SlackerManager agrees with me in his How do you hire great people?. I said Hire for Intangibles; You Can Teach Technical Skills. It’s a person’s attitude, passion, and ability to work with other people that counts.
A bunch of my clients are having trouble filling their positions. They can’t find a bazillion years of Java or .Net or something else. There is a relative candidate shortage, compared to the candidate glut of a few years ago. But of people start looking for attitude and general problem-solving ability and ability to collaborate,
A behavioral audition is one where you want to see some specific candidate behaviors. Management auditions typically fall into this category. But especially if you’re hiring for an agile team, you might want to see how a candidate exhibits behaviors, such as coaching, feedback, how the person participates in a standup meeting or in a
If you’ve ever been involved in a startup before the startup had competitors or were part of a disruptive change in technology, you’ve needed this hiring strategy. In this case, technical skills are close to irrelevant. What’s really important when you’re starting a disruptive change or you’re hiring a not-quite-known skill set is to specify
Sorin asks another great question: “So please enlighten me : how do you decide, with only interviews/auditions, whether a candidate will be a good addition to a team or a disruptive element“ I’m assuming you’ve already asked questions such as, “Tell me about the project you’re on now. … What’s your role on the project?
Sorin’s comment got me thinking. How do you make the decision that a candidate’s technical skills aren’t worth the candidate’s lack of relationship, communication, listening, or some other soft skill? Esther was talking about collaborative teams, so someone who won’t or can’t collaborate is not going to work in your environment. But there are
I was discussing how to hire a senior manager with a colleague the other day, and he said, “How do I know I’ll hire someone with integrity?” Good question. In my experience, a person requires at least dozen or so years of experience, taking on successively more technical leadership and/or more management tasks before the
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