You know that I use auditions as a way to see how people work. I find that auditions, along with behavior-description questions are a great way to see how people will work at work. However, there are some questions and auditions that just allow the interviewer to play a bad interview game: Stump the Candidate. […]
We’re getting ready for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, and my sister decided a scrapbook of family pictures would be a great present. She’s right, it will be wonderful. Mark and I were looking for pictures of us and our children, so we pulled out all of the pictures from the last 20 years. We
In his provocative article Nasty People, Robert Sutton says ” Managers who belittle and oppress one victim after another shouldn’t be hired.” Amen! If you’re not sure how to avoid hiring nasty people, try these techniques: You can try to ask the candidate about the last time he or she lost his or her temper
Some of my suggestions for people in my classes are simply to buy some good books for some specific information. When I suggest this, I sometimes hear “my manager won’t let me buy books.” As a bibliophile, I can’t understand that :-). Even though I do accept that not everyone is like me, you
Laurent has a great posting on Hiring Programmers. Note that he doesn’t say people have to be great writers. On the contrary, the bar is fairly low: awareness of spelling and typos, introduction, structured discussion, conclusion — that’s it. My kids practice this kind of writing all the time in school (in preparation for the
In the last few weeks, several people have asked me how much rework is normal. Well, if you’re working in a test-driven development environment, you probably have very little rework. My estimates for the few real test-driven projects I’ve seen is that they spend about 10-15% of their time on rework (finding problems and
I recently spoke with a hiring manager who was unhappy about a candidate’s references, “All the references are for jobs 10 years ago. And he’s had 4 jobs in the last 5 years. Why aren’t there references from those jobs?” If you’re a hiring manager, you’ll notice many candidates were either unemployed or had multiple
Sometimes I discover that one of my great ideas has already been discovered by other people 🙂 I first wrote about rolling wave planning in 1997. For those of you who can’t stomach the paper (it was one of my earliest pieces of writing), here’s an updated description of rolling wave planning: Loop: Plan what
I’ve talk about ads that help candidates screen themselves in or out. Here’s a great example from Ikea: “We’re hiring Why-Sayers” See Phil Wolff’s entry for the details.
I’ve just returned from the last of my spring conferences. And, I’m struck again by how much training is available to people at conferences and how cheap it is. You may be shaking your head, saying, NO JR, Conferences are expensive, about $5000 per person for the week, once you factor in travel along