Tim, a first-level manager, asked me, “Is it reasonable for someone to quit after just a week? With no notice?” “No. What happened?” “Sam, a new developer, started on Monday. He told me today, Friday, he’s not coming back.” “Did he say why?” “He had a whole raft of reasons. He had too many questions: […]
As we move to more remote work, especially in these pandemic times, how do we integrate people so they can succeed? See Hiring Geeks That Fit for all the new employee checklists and how to use them. (Want to preview the checklists and templates? Download the HiringGeeksThatFitTemplates for yourself.) I updated the checklists with a
I’m not going to summarize each part, but to treat all of these as a whole. Let me circle back around to what HR does, as in Part 1: Administration and Benefits Compensation and rewards Education and training Recruitment Hiring If the organization wants to create an agile culture, it makes sense to change the
Sourcing, how and where you recruit possible candidates is a great way to use small, safe-to-fail experiments. That’s because the recruiting landscape continues to change. A little history: in the past, we read newspapers—on paper! Before the Civil Rights Act, employers advertised for “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted.” (I don’t remember if that was women
One of the problems with agile hiring is this: what data do you collect? Let me digress for a bit and talk about cycle time and lead time. This image explains cycle time and lead time for a cross-functional team. Everything starts in the Ready column and proceeds through the possible progression through development and
This is part of an Agile HR series. The previous post is Creating Agile HR, Part 1: What HR Does This post is about creating a flow for agile hiring. Why flow? Very few people hire continuously. That means resumes don’t arrive at the every day, and certainly not at the same pace of arrival—or even
I keep hearing about the “Skills gap.” There is no skills gap. There is a gap between what employers want to pay and what people are willing to work for. I read an article this morning that prompted this post: Talk of a skills gap in the labor market is ‘an incredible cop out’ Let
Agile 2015 was the week of Aug 3-7 this year. It was a great week. Here are the links to my interviews and talks. Interview with Dave Prior. We spoke about agile programs, continuous planning, and how you might use certifications. I made a little joke about measurement. Interview with Paul DuPuy of SolutionsIQ. We
We talk a lot in agile about generalizing specialists. Scott Ambler has a terrific essay on what a generalizing specialist is: Has one or more technical specialties… Has at least a general knowledge of software development. Has at least a general knowledge of the business domain in which they work. Actively seeks to gain new
Now that you know what you expect from your Scrum Master’s job (the deliverables), and you know the essential and desirable skills (the first three tips), you can focus on creating the interview questions and audition. (If you have not yet read Six Tips for Interviewing Scrum Masters, Part 1 for the first three tips,