When I teach interviewing, I teach these approaches to interviewing: Let the behavior-description questions sell the candidate on the company. Don’t try to “sell” the candidate on the company or the people. It sounds like a used car salesperson or a bad blind date. It leaves a bad taste in the candidate’s mouth. (Yes, those […]
Workshop Objective: Hiring the right people at the right time in a high technology company remains a challenge even to experienced managers. This workshop prepares technical managers (or the HR folks who work with technical managers) for the preparation and hiring of people into the organization. Workshop Overview: This workshop walks you through a pragmatic approach to
Workshop Objective: This experiential workshop helps agile technical teams prepare, interview, and select candidates. This workshop prepares people who may have only been on one side of the interview as a candidate to effectively participate on an interviewing team and effectively evaluate candidates. This workshop specifically address the cultural issues and particulars of finding candidates who
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
You may have noticed my most recent post was back in October (ouch). That’s because of the past 6 weeks, I’ve been out of town 5. With that much travel, something has to go, and some of my blogging is it. In any case, I hadn’t stopped thinking about hiring issues, I just momentarily stopped
A few of you had reasonable concerns about asking for code snippets in What Your Job Ad Can Do For You. So what can you ask for? Here are some ideas: Pseudo-code that shows how you solved a problem as a developer Description of an automated test framework or pseudo-code that shows the interviewer how
I’m teaching PSL this week with Esther and Jerry. I met one of the participants for the first time yesterday morning, and he thanked me for writing the Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers book. I thanked him, and asked what he liked the best. He said that the advice about thinking about the attractors for
I just read Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about how a football recruiter agonized over his decisions: …“This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had
George asked in a comment what a fake audition was. Finally, I’m ready to discuss this. (Sorry for the delay, George.) A fake audition is when the audition is incongruous with the situation. In the situation described in A Second Chance Audition, the candidate cared about the outcome of the first audition, but the audience
John Cook pointed me to this gem: a second look – generosity 3. It’s the story of a fake audition that was dissatisfactory and how another real audition helped the author get a great job. Avoid those fake auditions. People don’t perform as well as they would in more real circumstances.