Re: [GD-General] Assessing candidates when you don't have the skills

[Brett B. \(Research\) <res...@ga...>]

Jon,
The general answer is you hire consultant/professional to "work" for you and 
help screen the applicants. Here in Malaysia it's easy; for your specific 
problem, we would go to the Chinese embassy and get their list of approved 
translators. Then, we would interview a few of those with the purpose of 
selecting someone who can help us recruit: develop ad, look through resumes, 
come to the interview etc. So if your priority is to translate the ood or 
feeling rather than the acutal text, you want a consultant who is up on 
pop-culture and can evaluate the candidate's ability to come up with the 
correct slang of the day, whereas if you need accuracy in the meaning, that 
is a different skill.

Finally, we have found students near graduation, or looking for internships, 
to be invaluable in this regard. We interned the 21 year old son of the 
Mexican ambassdor to help us with a Spanish translation and he was able to 
do an awesome job, he had a great time, and went on to graduate an work in 
the game industry in Austin as a programmer after graduation.

The real key though is always to have somebody on your side of the table who 
you pay to represent your interests, just like hiring a lawyer, accountant, 
etc.

Cheers,
Brett


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Watte" <hp...@mi...>
To: <gam...@li...>
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 12:16 PM
Subject: [GD-General] Assessing candidates when you don't have the skills


>I believe firmly in only hiring real quality talent. This doesn't mean a
> team of divas; teamwork is also a quality, as is the ability to deliver
> working code even though you may not be the best at inventing same code.
> This means that hiring at our company is a process of many steps (resume
> screen; written test; phone screen; second phone screen; one big or two
> sizable on-site interviews, ...)
>
> However, this all assumes that we know how to judge the quality of those
> we screen. What if you're looking for a totally different kind of skill,
> so you don't know how to screen for that? How do you ensure solid
> quality within that field? Here is a thought experiment:
>
> Say, for example, that I wanted to hire someone to translate my product
> to Chinese. The product is fairly technical, and it's already generally
> i18n aware, so this has more to do with proper use of the Chinese
> language than anything technical. Unforunately, for this example, I
> don't know Chinese, nor does anyone else at the company. So... how would
> we screen candidates to find the top quality talent, who knows how to
> efficiently translate English UI, documentation and verbiage into
> appropriate Chinese customs, with particular attention to high polish?
>
> Ideally, you'd know someone who's already good -- but in this case, I
> don't. Or you'd go for someone that someone you trust recommends highly
> -- but in this case, I'm an early adopter; none of my retrograde
> stick-in-the-mud friends have done this yet. How do you seed the web of
> trust?
>
> I would loathe going with agencies, because for the agencies we've used,
> almost all the candidates have been barely literate, and they've been
> still billed as "the best we have." (There have been exceptions, of
> course) Agencies seem to run a cursory keyword match, maybe check a
> reference, and then throw what they have at you, hoping something sticks
> so they can collect their commission. There might be an agent or two who
> actually spend the time to develop quality candidates and only place
> them at properly aligned companies -- if so, I'd like to hear about
> those, too :-)
>
> For the problem at hand: Maybe you can hear from a friend of a friend
> about some agency that specializes in Chinese translators, and is
> supposed to have good candidate selection and high standards, and you
> can go from there. That seems kind-of tentative, though.
>
> So... any ideas?
>
> Cheers,
>
>          / h+
>
>
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