Your interview questions and your auditions should sell people on working for you. It’s that simple. You don’t need to sell people on working for your company. When I teach interviewing, that’s what I teach. And, every single time, my workshop participants roll their eyes and don’t believe me until we start crafting their interview […]
If you are looking for a project manager, what questions might you ask? Well, it might depend if you are agile, or geographically distributed, or how large a project or program you have. All of those pieces of your context are going to feed into your question development. I hope you ask behavior-description questions. That
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
When Matthias Bohlen interviewed me for the OOP conference (see my post about the podcast for the OOP conference), he asked how to interview about lean experience. How do you ask potential team members about knowing their WIP limits or knowing how to help the team see its system? Well, I’ve had a chance to
Workshop Objective: How do you separate the talkers from the doers? How do you know this person will fit with your team? This workshop teaches you what you need to know to conduct an effective interview. You won’t have to ask questions that people can recite canned answers to, such as, “Tell me your weaknesses.” You
“I need another tester for my team” – Test Manager “I’m looking for a developer/architect/someone senior for my team” – Development manager Two managers, two teams. Although each manager has a group he calls a team, the teams are quite different. The test manager has a pool of people whom he assigns to projects in
If you’ve been hiring for a while, you probably have a list of questions you like to use with candidates. I certainly do. So let me ask you, “Can you give me an example of a time when you wanted to learn more about a candidate, and your questions didn’t seem to work?” Notice what
© 2005 Johanna Rothman. This column was originally pubished on Stickyminds.com Summary: Resumes only tell a portion of a candidate’s story just like caller ID doesn’t always reveal the caller’s complete identity. Screening candidates over the phone can help extract more of the person’s story if you ask the right questions. In this week’s column,
© 2005 Johanna Rothman. They may not have a traditional work history, but college grads do have experiences. Learn how to glean what they do know. It’s spring, and college seniors are starting to look for jobs. I’m assuming you’ve done a job analysis, to determine the essential personal qualities, preferences, and skills that your
Whether you’re organizing a project team or hiring a whole new test group, you need to discover if the testers you’re considering can perform the job you need them to perform or not. When you think about the job, don’t just think about the testing—although that’s critically important. Consider these skills when you’re defining what