Hiring for Your Team, One Day Workshop in Sweden

Posted on May 13, 2013 by johanna

I will be at Let’s Test the week of May 20. I am offering a version of my new hiring workshop, Hiring For Your Team: Culture Trumps (Technical) Skills. If you will be at Let’s Test and you have not yet decided which tutorial to take, I invite you to take mine.

I just finished it and sent it off to Henrik for copying. It’s updated for Hiring Geeks That Fit. We will be practicing all the ways you can integrate cultural fit into the job analysis, the job description, and especially the interviewing and reference checks.

If you are thinking about hiring, and you’ll be in Sweden, please join us. You have nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.

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A Novel Idea: Hire the Unemployed

Posted on May 3, 2013 by johanna

Did you read The Jobless Trap? In it, Paul Krugman asserts we are creating an underclass of long-term unemployed. This is what really stood out for me:

This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.

Do you know why this happens? For several reasons:

  • In this, a buyer’s market, hiring managers and internal recruiters are looking for the “best” candidate. They are shopping around.
  • Hiring managers (still) create laundry list job descriptions full of technical skills they might need. They overlook or don’t describe the activities and deliverables they do need and don’t describe the essential cultural fit necessary for the job.
  • Agism is rampant, especially in our industry.

There’s more, but I’ll stop there.

Hiring managers: stop looking for the “best”, shiniest penny in your list of candidates. Stop trying to hire passive candidates. Give those unemployed people a chance. Sure, negotiate with them regarding starting salary—they are probably thrilled to negotiate.

We don’t need to create a permanent underclass in this country, especially not in high tech. (And don’t think it’s not happening in high tech. It is. I have friends and colleagues who have been out of work for more than a year. Their “problem?” Their age. It’s a damn shame.)

Hiring managers and internal recruiters: you know that these people have the maturity to provide significant value. Learning a new language or a new tool? Come on. The more experience people have, the easier this is. You might even hire people on a three-month trial basis, dependent on their ability to learn and deliver results.

So, hire the unemployed. They got unlucky a few years ago. You can turn this around for them.

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Personal Kanban for Your Job Hunt

Posted on April 30, 2013 by johanna

One of the problems with a job hunt is that it’s a big and complex project. You need to decide what to do and when. Who do you interview with? Is it time to iterate on your resume? Do you have enough references? Are you networking “right”? Add to that problem is that your emotional well-being is affected with your search—well, it’s a recipe for low self esteem, emotional shaking, rattling, and rolling.

A job search/job hunt is tough. One way to manage this complex project is to use a project management approach that fits the problem. The best way I know is to use personal kanban. Personal kanban allows you to take everything out of your head, get it down on stickies so you have the transparency, and then see it move across the board to see it get to done. You have a way to limit the work in progress, and a way to corral those call-backs with the PEN.

Personal Kanban in a Notebook

Initial Blank Personal Kanban in a Notebook

As you can see in this image, it’s a simple system to start. Here, I’ve used a notebook, drawn a few lines, and voila! I have a personal kanban. No muss, no fuss. Yes, it’s great if you can use a wall or a refrigerator or a flip chart because those are larger surfaces. But, if you can only manage a notebook, you can still use a personal kanban.

One of my Manage Your Job Search readers has even used a file folder. He unfolded it, and drew the lines and is using small stickies. My eyes are not good enough anymore for that, but his are.

Now, when you start adding your todos, you add stickies in the Ready column on the left. (I explain how to do this in the book.) As you work on them, you move them to the In Progress column. When you complete them, you move them to Done.

If you have call-backs, you move them to the PEN, where you corral them. I suggest you create a WIP (Work In Progress) limit for the PEN. Otherwise, you can imagine that you have all these potential call-backs (job leads), when the reality is different.

In Manage Your Job Search, I recommend you plan and execute your job search project in one-week iterations so you can retrospect every week. If you reflect that often, you have a chance to change what you are doing. You can iterate on your resume. You can decide if your activity on LinkedIn is adequate or not. You can rethink your networking online or in-person. You have options.

Personal kanban might not help you get a job faster. It will help you organize a job and provide you the transparency to see where you are with your job search. That’s the first step.

Posted in Agile Job Search | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Book Review: Networking is Dead

Posted on April 21, 2013 by johanna

We all know that we need to network to find people to hire or to get a new job. But too often, our networking is random. That’s why you should read Networking Is Dead: Making Connections That Matter.

Wilson and Mohl make the case that you should network with purpose. It’s not the networking is dead, per se. It’s that you want to think about how you network. You want to make “connections that matter.”

I don’t disagree with them. But it’s difficult to know when someone will matter, if you are a hiring manager or a consultant. But, then they go on to say how you cultivate your network. Now, we’re talking!

I liked a number of the ideas: that your network has Takers, Givers, and Exchangers. Takers always take, take, take, never giving back. Givers are very generous, providing feedback, becoming clients, providing leads or information. Exchangers provide assistance without keeping score.

The book goes on to discuss the five levels of exchange:

  1. Social exchange
  2. Information exchange
  3. Knowledge-Wisdom exchange
  4. Connection exchange
  5. Opportunity exchange

The higher up the levels you work, the more valuable you are to the people on your network. You want to think about how you connect and what you exchange with the people on your network.

Networking as “spray-and-pray” for business cards is dead, and should be dead. That’s never worked. Being an open networker on LinkedIn? Well, it’s fine if you want to collect people. I collect people, but even I want to know why you want to link with me.

Stupid networking is dead. Be a smart networker. Use this book and you can be.

 

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The Company Doesn’t Love You

Posted on April 15, 2013 by johanna

I’m rearchitecting Manage Your Job Search (again). One of the things I’m doing is working on the introduction, explaining to people why they need to consider agile and lean as a system in which to work on their job hunt/job search project. I’m selling agile and lean to people.

The reason you want to consider agile and lean is that your job search project is complex. You want to use a strategy for that project that fits that project. And, there is a meta-reason also. You always want to move your career forward. Why? You need to plan your career. You are in charge of your career. Only you. Your manager might help. But, your company does not love you.

Let me repeat that. Your company does not love you. Only the people in your life love you.

That means that you are responsible for creating your career. You need to consider what will move your career forward, day in, day out, year in year out. You are responsible for thinking about “How do I learn something this year? How do I make this year a year of learning, not just another year of experience that looks like last year’s of experience?”

This is your lifelong quest.

Yes, it is a lifelong quest, unless you want to die of boredom. Unless you want to have merely an okay career. Have you ever seen Larry Smith’s Ted talk, Why you will fail to have a great career?

Careers are not linear. You will learn something technical here, some interpersonal skills there. You will increase your domain expertise, your functional skills at different rates. You will decide how to change your career.

And, ‘you’ is the operative word. You will decide how to change your career. Maybe you don’t buy that agile or lean is changing everything. Okay. Or that the cloud or that touch screens or that embedded computers and software have changed everything. All I know is that I look back at how I live now and just five years ago and everything has changed. I’m happy about many of those changes.

And, that means if you decide to stay at one company because of the security—if you can stay these days—you need to decide how to invest in your career. And, if you don’t stay at one company, you still need to decide how to invest in your career. Regardless of your career choices, you have to make your investment choices.

Long ago, I posted Jobs and Careers, an attempt to help people think about ways they might want to consider what to learn at different stages of their career. You might find that post helpful. Andy Lester and I are writing a column over at the Pragmatic Bookshelf every month to discuss issues like this. We just collaborated on our first column this past weekend.

As I work on editing Manage Your Job Search, I’ll be thinking about how to reach the people who don’t know about agile and lean and what I can tell them about why they should learn about agile and lean. Why it’s worth their time to learn yet another system of organizing work. (Because it makes the work transparent and they can accomplish chunks of work and then change their mind about what’s important next.)

In the meantime, start to work on creating your career. No matter where you are or how old you are. Because even when you retire from your first “real” career at 65, your career is not over. You still have the rest of your life to live. You want to be a vibrant, interesting, full-of-life human, right? That means you still have to learn. The skills you learn now to learn are the same skills you can apply then.

And, because the company doesn’t love you. You have to love yourself enough to invest in your career.

Posted in career | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

What Are Your Favorite Interview Questions?

Posted on March 26, 2013 by johanna

I have an article coming out soon in the next Prag Magazine about some questions to never ask in an interview. I thought I’d let you know so you could warm up your fingers to quick click on the magazine. And, then I saw this article, 14 Revealing Interview Questions.

Some of the questions are good. Some? Not so much. I like this one because it asks a behavior-description question that will provide you information about performance and cultural fit:

6. Tell me about a project or accomplishment that you consider to be the most significant in your career.

I like this part of this one. In the article, it has a whole preamble I would not use. Again, this tells you a lot about the culture of the interviewer because it asks about better, faster, smarter, etc.:

Tell me about a recent project or problem that you made better, faster, smarter, more efficient, or less expensive.

I might use this one on a second-round interview, after a candidate knows something about the job. Or, with a manager candidate, after I’ve explained the position. Otherwise, how the heck would a candidate know?:

11. Discuss a specific accomplishment you’ve achieved in a previous position that indicates you will thrive in this position.

I like this one. This questions asks about adaptability and how people recover from setbacks. Have you ever had a setback at work or in a project? I have! I have had many Murphy Law projects… I’ve been turned down for promotions. But that didn’t mean I didn’t ask for them. This is a great question for that time in your career:

14. Tell us about a time when things didn’t go the way you wanted– like a promotion you wanted and didn’t get, or a project that didn’t turn out how you had hoped.

As for the other questions? I would never ask about a superpower or a spirit animal. Come on. I’m supposed to keep a straight face and answer that question? Okay, you folks know me, and if I burst out laughing at that question, you know that I would not be a good cultural fit for that organization!

The problem with many of the other questions is that they are irrelevant, or they don’t provide enough information about how the candidate will perform in your context. Sure, some of the questions try to get at that information. The ones that try to predict the future? They are trying to elicit that information. But they are hypothetical questions, not based on performance.

When you interview people, you want to understand their actual performance, not their supposed capabilities. That’s the value of the interview. Don’t waste the interview on hypotheticals and predictions, not when you can learn about actuals.

Do you have favorite interview questions? Want me to comment on them? Add them in the comments and I will comment on them. If you like, I will suggest improvements.

Some people use favorite interview questions that are irrelevant because they hate hiring. If you want to enjoy hiring and interviewing, buy my book, Hiring Geeks That Fit.

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What Scrum Master Are You Hiring Posted

Posted on March 12, 2013 by johanna

I have another article posted on InfoQ: What Scrum Master Are You Hiring? I’ve noticed that many organizations are calling certain positions Scrum Masters, and they might be Scrum Masters, but to me, they are anything but. You need to do a job analysis first, and name the position second. This is all about cultural fit.

Go read the article and comment over there. I await your comments!

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Article Posted in PragProg Magazine

Posted on March 12, 2013 by johanna

Finding the Geek Who Fits: Five Tips for Hiring as an Agile Team is up in this month’s PragPub magazine. My colleague, Andy Lester, has an article, Being the Geek Who Fits: Don’t Forget That You’re Interviewing Them, Too.

You could read the entire magazine… It’s quite good. I hope you enjoy it.

You can comment over there. If you like, comment here, too.

 

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Gather Data About Your Hiring: Recruiting Strategies

Posted on March 4, 2013 by johanna

If you have not gathered data about your hiring activities, consider doing so. I find it useful to see how well I’m doing. This is especially important if you can’t find people and you want to know why.

For data about recruiting and selection, look at your different recruiting strategies, and for each strategy, record:

  1. Number of resumes you received from this strategy
  2. How many of those people you phone-screened
  3. How many of those resulted in in-person interviews
  4. Number of hires

Now, you can start to see which of your recruiting strategies worked well. You may still need more data: more junior or more senior candidates to see if a particular strategy worked better for different kinds of candidates.

In Hiring Geeks That Fit, I suggest you track data in a spreadsheet like this:

Recruiting_Strategy_SuccessNow you can start comparing strategies for open positions. Remember, not all openings are going to be the same. If you primarily use Twitter for one position, and personal networking for another position, you are going to receive different number of resumes for the positions. Well, I suspect you are. You might even want to track the start and end dates for the time the job is open. It depends on what you want to learn from your data.

Data gathering is all about what you want to learn. If you think you will be hiring more people in a certain category of experience, gather data about that category. I’m not talking about tools and technology here, I’m thinking more about age. I was quite surprised when I realized that 20-somethings were looking on Craigslist for jobs, but they are. More and more hiring managers are telling me that they are finding technical people there. So, go there.

If you discover a particular hashtag or a combination of hashtags on Twitter is working for you for a particular level of experience—and this is not counting cultural fit—then note it in your spreadsheet.

Your recruiting strategies will only bring in resumes. They won’t get you cultural fit. You still have to read the resumes. You still have to write ads that bring the right people in. But if you look in the right places, you have a much better chance. And, you have a shot of reducing your cost to hire and your time to hire.

Posted in hiring strategy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Can’t Find People? Root Cause Why

Posted on February 26, 2013 by johanna

There’s a great article that George Dinwiddie pointed me to, If There’s a Gap, Blame It on the Employer. It’s a nice companion piece to John Sumser’s entire series, Skills Gap: The Series.

Here’s what this means for people in technology:

  1. Hire based on how well people fit into your team. Yes, this is cultural fit, not technical fit.
  2. Be ready to train people. This means you need to assess if people are able to transition to agile, if you are, and transition them. Agile is a mindset, not a capability.
  3. You must differentiate among essential qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills, as well as the technical skills, and the merely desirable ones.
  4. Don’t be cheap with salaries. Well, you can be. But the great people will go somewhere else, because they have options.
  5. Find other sources of people. You can become creative about looking for people. I have more than 20 suggestions for sourcing people in Hiring Geeks That Fit. You’re not going to use all of them, but I guarantee that if you use more than two of them, you can reduce your hiring time and hire more and better people.

John has another post, More on Attraction vs Promotion, that talks the difference between people who want to come work for you and people who are stuck working for you.

If you need other ideas about what to do when you can’t find people, Hiring Geeks That Fit has a chapter on how to reorganize your projects when it’s taking you a long time to find people. See, I help you, coming and going!

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