Read Sidu’s Avoiding hell at work by spotting Dilbertian job descriptions.Sidu’s on target. That’s why I suggest you do a real job analysis, and write the ad and/or job description with other technical people. People who are not in the industry dumb down the descriptions and ads, and make them worthless for people to filter […]
A behavioral audition is one where you want to see some specific candidate behaviors. Management auditions typically fall into this category. But especially if you’re hiring for an agile team, you might want to see how a candidate exhibits behaviors, such as coaching, feedback, how the person participates in a standup meeting or in a
Last week, I was in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. I arrived Sunday afternoon, and my host took me to the Van Abbemuseum, a museum of contemporary art. It was great.I geeked out in the elevator, however. We started at the top floor and went down to the bottom. The elevator had musical accompaniment. A high-pitched
Part of making a job attractive is to market it well. But you can’t market it if you don’t respect it. So the first part in marketing is to come to terms with how you feel about the job. Are you hiring someone to do something you consider “grunt” work? That’s a hard job to
The first step in making a job attractive is to create a job that’s an opportunity for someone, not just a job (Adler). An opportunity allows people to grow in some dimension, not just do the same-old, same-old. That means you need to develop a hiring strategy, and do a job analysis so you can
According to my colleagues inside organizations, we are officially in a seller’s (candidate’s) market for technical jobs. Managers report it’s difficult to find people, and they want to know how to make the jobs attractive. I don’t claim to know a lot about sales (just enough to keep myself in business!). Here’s the one thing
Jason Yip’s Hire squirrels instead of turkeys has a link to a discussion of Harvard’s hiring of Faust as the new president. Looks like Harvard got smart and thought about cultural fit, and those critical influencing and negotiation skills. (See my other post A Perfect Example of Insufficient Cultural Fit.) On the other hand, read
If you haven’t read Hiring the Best …, you may not realize how often I say it’s ok to iterate on job descriptions.Job descriptions cannot be static. To all you HR folks, sorry, you have to work with the hiring manager to determine what’s most important for the position you’re filling now. This particular developer/tester/writer/project
Recently, a reader asked me about applying for a project management job. She was missing a particular technical tool, but had plenty of what seemed to me as reasonable job experience. I suggested she apply anyway. When I see an ad (or a job description) focused on tools, I am sure that the hiring manager
I’ve been traveling for the past three weeks (one more to go), and heard one manager say, “With good people, you can deliver almost anything.” He’s right. And it’s hard to define good people. Saying, “I’ll know one when I see one” is not enough. That’s shot-in-the-dark job analysis. Job analysis, even if you don’t