Some hiring managers use certifications to filter resumes. I specifically caution against that practice in the book. I’m not a fan of certifications. Michael Schrage’s column Hiding Behind Certification is another article about why certifications are not a good predictor of job success. Here are two quotes I particularly liked: “The truth — as we […]
Seth Godin talks about his search for interns in Needles, haystacks & magnetism. He makes several points I like: Employers don’t hire candidates because the candidate deserves a job. Employers hire people because they like the way they feel about you when they interview you. Employers are looking for something special, something non-commodity about candidates.
You know that I use auditions as a way to see how people work. I find that auditions, along with behavior-description questions are a great way to see how people will work at work. However, there are some questions and auditions that just allow the interviewer to play a bad interview game: Stump the Candidate.
In his provocative article Nasty People, Robert Sutton says ” Managers who belittle and oppress one victim after another shouldn’t be hired.” Amen! If you’re not sure how to avoid hiring nasty people, try these techniques: You can try to ask the candidate about the last time he or she lost his or her temper
Laurent has a great posting on Hiring Programmers. Note that he doesn’t say people have to be great writers. On the contrary, the bar is fairly low: awareness of spelling and typos, introduction, structured discussion, conclusion — that’s it. My kids practice this kind of writing all the time in school (in preparation for the
I recently spoke with a hiring manager who was unhappy about a candidate’s references, “All the references are for jobs 10 years ago. And he’s had 4 jobs in the last 5 years. Why aren’t there references from those jobs?” If you’re a hiring manager, you’ll notice many candidates were either unemployed or had multiple
I’ve talk about ads that help candidates screen themselves in or out. Here’s a great example from Ikea: “We’re hiring Why-Sayers” See Phil Wolff’s entry for the details.
A reader asked about interviewing interviewers: “it might be interesting if the person being interviewed were allowed to ask some technical questions of the interviewer.” Yes, you can absolutely ask question of your interviewers. And the best question might not be the stump-the-interviewer questions (in the same way that the stump-the-candidate questions aren’t the best
If you’re a hiring manager and you haven’t started using a blog to help people find you, consider it. Right now, there are still tons of great technical people looking for jobs, but it’s hard to find just the right candidates. And, I’ve been reading articles in the popular press that say we’ll have a
I exchanged email with a graduate student recently, who’s just starting to think about what she wants to do when she graduates. Since she’s about a year away from graduation, this is a great time to start thinking. She originally thought she might want to work with teams who maintain software systems. I commented that