I wa just reading recent grad frustrated by job search, and want to highlight something many candidates, even experienced candidates, forget: Remember, a hiring manager is going to spend maybe a minute (or less) on the initial scan of your resume. What do you want her to see in that minute — a list of […]
Many hiring managers are looking for initiative, especially for agile team members. (In agile, the team members self-organize, which means they are looking for ways to do work better and to solve problems without requiring management’s involvement.) I was thinking about initiative how to look for it, and I realized that at least some people
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
You’re interviewing someone for a position at your company. You remember working with that person years ago, and you were unimpressed. Maybe it was the jerk factor, maybe it was the way he didn’t quite finish work, or maybe it was her perfume. Whatever it was, you were not excited about the candidate then, and
Kristan Vingrys has a great post, A question I have found useful when interviewing candidates. His question: You are allocated a training budget, what is the first course, conference or workshop you would attend? This is an excellent question to see if people are keeping up with thinking about what they want to learn. I
I’ve been talking with a few hiring managers and a few senior candidates. The hiring managers are afraid to look at some senior people because they’re concerned the senior people will want salaries that are higher than the companies want to pay. The senior people are concerned that they can’t get interviews because the hiring
I recently spoke with a recruiter new to the high tech field. “So many of these people have suspect experience on their resumes. They’ve been laid off, and then out of work for several years. I can’t believe they would be good for our organization.” If you’ve worked anywhere since 1999, you know some “failures”—people
As candidate evaluations go, you gotta hand it to the 2008 presidential candidates. They are “interviewing” for the job for longer than the apprentices on the TV show. I was watching the news recently about polling results of the 2008 presidential election. I wasn’t surprised at the top few qualifications: experience, competence, values, and character.
I emailed with a colleague today. He’s been looking for a position that shouldn’t be too hard to fill–but it is. Let’s assume the position is a development position. He interviewed a candidate. He’s not thrilled with the candidate; the candidate doesn’t have quite enough functional skill to do a good job. The interviewing team