I received an email from a reader today, along with an outline of their hiring process. They spend about 6-8 hours with each candidate, most of which is a series of auditions. They spend maybe an hour with behavior-description questions. These folks have an atypical problem—they’re hiring for consultants, so they need to know how […]
Last week, at the AYE Conference, I led a workshop called “Conversations with Candidates.” One of the participants wanted to know, “How do I build off a behavior-description question?” I’ve always led the conversations intuitively, so I had to think for a minute to describe what I do. If the next questions doesn’t just come
Christian Sepulveda has a lovely post, Guidelines for Being a Strong Job Candidate. Some of his gems (these are all from his post): A prospective employer has no attention span whatsoever. You are selling yourself to an employer. What would make it a “no-brainer” to hire me? Notice his emphasis on communication skills given that
I taught a bunch of classes this week at the Software Development conference. At one interviewing class, a participant wanted to know, “How do I hear the other half of the conversation?” I asked for clarification, and he said, “Sometimes I feel as if the candidate has only said part of the answer, and if
I had a discussion with a hiring manager at the Better Software conference this week. He claimed he could tell what candidates were thinking from their facial expressions.I asked him what I was thinking. He said, “You look pleasant, smiling, as if you’re agreeing with me.” I laughed out loud and said, “Nothing could be
When I teach interviewing, many people want to know how to shorten their interviews. They think they spend too much time interviewing candidates. When I probe a little more, here’s what I find. Many people spend 30 minutes or less in the interview. They try to “sell” the organization in the interview. They ask only
When I teach interviewing skills, I ask the workshop participants what they want to learn in the workshop. I’m always amazed at how many people say “interpret body language.” I expected people to focus on listening for behavior-description answers to questions, not body language. Interpreting body language is difficult. Imagine you’re sitting across a table
I spoke at Boston SPIN last night, and facilitated the hiring initiative roundtable before the main presentation. One of the roundtable participants explained that he was looking for entry-level testers. And, since no one (okay, not quite no one, but almost no one) teaches testing in college, he wanted to develop an audition to see
I was speaking with a colleague the other day, and he told me about an audition he’s been using for developers for years: asking them to implement a String-Copy function in the language in which they’ll be developing. Some of their reactions are telling: Some have said, “Why? The language has it?” Some have worked
Take a look at Success Through Failure. I really liked this: Software development is difficult in the best of conditions. You should always be failing some of the time, and learning from those failures in an honest way. Otherwise, you’re cheating yourself out of the best professional development opportunities. How do you ask about mistakes