A behavioral audition is one where youw ant to see some specific candidate behaviors. Management auditions typically fall into this category. But especially if you're hiring for an agile team, you might want to see how a candidate exhibits behaviors, such as coaching, feedback, how the person participates in a standup meeting or in a retrospective.

If you want to see some specific behaviors, first, return to your job analysis. What are those essential technical and non-technical skills? Can you make a behavioral audition around those skills?

You might want to see if the candidate will be a smooth addition to a team or a disruptive addition. In that case, you ask the candidate to do some work with one or more members of the team. You'll ask the candidate how that work went, and you'll need to debrief the members of your team (with open-ended questions) about what it was like to work with the candidate.

Try a focused conversation for the debrief:

1. What stood out for you?
2. Where were you challenged?
3. What insights do you have about this candidate?
4. What do you recommend we do with this candidate?

Behavioral auditions are the most difficult to design. In my experience, you can see the behaviors if you use a technical audition, you are likely to see the behaviors you want to see. But to know what you want to see, you've got to do a job analysis.

Labels: audition, job analysis

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 8:50 AM | link |

A management audition is similar to a technical audition, but because the functional skills are so different, and because senior technical people may also require some management capability, I see these as two different kinds of auditions.

As usual, your mileage may vary. Here are some possible management auditions:

• Facilitate a meeting
• Give a presentation
• Analyze some budget information. Don't forget to ask what they would do with that budget and why
• Organize a project portfolio
• Develop an audition for a manager. (ok, that's slightly evil :-)

If you have other good ideas, please comment away.

Labels: audition, interview

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 1:30 PM | link |

In his comment, John asked about auditions for a business analyst. The audition will vary, depending on the kind of projects you do. Here are some possibilities:

• For a more serial lifecycle, you could ask a BA to help elicit requirements. You'd listen to the way the candidate interviewed, if the candidate interrupted the speaker, if the candidate asked meta questions.
• For a more agile lifecycle, you could ask the candidate to make user stories from bullet lists of requirements.
• For any lifecycle, ask the candidate to explain his or her favorite way to express requirements. Then take a product and ask the candidate to write down the requirements for that product.

Make sure your audition matches your environment. I might not have described something useful for you, so adapt my suggestions.

Labels: audition, interview

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 10:48 AM | link |

If you're thinking about auditions, consider a "technical" audition for any of your open positions. A technical audition provides you a little insight into a candidate's functional skills.

If you're hiring a developer, ask the candidate to extend a design, or find a problem and design a solution. You could ask a tester to test a piece of a product, or a particular set of features.

A particularly good technical audition is one where you always ask the candidates (for a certain role) to perform the same kind of work. Ask each developer to write some kind of code, or ask a tester to test some specific product. (Don't vary the task between candidates.)

You can use these auditions for a phone screen or an in-person interview.

Consider technical auditions the minimum entry point for auditions. You'll learn a lot about a candidate with this audition.

Labels: audition

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 3:18 PM | link |

I'm planning to do a series on audition, and the first one is the idea that every candidate enjoys an audition of the hiring manager, team, and company. That's because every time you organize an interview, ask a question, or do anything at all, the candidate can watch you work. That's an audition.

Labels: audition, interview

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 11:43 AM | link |

In Laurent's Hiring and Testing post, he wondered why we spend so much time in the up-front stages of hiring. Why not use the probation period that seems to be the law in France, and is part of many companies' stated HR procedures?

A bunch of reasons: as managers, we need to give substantive and useful feedback during probation; many professional people are uncomfortable with the notion of being on probation, and you still have to invest the time and money on interviews and reference checks (although you might be able to spend a little less). I'll address each of these issues briefly.

1. How many of you are comfortable with giving substantive and useful feedback? I suspect that you haven't been trained on how to provide feedback, and if you haven't, it's dang hard. Esther and I have developed our Five Steps to Effective Feedback, see Collaboration and Teamwork for some of the content.
2. Probation means testing of a person's fitness for work, but too often we think of it as something we do after we've made a mistake.
3. It's hard to take an agile approach to hiring if firing is time-consuming and difficult. If firing is difficult, then you still have to define the job and interview carefully, audition, and check references. If you don't, you could be stuck with someone who's not working well for an extremely long time.

Probation is a good idea, and has only been pro forma for many companies. The necessary preconditions are the hiring manager's ability to give useful feedback and the ability to fire easily.

Labels: audition, feedback

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 4:08 PM | link |