Consultancy

Cross Cultural Recruitment Consultancy

Recruitment is a difficult process in any case – success rate can change from “hit-and-miss” to about 90%, depending on your process, and your definition of “success”.

However, things tend to change for the more difficult when you start recruiting across borders; more precisely, across cultures. The language barrier is one thing; the language you communicate is more often than not a foreign language for the other party. The true barrier, which is realized a bit later in the process is differences in culture. Your issues and requirements may not even be understood by the other side; while their worries may be complete non-issues for you. As such, you may end up spending most of your time discussing trivia while grave problems remain untouched.

As Safkan Yazılım, we are familiar with multiple cultures – we understand western cultures, as well as Turkish culture. We can help you bridge the culture gap, and recruit the right people whether you want them to relocate, or just work remotely.

Our services include the following:

Shaping your job listings to attract the right people in Turkey.
Evaluating profiles for quick short-listing.
Interviewing candidates in their native language, and in English and submit a detailed evaluation report.
Evaluate people in the software track in two ways: We can either set an hour-long technical interview, and get them to solve technical problems face-to-face; or send them an offline technical challenge. In both cases, we provide detailed reports about the problem solved, the process taken, the quality of the solution, and our overall technical assessment of the candidate.

As Safkan Yazılım, we will help you bridge the culture gap and find mutually beneficial candidates for recruitment.

“Culture” is everything you know, but you don’t know that you know. As such, this makes cross-cultural communication quite difficult.

While remote interviewing is difficult as it is, it is only friction, not the wall.

As Safkan Yazılım, we have been in many, many software projects in many companies. We know how things work here in Turkey – and also all the modes of failure. We know the strengths of Turkish software engineers and architects, and we also know their weaknesses. We also know the difficulties Turkish people go through when they work in other cultural environments.

So, to be blunt about it, we can not be fooled. We will give you the good news, and the bad news, so you can actually decide for yourself.

Analysis and Reporting

If you believe things are not going well enough, you are not efficient enough or things could be better in your company, Safkan Yazılım will start helping you by analyzing the current state of affairs.

Such an analysis effort is generally expected to be focused heavily on technology. However, software production is a human activity; as such only a holistic approach can reveal the mechanisms that generate sustain the status quo.

In addition to technologies, systems, and source code; team members, managers and business processes are also within the domain of this analysis.

The resulting report will contain our findings, deductions and recommendations for change in the desired direction.

Another name for this is “taking a snapshot of the situation”.

Every manager wants to get their business better and more efficient. However, unless the efforts are not applied with a holistic approach, the desired results are seldom reached.

Your reaction to our findings in the report will be “yeah, sure”. The real value in the report will lie in our deductions of how these findings generate the current results and our actionable recommendations for effecting change.

Management Consultancy

A consultant’s true job is “management assistance”. You may request management assistance for two reasons:

To support a new manager to get acclimated to their new role faster.
To provide new points of view and new ideas for a seasoned manager or just be another “pair of eyes” looking at the same problems.

In both cases, the consultant works attached to the manager in question. Safkan Yazılım will provide you true management consulting services in line with your level and intensity requirements.

In fact, management consultancy is the essence of consulting. The consultant imparts their knowledge and experince on the manager to help with the decision making process.

A consultant does not and should not perform any direct execution.

A consultant never does work known only to him/herself; their services can be terminated at any time wihout fear or hesitation.

Project Consultancy

Software projects are notoriously difficult. An important portion of projects get canceled. Those that are actually executed to completion end up being over budget, late, and with lower quality results than expected.

Safkan Yazılım will combine methods in the software literature and past experience to plan or re-plan your projects with you.

Safkan Yazılım will take part and provide support in both project planning and execution as per your request. They will also gain a deep technical understanding of the project by communicating with technical people and a deep business understanding of the project by communicating with business people. This provides a trusted and safe environment for all stakeholders and contributors.

Software is a difficult, slow, and expensive business. Yet the real expense arises from doing things repeatedly, and doing things over.

Safkan Yazılım will tell you the “bad news” at the earliest possible date by looking at the right pieces of information combined with insight.

A startup is a project; so is a corporate project. However, the planning methods and results are completely different. Safkan Yazılım can help you with both kinds of projects and everything in between.

Team and Organization Consulting

The evolution of a team into a jelled team is essentially an organic process. The preconditions for this organic development include getting people with the right abilities and skillsets together and these people having compatible personalities to be able to connect and cooperate.

Safkan Yazılım, will first support you in defining the required team size and organization in line with the requirements at hand.

Once the target team structure is defined, Safkan Yazılım will assist you in assessment of potential team members in technical, personality and cultural fit terms in the hiring process. The services provided includes evaluating résumés, holding or participating in interviews and submitting detailed reports about the candidates.

Building a team is not about defining boxes and then finding people that will fit in those boxes. Building a team is more akin to playing Tetris or building a masonry wall out of rocks. You decide on the size and shape of the wall you want, then you go out and find rocks to complete that shape.

Hiring the wrong person has a very high cost. On the other hand, perfect assessment is just impossible. The fact remains that selection and assessment is a difficult, yet necessary part of the job.

Training

Training is your investment in people. Investing in the right person at the right time is good for business, people’s careers, and their loyalty to the company.

In a good training program, the content should be suitable for the goals and purposes, at a level suitable to the students, and concise; the instructor should be well versed in the subject matter and have good communication and presentation skills; the students should have ability and motivation.

As Safkan Yazılım, we can provide you with the first two; and assist you with the third.

How many teachers, professors and instructors have you known in your lifetime? How many were actually good?

How many lessons, lectures, or sessions have you attended without getting bored? How many have you actually learned something from? How many provided you with information that actually proved useful?

Instructor: Yaşar Safkan

Dr. Yaşar Safkan graduated from Boğaziçi University in 1995 with a double major in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Physics. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. Following his graduation, he took various roles in the software industry; including but not limited to entrepreneurship, management, consulting and executive management. In the same time period, he taught physics and engineering courses at Boğaziçi University and Yeditepe University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of Özyeğin University. His research interests include software and software management.

You can find detailed information about Yaşar Safkan on his LinkedIn profile page.

The highlight of Yaşar Safkan’s academic career is probably the fact that he has taught roughly 20 different courses in 20 years. Teaching different courses in rapid succession is usually not preferred by academics due to being difficult and time consuming.

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