You’ve been unemployed for a over a year. You’re looking for a job. You have not been sitting home, eating bon-bons. You’ve been contributing to open-source projects, or studying for a certification, and networking like there’s no tomorrow. You have not found another job yet. So, what do you say when hiring managers, HR people, […]
If you’re a candidate and you are looking for a job, it can be difficult to deconstruct a job ad, especially if it’s a laundry list of technical tools. A lot of hiring managers use a form of shorthand to identify their needs. Here are some common themes that might be their shorthand: What the
I recently worked with a hiring manager who was having trouble with his job ads. They were not working for him. The ads were not screening out the more senior people. They were not screening in the more junior people. As part of the problem solving, I asked him to send me the job analysis
I’m seeing ads for what should be agile program managers on LinkedIn. I can’t tell what these positions really are, but when they say “responsible for management of 15 scrum teams,” that’s an agile software program manager to me. But the distressing part of the ad is when it’s a US-based position with a base
You might think that your only alumni network is from your school. But you have corporate alumni networks too. I bet you’ve worked for some great companies, or some large companies, or for some great managers, or with some great people. Those corporate alumni networks are just as valuable as your university alumni network. So,
Produce Something When we last spoke, you had a board and a ranked list of todos. Now, it’s time to apply your agile mindset to your todos and use your board to help you do so. Remember when I asked you to make each of your todos small, so you could accomplish each of them
Last week, I gave a talk at WIND (Wednesday is Networking Day), here in the Boston area. It was titled An Agile Approach to Your Job Search. I decided that based on the response to that talk, I would do a series of blog posts for candidates about how to look for a job. Hiring
I’ve been on vacation and traveling, which is why I’ve been quiet on this blog for way too long. Sorry about that. And, I’ve been deleting numerous emails with the subject, “Are you taking on new clients?” which is a referral-for-pay scheme. I don’t participate in those. If I can’t refer people because I believe
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
I gave a talk at the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise earlier this week about managing the project portfolio. I was talking about people who start thinking at the 50,000 foot level (like me) and people who start thinking at the blades of grass level. We both move up and down, it’s just where