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.
I recently met a lead whose business card read “Lead Phoenix Developer.” I asked what that meant, and he explained that he was a technical lead for an project code-named Phoenix. His business card could have read “Lead Developer” or “Technical Lead” and made much more sense. This almost happened to me today. I’m the
Many hiring managers are looking for initiative, especially for agile team members. (In agile, the team members self-organize, which means they are looking for ways to do work better and to solve problems without requiring management’s involvement.) I was thinking about initiative how to look for it, and I realized that at least some people
Lisa has a nice post, How to Hire a Manager – A Time Tested Recipe. She’s close. I’m not so sure about the “humble” part, and I would add something like “advocates for team.” But the piece Lisa missed is integrity. Without integrity, the other qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills are useless. To be fair,
I led a 90-minute Hiring for an Agile Team workshop at AgileItx! this past week. I ask each team in the workshop to call out a candidate’s quality, preference, or non-technical skill that they look for in a team. One of the teams said, “teamwork.” Well, teamwork means a lot of things to lots of
One of the nice things about the social networking sites such as LinkedIn, is that they allow me to reconnect with people I worked with years ago. I recently re-met a colleague from my undergraduate days, and a colleague I worked with 25 years ago. I mentioned to one of these colleagues’ peers that I’d
Jack Vinson writes in New Grad Hires: Ready and Willing, but Are They Able?, The solution is to hire people who have the general skills, capability, and/or experience you need and then train them in the missing aspects. That’s the way it has always been. For technical staff, expect to spend time helping them develop
Jurgen’s post, How to Select a Fine Technical Manager, along with the posts he responded to prompted this one. I’m not agreeing much with Jurgen today. I suspect it’s because we have very different experience. In my experience, only technical people who want to manage want to be managers–unless HR has screwed up the salary
For the recruiter interview series, I had a conversation with the Recruiting Animal: JR: How long have you been in the recruiting field? RA: Over ten years. JR: Do you have any specialties? RA: I’m a generalist but I have done a number ofsearches for internal auditors in recent years. I have also worked on
I found my first job with the help of an on-campus recruiter, and with a local Boston-area recruiter. I found my second job through the newspaper. I’ve found all my other jobs (all of them, including my consulting engagements) via my network, which does include recruiters. That’s about 25 years of jobs. Louise Fletcher has