Now that it’s a hiring manager’s market, I’m hearing that a number of interviewees are hearing questions such as “Why do you want this job?” or “Why Should I Hire You?” Hiring managers: that’s a shorthand question. You know what it means, but your candidate may not. You’re looking for ways to know if this […]
At SD West last week, one of the folks in my talks asked about how to hire a Scrum Master. First, don’t do this: Don’t look for a CSM. A CSM means the person has taken a 2-day workshop where he or she may have practiced some pieces of Scrum. There is no guarantee that
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
I taught my “Hiring for Agile Teams” workshop at ADP today, and finally have words for something I’ve seen for a while. When I ask people to describe qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills, they say things like “easy-going” or “intuitive” or something else that describes behavior. Since I love behavior-description questions, you’d think this would
I’ve got election fever, I admit it. In the VP debate last week, the moderator asked a useless question: “What is your achilles heel?” (I’m probably paraphrasing the question.) Both candidates treated it as the weakness question, and didn’t answer the question. They each turned the question around to their strengths. What a surprise (not!).
I was thinking about the election. (How can anyone in the US avoid it?) I read Seth’s piece, Politics!, and thought that nightly debates might be a great way to discover who the smartest people are. Maybe. But a lot closer than the sound bites we get now. Since we’re not going to have nightly
I’ve been in email contact with Pradeep Soundararajan for a few months now. He was recently at a conference in Toronto, and has posted his The (bad) state of software testing interviews in India, which includes a pdf of a talk he gave about interviewing. He has several wonderful ideas, including: Candidate and interview myths
Jurgen has The Perfect Job Interview Question. It’s When reviewing somebody else’s code, what is it that you usually find most disturbing? This is a good question. If someone doesn’t review code, you’ll hear that. Jurgen goes on to discuss the syntax answers vs. the design/architecture answers. He has a point. I would add some
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