George asked in a comment what a fake audition was. Finally, I’m ready to discuss this. (Sorry for the delay, George.) A fake audition is when the audition is incongruous with the situation. In the situation described in A Second Chance Audition, the candidate cared about the outcome of the first audition, but the audience […]
I’ve got election fever, I admit it. In the VP debate last week, the moderator asked a useless question: “What is your achilles heel?” (I’m probably paraphrasing the question.) Both candidates treated it as the weakness question, and didn’t answer the question. They each turned the question around to their strengths. What a surprise (not!).
I was thinking about the election. (How can anyone in the US avoid it?) I read Seth’s piece, Politics!, and thought that nightly debates might be a great way to discover who the smartest people are. Maybe. But a lot closer than the sound bites we get now. Since we’re not going to have nightly
I’m writing about a post a week for ITJobBlog. I’ve already written a couple of posts about how to develop your interview skills when you’re a candidate, part 1 and part 2. Please join us over there, too!
I’ve been in email contact with Pradeep Soundararajan for a few months now. He was recently at a conference in Toronto, and has posted his The (bad) state of software testing interviews in India, which includes a pdf of a talk he gave about interviewing. He has several wonderful ideas, including: Candidate and interview myths
Art Petty has a great post, Capturing Talent and Creating Great Customer Experiences: They Go Together. I really liked this part: A manager that takes mid-interview smoke breaks and badgers a talented candidate about salary expectations is someone that I want working for my competitor. I’m still astounded when I hear stories like that.
Jurgen has The Perfect Job Interview Question. It’s When reviewing somebody else’s code, what is it that you usually find most disturbing? This is a good question. If someone doesn’t review code, you’ll hear that. Jurgen goes on to discuss the syntax answers vs. the design/architecture answers. He has a point. I would add some
I ran a workshop recently about hiring for an agile team, and one of the people learning to interview said, “I want a candidate who can take criticism.” I replied, “Don’t you mean feedback?” He asked, “What’s the difference?” Oh, boy. Plenty. Criticism is when you you’re looking at a piece of code and you
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 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