It’s tempting to look for candidates with lots of experience for your open positions. But at this time of year, and through the fall, consider looking for new college grads. Not just because I have a daughter who just graduated, but because new grads offer you an opportunity to steer people without a lot of […]
There’s a push in the agile community to recognize women and see if we can’t get more women on agile teams. Whatever you think about the program, the goal is a laudable one. Hiring women creates a diversity that is difficult to match with an all-male team. Women tend to bring more collaborative skills and
I’ve been reviewing job descriptions from clients that are a laundry list of tools. Or, that ask for “significant experience” with a particular technology. No, no, no. People are not tools. They are human beings who have specific qualities, preferences, and technical and non-technical skills. When you think about those personal qualities, think about these
I’ve been at the PMI Regina PDC this week. I did a general session talk Monday, and am leading a two-day estimation workshop through tomorrow. Andy Nulman had a great riff on normal vs. abnormal employees. You can see a clip of it here. Warning: racy, not completely clean. If you think of normal as
I read a bunch of blogs, and Evolving Excellence is consistently good. I was struck by this post, Homozygosity – That’s The Problem!. I had never heard of homozygosity before, so I looked it up. According to Merriam-Webster, it’s having the two genes at corresponding loci on homologous chromosomes identical for one or more loci
I was working with a client recently, and one of the managers declared, “What we really need are a bunch of innovators. All of our open reqs–let’s hire some innovators.” Well, there’s a little bit about creating an environment in which innovation can flourish (e.g. ending the multitasking, giving people a little slack time, building
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
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
Jurgen’s post, How to Select a Fine Technical Manager, along with the posts he responded to prompted this one. I’m not agreeing much with Jurgen today. I suspect it’s because we have very different experience. In my experience, only technical people who want to manage want to be managers–unless HR has screwed up the salary
I decided to start a new series, interviewing recruiters. It’s not clear to me that either my hiring manager colleagues or candidate colleagues are using recruiters as well as they could be. Here’s the first interview with Dave Freireich, one of the authors of Getting the Job. I loved his An interview is a blind