Now, let’s think about this for a minute. A senior manager with 20 years of experience who felt the need to lie about a bachelor’s degree?  Why does anyone care about a degree from 20 years ago?

If you were to hire me today, would you care about my bachelor’s degree from over 30 years ago? How about my master’s degree from more than 25 years ago? Do you care about those degrees? I would hope not. Do those degrees add to my credibility?

If you have graduated within the past 10 years, a technical bachelor’s degree has some technical meaning.  But what matters most if you graduated more than 10 years ago? Experience. Thinking ability. The ability to take that long-ago learning and adapt it to your current situation.

Experience trumps schooling every time. On the job learning, how you work in teams, your ability to think, the culture(s) in which you are successful, how you solve problems–all those things trump formal education. I was a pretty good student. I was and am a much better on-the-job learner. Why? Because on-the-job is real. Even simulations in workshops are more real than what I did in school. I could tell. (Do not try to tell me that Towers of Hanoi are anything like a real problem. Do not.)

I am adaptable to a number of cultures, to a number of different kinds of organizations. I can think, so I can solve problems. I bet you can, too. That is what organizations need. Does a BS in Computer Science guarantee that? No.

Yes, I have a BS in Computer Science, back from the early days of Computer Science degrees. I am quite proud of that degree. I did well in those courses. It was the non-major courses I had trouble with I have a Masters in Systems Engineering, which was not requirements gathering, but how to engineer a system. I learned a lot in my courses, which were advanced for their time.

But, the world has changed since I went to school. I have learned a ton from working. I have learned from my clients, as they have learned from me.

The problem with requiring a Bachelor’s degree, especially in a technical area, is that the Bachelor’s degree is shorthand for a hiring manager’s requirement of:

“the ability to think, to be adaptable, to solve problems”

Well, why not say that? Don’t ask for “a BS in CS or equivalent” if you don’t need it. Ask for what you want.

In a senior management position, you need experience with the ups and downs of reacting to the what happens when your original market moves. You need to know how to move an organization’s culture. You need to manage the project portfolio, so you can select which projects to do and which projects not to do. I doubt that you need a BS in Computer Science.

“If you don’t give me good work to do, you’ll be down a developer,” I warned him. “I’ll be looking for another job.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me,” he said, shocked.

“Sure I would. Why wouldn’t I? I’m not married to this guy. We are just dating,” I replied.

I didn’t marry that other guy. I married Mark, who was—and still is—local. I did look for a new job, because I wasn’t working on the interesting work. I was working on the old boring maintenance stuff, not the new exciting work.

You see hiring managers making decisions like this all the time. Do they try to hold testers in test jobs, especially now that agile testers have more automation capability and could become developers more easily? Or do they try to keep technical support staff in tech support when they could move into development—or the other way around?

It’s a mind reading problem. If you are a hiring manager, don’t assume you can read the mind of a candidate. You can ask behavior-description questions. You can ask elimination questions. You can even ask for a commitment time, “I need you to commit to this position for x months.” But, if you as a company can’t commit to a position for that length of time, it’s amoral to ask that of a candidate.

Especially when you hire from within, take the time to perform a job analysis on the open position. Do write a job description. Develop your behavior-description questions. Know what your elimination factors are. You might surprise yourself. What eliminates one candidate from the position might not be what you are worried about at all.

My old boss? He did replace me, but as he said, the humor quotient decreased in the department. And, so did the maintenance. The customers noticed and were unhappy. They had to hire a couple of people to replace me. I had taken years of solution-space domain expertise with me. It’s difficult to replace that with one person. With two people, they could pair and learn from each other.

Ask, don’t assume, you know what’s going on in a candidate’s mind. It’s too expensive to assume you know what the other person thinks. Just because you work with that person daily does not mean you have clairvoyance. Let’s leave the mind-reading to the professionals, ok?

“Can anyone older than 35 or 40 really know anything?” was his concern.

I sat there, a little nonplussed. “How old do you think I am?” I paused. “No, don’t answer that. Just remember that age is not the issue. You want people who know how to learn and work well with you. You want people who don’t have the same year of experience year after year after year.”

Those of you who have read Age and Agile are Orthogonal know what I think about age and agile. It’s not how old you are. It’s about how well you think. It’s about what you have learned and applied during your career.

In my recent post about Why an Agile Project Manager is Not a Scrum Master, I talked about the ongoing learning I expect a project manager to have. Of course, not all project managers have that. But the project managers who don’t continue to learn have the same year of experiences every year, year after year, do. (The goal of the PMI certification PDUs is that the PMP continue to learn, year after year.)

So, remember, it’s not about how old a candidate is. It’s about how well they they think, and how they have applied what they have learned.

And, you young turk hiring managers: yes, people that old might just know something. And, they might have more maturity than you give them credit for. And, they might not want your job. You can’t tell what a candidate’s value is until you read the resume. So, stop playing age discrimination before the older candidate even gets in the damn door and give them a shot.

Sheesh. Repeat after me. It’s not about how old the candidate is. It’s the value the candidate brings, regardless of the candidate’s age. Young people might not be able to learn anything, either. Sheesh.

I attempted (ahem) to give an example of how managers feel when they feel compelled to ask people to multitask. I said, “like in the Star Trek movie, where Luke and Leia are stuck in the trash compactor and the walls are closing in on them…”

There was a ripple in the audience, and I briefly wondered what it was, but no one said anything. A day later, one of the people who was in the audience came up to me and explained he was a blade-of-grass level person. “I knew you meant Star Wars, and you had gotten confused, but everyone else was nodding their heads (a typical 50,000 foot person reaction), so I didn’t say anything.”

Oh, that is so typical of us big-picture people. We say one thing (Star Trek), mean something else (Star Wars), it’s close enough (a science fiction movie). At least I then described the specific situation, so everyone caught up. Except, I’d left the blades-of-grass people still confused. They were still stuck on Star Trek vs. Star Wars, and correctly so.

On a real project team, one of those people would have said, “JR, do you mean Star Wars?” I would have said, “Oh, yes, thank you.” We would have gone on from there. Disaster averted. But the people in my talk were polite. (WHY??? They didn’t know me. Grumble. I have to get out more.)

This is why you need personality diversity, especially on complex projects. Imagine if you had only 50,000 foot people on a complex project. We would all be nodding our heads, imagining different science fiction movies. We need blades of grass people to ground us in reality, to say, “Do you mean ____?” I can sometimes play that role on projects, but it’s against my preferences, so I tire easily. The blades of grass people can play the 50,000 foot people too, and it’s against their preference, so they tire easily.

Consider personality type, if you can, as part of your hiring strategy. Don’t discriminate against or for, but if you can take advantage of another personality type in your hiring, do so. You won’t be sorry. And me, I have to practice my examples more!

That was this weekend. Another year, another location, it would have been a different technology. The problem is if you can’t find the candidates, it’s not the technology, it’s you. You have other options. You need to realize you have other options. (Sorry for my blaming way of writing.)

Here the options I can see, and I bet you can see more once I show you these:

1. Train everyone in the group in this technology. Now you have a surfeit of people in this technology. Once everyone is trained, everyone knows how to administer this technology, and maybe it’s not hard to use it.
2. Transition to a new technology. If you can’t find an administrator, maybe this technology’s days are over. Find a new technology, and transition everyone to a new technology. Are people using it because it’s a good technology or are people using it because it’s the path of least resistance?
3. Take your most experienced person in the group and train that person in the technology. Now, ask this person if the technology is worth that person’s time. Do they know of alternatives?
4. Hire a new person and train the person in the technology. Ask the person if the technology is worth that person’s time. Do they know of alternatives?

If you can’t find people, you have to change how you work. You need to consider other options. It’s that simple. (Yes, there’s a chapter in my Hiring book about this.) Easy to say, not always easy to do.

Look, this management stuff is not easy. That’s why you get paid the oh-so-big bucks. (Ok, get up off the floor once you are done laughing.) But these are the management problems you need to solve. You can probably see other potential solutions that I can’t see that are much better than the ones I suggested. But you can’t say, “Oh, let’s just hire a junior person and turn that person into a SharePoint developer.” You can say that, but that’s only one option, and you need more options before you really understand the problem.

That’s why it’s so important to understand your hiring strategy before you start with a job description. Spend five minutes on your hiring strategy and save yourself hours on review resumes. And, you’ll know how to find those candidates.

First, there’s the well-meaning manager who wants a current tester to be “motivated” to do manual testing. “How do I motivate him to do manual testing?” was the question. I asked, “What’s that person doing now?” “Automated testing.” “Why would you have the person do manual testing??? If you have someone who is more capable, why would you ask that person to do less than their capabilities?” “Because the other people aren’t as capable and  I want everyone to feel like part of a team.”

Asking someone to do less than they can is not the way you make a team. The way you make a team is by having people work together, committing to each other. If you are not sure of the work you need done, you do a hiring strategy and a job analysis.

Next, there’s the director who marched an automation expert to HR to fire the expert because he wouldn’t do manual testing. Now, I have no idea if this guy was warned or if there were any other issues, but my goodness, test automation engineers are few and far between, and he seems like a reasonable enough guy. Firing someone because you are a bad manager is more bad management. Firing a rare person is the height of stupidity.

And then there is the organization who thinks that they must be the best organization in the world to work for, especially in this economy. They specialize in taking young idealistic people, putting them to work in entry level jobs, and making them turn off their brains for a year. If they are lucky, they get to do something useful the second year. In the meantime, all these bright people can do is see the waste. And look for a new job. And, because they have a year of experience at a known organization, they will get a new job. The organization’s HR policies do not allow these bright young people to look for a job inside the organization until they have been there for a full year. By that time, these people are so dead inside, who can wait to look for a new job? They’ve had their fill of bringing self-important know-it-alls coffee and lunch and setting up meetings, and printing (yes, printing) email.

All of these situations could be avoided by first defining a job strategy and then defining a job analysis. If you over-hire for a job, you will hire someone overqualified for a job. Although, I honestly do not understand how you can have a software product and not need test automation people.

If you over-hire, do not expect to have happy people. Do not think you can do team building by having people work below their capabilities. But you have a very interesting option: building a community of practice.

If you have one “overqualified” person, why not use that person to help bring other people’s capabilities up? Is that reasonable? I don’t know. Can you use those capabilities in your context? In the case of the software organizations, I know that they need test automation. I’m perplexed about why they would move from automation to manual scripted testing. These are the same organizations complaining about shortened schedules, insufficient people, technical debt, and how it’s so hard to get anything done. Why would you cripple a group by removing a tool (test automation) from the toolbox? Why would you remove a person with more capability? There’s gotta be more to this story.

Managers, look at yourselves. Do you think you have “overqualified” people? Are you tempted to dumb them down? Consider your other alternatives. You can pair a person with more capabilities with a person who wants to learn. You can create a formal community of practice. You can invite people to learn from each other informally. And that’s just three options.

These stories are all true. I wish I had the imagination to make them up. But not in my wildest dreams could I imagine managers thinking this way. Managers, “overqualified” employees are not a threat to you. Great people reflect well on you. They make it possible for you to get more work done. Nurture them. (Ok, if they are jerks, give them feedback, but we all need help on our interpersonal skills. We are technical people.)

I don’t recommend hiring people who are overqualified. But if you find yourself in a position where you have people who appear to be more than you need, find a way to use them for the betterment of the entire team. Whatever you do, do not ask them to dumb themselves down, to give up their capabilities. They will leave. And, they will tell people why. Do you want to be known as the organization or the manager who couldn’t handle a smart employee?

If an organization can commit to a candidate for two years, it might be okay to ask a candidate to commit to a job for two years. But I don’t know of any organization that commits to anyone for any length of time, never mind two years. Why would a hiring manager ask a candidate to commit when an organization can’t?

It’s still a hiring manager’s market, but not for long.

I realize you’re concerned about people leaving, especially if you think they are overqualified. So, acknowledge that fear. And consider what you can do about it. Here are some options. Say, “You look like you might be overqualified for this position. Do you really want this position?” Wait for the answer. “Why?” Now, you can have a conversation about why.

1. Sometimes people just don’t want to be managers anymore. I know a bunch of previous development managers and writer managers now developers and writers who didn’t want to be managers anymore. It’s that simple.
2. Sometimes people can’t find a more senior role in their previous are of domain space expertise. When the telecom area imploded, there were a ton of experts looking for jobs who didn’t change domains. They took successively less-expert roles in telecom. They were overqualified for telecom.
3. Sometimes people have an overinflated view of what they can do. You’ll learn whether or not that is the case when they start working for you. In this case, you may be happy you did not insist on a two-year commitment!

A two-year commitment is too much like indentured servantship. It’s unnecessary. To me, it’s wrong. If you really want someone to commit to a person, make it an attractive job, one where the job grows and a candidate can grow with the job. An employee will commit to a job where there is real growth.

But don’t ask someone to commit to a job where there is no sign of growth for some random time period, especially because you are concerned your organization may not let you hire a replacement. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are bad reasons to ask a candidate for a commitment.

In any case, I hadn’t stopped thinking about hiring issues, I just momentarily stopped writing about them. So, here are the musings from my hiring notes for the month of November:

• Some hiring managers are still stuck on alphabet soup for potential candidates. Remember that technical people tend to learn new technologies quickly. Don’t make technical experience the cornerstone of your hiring filters. Perform a job analysis before you decide on which technical skills are really filters.
• Think about your auditions. I met a number of hiring managers who use pairing in an audition, but don’t pair on projects. Or, they think that testers and developers need the same audition.
• If you are a hiring manager, don’t decide on a candidate for the team; help the team decide with you, or for you.

I thought I had more notes, but my notes are not arranged by category; they are in chronological order. As I use them, I’m sure I’ll think of more issues.

Here’s how I spend time. First the preparation time, maybe a couple of hours

• Define the hiring strategy
• Analyze the job
• Write the job description
• Write the job ad; send it off to get it posted on the company’s site
• Let my personal network know

Now, the sourcing time, which varies depending on my activities:

• Explain to HR what I’m looking for. Since I’ve done a job analysis already, I can explain it clearly, and not spend too much time with HR.
• Job fairs, other sourcing activities
• Filter resumes, timeboxed to an hour each day. (For those of you claim you don’t have an hour, rethink what you are doing. Hiring is the most important role you have, aside from managing the project portfolio.)
• Develop the phone screen questions

Interviewing: up to 3 hours per candidate

• Phone screen each candidate who makes it to the “yes” pile. Am I happy with my results? If so, continue. If not, rethink my job analysis.
• Organize the interview matrix and interview the candidate
• Conduct follow-up meeting to evaluate the candidate

Assuming I want to go forward with an offer, spend about 2 hours, one on checking references and one on extending an offer.

If you start with interviewing, you haven’t spent enough preparing yourself or your team. Your hiring cost will be sky-high and you won’t get the people you really want. Spend a little time on a job analysis, and the rest of your work will fall into place.

When there are tons of candidates, your prep work is even more important. Spend a little time at the beginning and you’ll find you won’t waste much time.

For those of you who sent me private email, I will try to email you to let you know over the next week.