Reviewing Resumes for an Agile Team: Summary

I hope that when you read these posts, you came to the same conclusion I did. It's almost impossible to detect from a resume whether or not a candidate is accustomed to an agile project, or could work on an agile project successfully. Keywords, especially, are useless when it comes to reviewing resumes. So what's a recruiter or hiring manager to do? Look at domain expertise, glean what you can about the kinds of team the candidate has worked on, and develop a phone screen or an audition that you can use before the interview.

Phone screens don't have to take a lot of time. Sure they're inconvenient. One technique I saw at SD last week was the essay as a pre-interview assessment. Sure you'll still have to read the essays, but fewer candidates will write them, so you'll have fewer people to screen.Phone screens and essays are time consuming and possibly inconvenient. But a bad hire is more than inconvenient–it's much expensive than any time you spend phone-screening or reading resumes.

The other posts in this series:

1 thought on “Reviewing Resumes for an Agile Team: Summary”

  1. How are phone screens time consuming and inconvenient? I can understand essays being time comsuming because you have to read all of them to be able to screen out candidates. Who would want to read all of those essays, plus resumes? Many of my professors complain about reading too much.

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