In one of my presentations this week at the Software Development conference, someone asked, “How do I attract suitable candidates? I can attract lots of candidates, but how do I get the most appropriate people to respond to my open req?” In this economy, that’s hard. Even so, you have some options: Use your personal […]
I’m at the Software Development conference this week. One of the hot topics I discussed in my presentations and with attendees during and after the talks were about context switching and multitasking, Focused Performance and Breakthrough Thinking on Worker Productivity and Multi-tasking Makes you Stupid, studies say.We agreed that: several pieces of work at different
If you’re like most IT managers, you have a couple of open reqs. You’d like to make the most of your reqs, and you don’t want to take a long time to hire. To hire the most suitable candidate who aligns with your strategy and needs, find candidates with relevant experience and then ask them
I was on the phone this morning with a senior manager. He was describing their current project: “Well, we’ve got 25 people: 12 developers, 6 testers, 2 writers, 4 support people, and 1 project manager.” I asked about the managers of the developers and testers. “Oh, the dev manager is running the project. We
It doesn’t matter what kind of paper your resume is printed on. It does matter how your resume looks to potential employers. Here’s a little checklist to make sure you’re presenting yourself in the best light: Is your experience in reverse chronological order? It’s too hard to quickly read a resume in any other way.
You’re hiring someone. You don’t want to waste your time in the interview. So, if you want to ask good interview questions, ask people about how they’ve worked in the past. People repeat perceived successful behaviors (whether those behaviors were successful or not). Behavior-description questions elicit the candidate’s story of how they worked in the
I seem to have a vision theme happening this week 🙂 How many kinds of review do you perform on your project’s work products? Especially with software projects, it makes sense to review interim work products, so you have some idea about how good the final product could be. Sometimes when I ask project
Once you’ve worked for 10 years or more, it’s worthwhile creating a one-paragraph summary of your experience. It’s not easy to create that paragraph, and it’s necessary, so that you can grab and retain the hiring manager’s attention. So what’s a one-paragraph summary? Here are some: A proven track record of improving business processes through
I was working on a newsletter article about how to see your project’s progress, and got stuck. It’s easier to see project progress on a project with a tangible deliverable; it’s much harder for software or a service project. So, I took a break and read Esther Derby’s blog entry, Start Seeing Software from
Sometimes, it’s not clear that you should fund or staff a project. If you’re not sure how to discriminate between alternative projects, here are four questions to ask: What’s the strategic reason behind this project? (Does the strategic reason behind the project change the importance of the project?) How does this project fit into