You’re interviewing someone for a position at your company. You remember working with that person years ago, and you were unimpressed. Maybe it was the jerk factor, maybe it was the way he didn’t quite finish work, or maybe it was her perfume. Whatever it was, you were not excited about the candidate then, and […]
Kristan Vingrys has a great post, A question I have found useful when interviewing candidates. His question: You are allocated a training budget, what is the first course, conference or workshop you would attend? This is an excellent question to see if people are keeping up with thinking about what they want to learn. I
In one of the comments, for When is a Scrum Master (or a PM) Not?, Craig Brown said Process, process, process. What about people? At the end of the day the process is just one of several enabers (alongside culture, technology and tools, etc.) Won’t an experienced and talented team just deliver regardless of the
In a recent workshop, one of the participants explained, “I like to ask personal questions to see if the candidate will fit in with the team socially.” Well, that’s an illegal discrimination. * in the US, but not in other places. (It’s illegal because if you reject a candidate based on their answer, you’re discriminating
Both David Maister, in Compensation Systems, and George Dinwiddie, in Agile Compensation, have useful comments about compensation systems. There’s something implicit in both pieces, that the criteria to move from position to position (as well as from one salary to another) have to be explicit. For years, I called this expertise criteria. You develop expertise
I just read Penelope Trunk’s Quit work for a while to have kids. Your career will be just fine. I hope it’s true. I don’t understand how it can be true for highly technical people. I hope I’m wrong. I took off 3 months when each of my children was born. I didn’t want more
Bob Sutton has an intriguing post, A Surprising Study of Infant Mortality Rates: Evidence-Based Management Meets Evidence Medicine. One of the surprising conclusions: One kind of collaboration was linked to higher mortality rates. When front-line employees became more involved in unit governance — doing things like being involved in decisions about who was hired and
I was supposed to be doing an informational interview with an upcoming college grad now. She cancelled because she felt terrible. She said, “I’ve been feeling nauseous all day. I really wanted to talk to you when I’m at my best. Can we reschedule?” You betcha we can. If I’m going to give my time