At Agile 2009, I had some informal discussions with hiring managers about how to hire for their agile teams. I’m considering writing an ebook. If you think that’s a good idea, please leave me a comment or send me an email. In the meantime, I was surprised by some mistakes hiring managers make. These are […]
At SD West last week, one of the folks in my talks asked about how to hire a Scrum Master. First, don’t do this: Don’t look for a CSM. A CSM means the person has taken a 2-day workshop where he or she may have practiced some pieces of Scrum. There is no guarantee that
Way back in November, I taught a half-day tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team” at Agile Development Practices. The participants had several questions I thought you might find useful. Several participants wanted to know how a candidate would deal with challenging others and taking “criticism” during the workday. They had these questions: Tell me
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
I ran a workshop recently about hiring for an agile team, and one of the people learning to interview said, “I want a candidate who can take criticism.” I replied, “Don’t you mean feedback?” He asked, “What’s the difference?” Oh, boy. Plenty. Criticism is when you you’re looking at a piece of code and you
I spoke with a couple of recruiters this week. They’ve been specializing in finding test people for the last 10-15 years. (I used one of them 15 years ago, the last time I was hiring testers.) They both asked a question like this, “With all this Agile stuff, where am I going to find the
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been updating my web pages, which includes (finally) updating my workshops. One of the workshop you might be interested in is Hiring for an Agile Team. Hiring for an agile team can be a bit trickier than for more traditional project teams. The issues of culture, and personal
Last week, at the Agile 2007 conference, I ran a tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team.” As part of the tutorial, I ask people to group themselves into threes, where one person interviews, one is the candidate, and one is the observer.It never fails. An interviewer thinks they’re asking one question, but the candidate
In Hiring the Best …, I recommend you hire for today’s projects, not for tomorrow’s projects.Now that we are back in a candidate’s market, it’s even more important to hire the people you need now. You can’t tell who you’ll need in the future. That “guaranteed” project? I’ve seen many of them postponed again and
On my recent trip to NZ and AU (to speak about project management), I had some informal conversations with people who could not find enough people for their projects.From my non-scientific survey, it appears that we have started a technical hiring crunch (not enough candidates for positions). Consider people you might not have considered before: