If you are looking for a project manager, what questions might you ask? Well, it might depend if you are agile, or geographically distributed, or how large a project or program you have. All of those pieces of your context are going to feed into your question development. I hope you ask behavior-description questions. That […]
Jeff Haden, over at Inc, says that these three interview questions reveal everything. You are supposed to go down the person’s resume and ask them about each and every job they have ever had. The questions are: How did you find out about the job? What did you like about the job before you started?
There’s an article in the Huffington Post about asking candidates to turn over their Facebook login credentials, so the interviewers can see their “private” pages. If you provide your login credentials, your private Facebook pages are no longer private, are they? I have a difficult time understanding why an interviewer wants this information. Is the
When I teach interviewing, I teach these approaches to interviewing: Let the behavior-description questions sell the candidate on the company. Don’t try to “sell” the candidate on the company or the people. It sounds like a used car salesperson or a bad blind date. It leaves a bad taste in the candidate’s mouth. (Yes, those
When Matthias Bohlen interviewed me for the OOP conference (see my post about the podcast for the OOP conference), he asked how to interview about lean experience. How do you ask potential team members about knowing their WIP limits or knowing how to help the team see its system? Well, I’ve had a chance to
On the Scrumdevelopment list, there was a thread about interviewing candidates. I didn’t see the thread until too late to be useful. But I have comments and thought I would share them with the greater community. A poster said, We didn’t try to pair with the whole team during the interview – just one person
There’s a question on one of the forums, about how to ask questions in a phone screen for junior developers. I thought I would answer it here, and then post a link. These tips work for junior developers, testers, writers, BAs, whatever. In a phone screen, you first want to ask elimination questions; then essential
One of the ways I organize and plan for interviews is to use an interview matrix. I take the essential skills from the job analysis and use them in the interview matrix to decide who will ask which questions. No, I don’t make those decisions—I ask the interviewers who wants to ask which questions. Now
Another key piece of culture is understanding a candidate’s background and preferences around rewards: what do you reward, how do you reward, and when. Let me be clear: I am not discussing what the organization should and should not reward here, although I have plenty of opinions. I am discussing how to detect what the
I bet you’ve seen teams like this: people are quiet, reserved and thoughtful. They discuss issues in moderated respectful tones and words. And, I bet you’ve seen teams whose favorite word is “brain-dead” when discussing ideas or people, who seem to need to have high volume discussions, and are loud. I bet you’ve seen teams