Louise points to an article about questions candidates should ask at the end of the interview and follows up with her own, Questions to Ask at the End of the Interview: A year from now, how will you evaluate if I have been successful in this position?” Louise goes on to explain why she likes […]
At the SD conference a few weeks ago, a colleague asked me this question. (I’m using the Myers-Briggs terminology:If you’re wondering, I often describe introverts as people who need to think in order to speak, and extaverts as people who need to speak in order to think.) Well, the answer is Yes and No. If
Bruce Eckel has a nice post, What Questions Would You Ask?, especially for developers. I really like the question about books :-)Here’s how I would expand on that for project managers and testers: How do we you make project decisions? Can you give me an example? What happens at the end of the project? or
Once you’ve seen some evidence of a lifecycle, look for the practices the candidate has used on projects. To be honest, I can imagine seeing one or two of these on a resume; certainly not all. Test-driven development (likely to be on a resume) Unit testing (likely to be on a resume) Pair programming (likely
A few weeks ago at the “Hiring for an Agile Team” session, the group generated a number of behavior-description questions. I promised I would post them, so here they are: “Tell me about a time you made a mistake.” Using the context of shipping/releasing a product late: “What did you change?” (Notice the past
I received some great comments on Why Puzzles and Riddles Discriminate. Adam has a terrific list of the things he’s looking for when he uses “puzzles and/or brainteasers and/or random programs to test”: Do they give up right off the bat? Do they ask questions or sit silent pondering? Do they make different attempts or
At last week’s Agile 2006 conference, I led a tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team.” I made a statement that some of the participants challenged: Using puzzles and riddles discriminate against anyone who isn’t a (middle-upper class) white American suburban male. (I’d forgotten the middle-upper class part when I was leading the session.) So,
Last week at the Agile conference, a participant in my “Hiring for an Agile Team” session asked how to know if the people she was interviewing–who had no experience as part of an agile team–might actually work in the team. As she said, “I can’t wait for the perfect person. I can train, but I
I coached a manager who’d hired seven people in the previous year–and had fired five of them. His manager was ready to toss him out, too. Instead, the senior manager decided this manager needed coaching about how to hire people. When I asked the manager about his interviewing style, he explained that he used what
Hiring managers love the ‘Why did you leave your last job’ question. As an interviewer, too many people are willing to tell all, and those stories explain a lot about a candidate. Anthony in Been Fired Lately? says it’s not a big deal–everyone’s been fired. And for many candidates, I would agree. But here are