In his provocative article Nasty People, Robert Sutton says ” Managers who belittle and oppress one victim after another shouldn’t be hired.” Amen! If you’re not sure how to avoid hiring nasty people, try these techniques: You can try to ask the candidate about the last time he or she lost his or her temper […]
If you’re like one of my readers, you only have two reqs and a perceived need for three people. It’s hard to know what to do, when you only have enough money for two people and want three (or any other case where you have N reqs and N=1 (or more!)) people. Here’s one technique
I don’t normally think much about how teams recruit pro athletes. But this quote from John Powers’ article “Mistake-Free Football” from the Boston Globe 1/27/04 says volumes: If the Patriots have relatively few disciplinary cases, it may be that they’re screened out before draft day. […]”Three things we look for in the people we hire
I spoke at a graduate class last week, presenting my “Interview with Ease” (candidate version, not the hiring version) workshop to the class. One of the questions that arose was: What do I do when I’m faced with a puzzle? In Down with Games and Puzzles, I suggested using an audition instead of a game
If you manage people, at some point, you’re going to deal with titles and job descriptions. Here are my perceptions about the constraints on titles: Make sure the titles for developers, testers, writers, anyone who performs project construction are parallel. That is, don’t have junior testers unless you also have junior developers. Make sure the
Hiring mistakes are common. Too often, we don’t consider in advance what our critical criteria are, and we make mistakes. Here are some I made early in my management career: I hired a prima donna developer, because I didn’t listen to my gut telling me he was wrong for our culture. The rest of the
I interviewed once for a QA Manager job. The position was supposed to run the SEPG and chair the corporate quality improvement team. The position was supposed to hire auditors to assess the organization against the CMM, and hire testers to test the product. In addition, the position was supposed to define test plans, and
In previous hiring tips, I suggested you ask behavior description interviewing questions and perform auditions. I haven’t discussed hypothetical questions yet, because they can be difficult to frame well. In response to my current Stickyminds column about how to improve tester performance. Suzan Noden said she uses this as a question: “how would you test