. At Rocket, you will help us develop fast growing Internet companies and benefit from the broad expertise of our high-energy IT team. In return, you can expect an attractive salary and various opportunities to grow on, both, a personal and professional level.

Essential qualities, preferences and skills

They define the company's interest in the candidate professionally and personally. Many hiring managers get too deep into describing their ideal employees here that I often find this section of job ads unclear and unrealistic. This part is best done by giving details about how the candidate with perform activities and deliverables. E.g instead of writing "Must have negotiation skills", try "You will negotiate with suppliers and with the project team about milestones and tradeoffs". The second approach brings a breath of reality to the ad.

Skunkworks' ideal employee sounds pretty much a workplace super hero

• Open-minded and comfortable in an intense, high-growth startup

• Innovative and love to find new ways to resolve problems

• Able to adapt according to changing project schedules

• Self-motivated and can work independently

• Totally committed to quality

• Professional and responsible

• Able to communicate well in English (written and spoken)

In general, I try to avoid putting many soft skills here but the critical ones. This poses a similar problem as hypothetical questions in interview. Hypothetically, I am perfect.

Also unless I kept running into candidates with really bad cultural fits, I am not a big fan of explicitly points out desirable personal qualities. Again, many people have the tendency to idealize their personality. On the other hand, different personal qualities do not always need bad cultural fit (and diversity should always be embraced). Best personal qualities requirements I have read do not have their own section but are embedded into verbal descriptions in job ad, which in turn drive the way readers perceive the firm in the way it desires.

Similar to Dropbox's, Foursquare's job ad makes use of plenty verbal description to reflect the company cultural fits.

There isn't much to say about Contact Information so I am wrapping up my writing here. Hope you find it useful.

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Note: By the time the post was finished, Skunkworks.vn was going through a restructuring process and its website therefore was inaccessible.

Branding pitfalls

So far we have looked at the psychology of job offer selection and how to gain advantage from that knowledge. I hope my thoughts back you up and give your more confident when approaching potential employees. But there are some pitfalls to watch out for too.

Wage war

The number is one of few objective things in the offer Tèo can rely on to imagine a bright future ahead, the rest is basically a leap of faith. So unless a company has a good reputation in the job market, matching the going rate is for the position is the first step to get the company to any shortlist.

A place in candiate's shortlist is good. However that is not enough to have a strong influence on his decision. In today's job market, companies want to stand out and make them the desirable destination for everyone (think about the power Google has in the software engineer world). However relying on the wage alone to become an outstanding talent magnet is highly risky at best and suicidal at worst. The move triggers an arm race among employers. A deep pocket grants you certain advantages in the race. But in the software industry, where talent is the most important resource of each company, other competitors will respond in kind if you pose a serious enough threat and just hope you burn out before they do. This is especially true when your competitors cannot afford to lose and have no option but to fight to death.

Expose key employees to competitors and recruiters.

Every successful tech companies spends its resources massively to build up a team of experts in its field of expertise. Not only this matters to company's products, it also has a psychological effect on potential employees. The investment provides a reassurance that the company knows what they are doing, with high quality. A chance to work with people on top of the technology stack is a compelling learning opportunities. It directly affects Tèo growth and reflects in his CV, both eventually lead him to a better career.

Don't forget to watch your back. When you are busy attracting the next generation of technical leads, your competitors might have already craven for your A team and started poaching. No-poaching agreement is quite common among key partners and alliance members. But in general, it is not possible to protect/shield/hide employees from recruiters. It will just be counterproductive to have policy restricting employees from doing their personal branding. Provide the right environment and they will stay. Happy employees are financially satisfied, professionally developed, and individually secured and respected.

Oversell

Every employment goes through a stage where the candidate is sitting on the fence considering options and you need to sell the vacant. But bear in mind, never oversell. It is not like you shouldn't sell on the bright future the company is heading to, the potential of the market or how exciting the working environment is. When the company is being successful and adrenaline in blood is high, it is hard not to do so. And in fact, you should. You want everyone you interviewed to spread the gospel whether they join or not. But many companies in the effort of recruiting people are promising things they can't deliver, like benefit packages or revenue/growth exceeding what the company and its market are actually capable of.

Once people know the truth, they are frustrated, they feel cheated. they express this to others. Now you have gained one more problem. And it is never a good thing when a high-profile hire quits unexpectedly. It causes otherwise happy people to second guess.

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So that's it. The last post in the company's perceived values psychology trio. Hope you enjoyed it.

Increase perceived values of a company

Last time, we talked about several factors that can affect the way Tèo - a well-trained software engineer - perceives a company's image and offer. In this post, we are looking into ways to increase perceived values.

Increase the wage objective value.

Perceived and objective values aren't identical, but they're still correlated. The offer-letter numbers are similar to the tip of an iceberg in many ways. Typically only one-ninth of the volume of an iceberg is above water yet it is the only visible factor to estimate the shape of the under water portion. The number is one of few objective things in the offer Tèo can rely on to imagine a bright future ahead, the rest is basically a leap of faith. So unless a company has a good reputation in the job market, matching the going rate is for the position is the first step to get the company to any shortlist.

Give the company a personality. 

There are a fair amount of profound articles, books and university programs on company culture and visual identity, I would make a fool of myself trying to cite these numerous theories that people have formed and practiced for centuries. However, I believe people in each profession have their own niches that are not so common to find, so do software engineers. When talking about a company, a normal engineer talks about offer, product and what kind of toys he is given. That's ok, that is a basic need of a human, just that it is superficial and can't tell anything about career growth in the coming years. A trait of a great engineer and contributor is showed via his genuine interest in deeper technical and organizational aspects such as process, field of expertise, type of projects, etc. Pitching on one of these field and promoting it in technical event the company takes place give it a bit of control on how people perceive the company.

37signals is not the best project management software shop in the world, but it has personality. The 37signals team stands for something: uncompromising simplicity. Other domestic examples are numerous: Greengar is specialized in mobile applications, East Agile etches its beloved management methodology into the name, Skunkworks is applying Silicon-Valley-approved product development in the heart of Saigon, etc... Ultimately, it comes down to differentiating the company, it almost doesn't matter on what, more or less anything will do.

Link the company with its top-notch team. 

Every successful tech companies spends its resources massively to build up a team of experts in its field of expertise. Not only this matters to company's products, it also has a psychological effect on potential employees. The investment provides a reassurance that the company knows what they are doing, with high quality. A chance to work with people on top of the technology stack is a compelling learning opportunities. It directly affects Tèo growth and reflects in his CV, both eventually lead him to a better career.

And really, if it is a job a tech rock star nods his head to, why bothers?

When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.

Read more: http://read.bi/11ZOSEh

Lot of expats in the team structure helps too! For international corps, this shows a strong connection between the company and head-quarters. For others, it is a demonstration of the budget (yes, that the company is not running out of business and Tèo and his friends are first targets for layoff) and an international vision the company is approaching. This is a growing pattern of globalization and Vietnam, certainly, is not outside of the circle. (1000% bias, but Tèo grew up in the middle of nowhere. To him foreigners is a sign post of civilization and advancement)

As mentioned in the last post, Vietnamese education is sadly years behind developed countries and the country is crying for capable people in STEM. Even a big corp can't just hire a team that it wants. And when that happens, talents need to be raised, for the most vivid sample, Intel cooperated with RMIT to grow its team.

There are many ways a company can raise its tech team, but none of them is cheap.

"Quality is free, when you pay dearly for it" - Peopleware. 

Local companies are catching up with the trend in Silicon Valley by striving for an environment where every effort to master the technologies stack and get more productive is appreciated explicitly. In Cogini, we have been organizing weekly TechTalks where everyone is given chances to share about basically whatever they find interesting. Put it another way, it is like our weekly BarCamp. Leveraging that spirit, in the coming time we are having compulsory research hours and hack days, times when engineers can be completely creative, free from the constraints of their normal jobs. These research and sharing are endless source of blog posts, tweets and status updates - the first step to promote the team to the outer world. We are also sending engineers to conferences so that they can keep their skills up to date (we went to BarcampPP a few months ago). Allow engineers to buy books that contribute to their knowledge on the company’s dime. Permit engineers to express their ideas about the projects they’re working on.

Create a tribe. 

A tribe that links itself to the personality the company is building. This is an advanced form of #2 and #3. Like company's culture, the tribe needs time to grow and everyone participates to controlling - not just individuals. But once it is formed, the tribe is the driving force behind every success of the company. I was taught a classic example of this, the IBM's Black Team when I was in the Software Testing class of Mr. Quang Tran. If you haven't known about the "nefarious" team, take some time to read it. Please, I'll wait.

IBM was delighted about the team, as every defects they found was one that customers didn't. And their colleagues outside the team were jealous at the apparent fun they were having. And others too.

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So far we have looked at some humble opinions of the silly me about talents acquisition in Vietnam. Hopefully, you have got some ideas of how job market works here. But there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Stay tuned. Check it out

Perceived value of a company

"Hiring is the most important decision a manager can make"

That is if you can attract enough people to interview, filter and finally hire. When the number of CV you receive doesn't even meeting the number of vacancies you are having, your decision is highly constrained.

Now that I have set foot in the software industry of Vietnam for a while, I learned a couple of things. The job market in Vietnam is abundant in quantity yet desperately low in quality. The situation keep improving over the years with the coming waves of overseas students and local international colleges. But that hardly meets the thirst of this growing country (for many years, Vietnam has been one of the countries with highest growth rate). Despite of this huge demand on high quality workforce, a majority of college programs is sticking with impractical knowledge. The sad fact turns the middle to senior job market in Vietnam really really competitive. Big corps and small startups, both local and multinational, are drawing from a small talent pool and there are obviously not enough fishes for everyone.

Companies of all sizes are positioning themselves different to take advantage in the head hunting game. Hilariously, the ones who are winning the game are the preys, the talented engineers. With an overflowed number of offers and a few mainstream technologies choices that ensure the engineers to be useful in any firm (iOS, Android, Django, RoR, etc..), how are they making their decisions is a very interesting topic. My view point as an engineer is different from that of a professional recruiter and might turn out to be entertaining.

The story of Tèo

Tèo is a well-trained software engineer that has been living in Ho Chi Minh for the last few years. He was an active student that won several merit awards and found a club for hobbyists in his school of computer science. He is the new generation of Vietnamese that every recruiter loves. An hour of Tèo drawing class diagram and slamming the keyboard with customer worths $10. That means Tèo should nod his head at an $3200/month offer, assuming he generates value to the company for every hour he works.

Of course that assumes that Tèo is a rational, decision-making machine that economists love. In fact, Tèo is flesh-and-blood irrational human being who doesn't price his time and calculate the costs and benefits. He has a perceived value of an offer which may or may not be linked to its objective value.

The perceived value of an offer may be higher than its objective-value. Just look at how many people want to be a Apple genius in comparison with the wage. But the perceived can also be lower than its objective value. MailChimp is a successful company and can make good offer, but worried that its PHP developer is not as appealing to others as it actually is.

Back to Tèo, if a recruiter wants to get his nod, then changing the offer is an option, but she can also change his perception.

How people set their perceptions

For a start, it is extremely hard for them to do so in a vacuum. Isolate a fresh grad from the rest of the world and ask him the offer he wants. If he somehow manages to find the question make sense in the situation, the answer is probably derived from his monthly expense during college years, not the value he can possibly generate for the company.

People base their perceived values on reference points. Whenever an offer arrives, Tèo is making sequence of subconscious and intuitional calculation that scans through what his friends are earning, a relative comparison of their capability and employment history.

Software industry of Vietnam is not so young that reference points are hard to find. The industry of Vietnam is pretty outsourcing-centric. Big outsourcing firms, the trend-setter a decade ago, have all stabilized and paychecks are standardized. These references are pretty well-known, like FPT with its own education system and Japan-centric business, VNG with the tendency to localize Chinese games or TMA, the popular first stop for all students from HCMUT. If a new company wants to break through the circle, there is a chance that it is triggering an arms race and the winning chance is equal for one with either deeper pocket or better local relationship. This is the minefield that no startup ever set its foot in for years.

That doesn't mean one needs to copy the reference point. If the company is genuinely positioned higher than its competitors in term of career development, growth potential, working environment or any other unmeasurable factor, a new reference point is set.

The value people perceive an offer to have can depend on their taste. By the time I was a student, I struggled with the question of being a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond. Some might like it this way, others like another. However, the tribe people belong to can affect their taste. It is not a surprise that there are so many startup and tech companies in Silicon Valley. There have been students coming to the area for un-related programs such as philosophy or geography and end up being engineer in a very ad-hoc way. They are essentially the same people, the changes were in the expectations and sense of value of those around them.

Knowledge is yet another factor influencing people choice. "An intense, self-motivated environment" might sound innovative and exciting to someone who spent a few years in a big bureaucratic corp. The same sentence sounds like extremely stressful workplace for team members of an unfortunate startup. Over the years I have found some other mismatches in wording and what actually happens.

"Our fast-paced company" - We have no time to train you. 

"Must have an eye for detail" - We have no quality assurance

"Good communication skills" - Management communicates, you listen, figure out what they want and do it

So many factors are getting between Tèo and his right employer. In this competitive market, how can one company stand out to catch Tèo attention while not being an attention ho? Stay tuned. Here are some inner thoughts http://bit.ly/QUNCyT