We reached on time and requested to send their candidates after completing greeting and handshaking formalities. The first two candidates had three job changes and were relatively good in communication skills. When we started asking questions, we realized in the first five minutes that they are versed with very basic activities like creating users, groups, assigning permissions etc. They didn't have clue of writing cron jobs or scripts or for that matter configuring scheduler.

We requested other set of three candidates to be interviewed whose experience ranged from 2 to 6 years. Same result. We had hoped that at least the 6 years experienced candidate would perhaps meet our expectations. Alas! None of them were able to meet our basic expectations of providing support role. Yes, you guessed right. We shook hands and left their premises.

I have also been interviewing candidates for several years now. I must admit that few years ago, most of the candidates knew at least 30-40% on the technology they worked or about their domain. Off late, it has been very difficult to get quality candidates. I wonder why there has been so much of resistance to improve, to learn new technologies or for that matter, excel in the domain that one is in. As Robin Sharma says, people often confuse activity with productivity. It is fair when candidates ask for better pay when they have expertise and when they deserve it; however, not having necessary skills to get ahead in the career is something which I have been noting very frequently amongst the candidates. I don't intend to sound philosophical here; however, have few suggestions to few who have high levels of resistance for changing or learning new -

• Have a weekly objective plan before the week begins. Ensure to have meaningful goals
• Review the milestones of previous week and take necessary actions
• Ensure to align the weekly objectives to bigger plan regularly
• Stop procrastination
• Keep yourself appraised of the important happenings in your technology/domain
• Most importantly, get into the habit of developing new solutions/integrations or even tinkering the systems. I think that many of naysayers are in the habit of not taking enough risks.
• Walk extra miles to learn something new or deliver assignments with utmost quality regularly
• Challenge yourself regularly
• Download new tools/solutions and explore the trends

I have a new acronym to measure its success - ROICI (Rate of Overcoming Inertia of Continuous Improvement). I hope to do a bit to help improve the quality of the candidates soon since I think that these issues may be faced constantly by other organizations too.

I have one question for people who have high ROICI - Are your excuses more important than your goals/dreams?