Teambuilding Secrets

Damn all this prosperity! Overly optimistic fools drive up the cost of office space, you need to book a table even at bad restaurants, and even the dark blue taxis are hard to catch. For any business owner in Shanghai right now, however, the biggest shortage seems to be staff.

To prepare for the next stage of our launch, we have just updated our org chart here at RightSite, and thought we would share it with you.

We have not yet ramped up our hiring here at RightSite.Asia, but with the website set to be in beta testing during July, we will be doing some hiring during June.

While I have worked at organisations where folks liked to believe that two weeks was sufficient time to recruit a senior manager, even in a normal market we need to allow at least two months from the start of recruitment to actually having the person in place. And while I am lucky enough to have former staff and friends with useful skills scattered around Shanghai, putting our team together will not be easy.

During the month of June we expect to start searching for

• An international marketing manager
• A local market marketing manager
• And most importantly, a sales manager

And those are just the managers. We will also need junior level staff in each department to help launch the site. Yeah, yeah, I know the sales department is too small. But we will build that up slowly.

Not that I want to build the sales team slowly. Not that I want to build any part of the team slowly really. But this is a plan that I want to reflect the reality of building a company. And the facts of building a company in Shanghai in 2008 means that it will take nine to twelve months to build the sales team into an effective unit.

So in the initial stage, our marketing and customer service teams, along with the big boss, will all be pitching in on sales.

So now we need to get an office (hard to recruit people from your living room), get our labour contracts and job descriptions spiffed up, and then start placing those job ads.

Oh, and the big recruitment secret? Plan ahead, grit your teeth, and Just keep at it until you get the team you can work with.