Via Mischievous Ramblings I discovered Microsoft tries to recruit me. Here’s the message I’m seeing loud and clear: It’s worth a few minutes to perform a little research on the name of the person you’ve just discovered via the web. If you’re a hiring manager and you’re hiring a contract recruiter, interview the recruiter. Ask […]
When I teach interviewing, many people want to know how to shorten their interviews. They think they spend too much time interviewing candidates. When I probe a little more, here’s what I find. Many people spend 30 minutes or less in the interview. They try to “sell” the organization in the interview. They ask only
When I teach interviewing skills, I ask the workshop participants what they want to learn in the workshop. I’m always amazed at how many people say “interpret body language.” I expected people to focus on listening for behavior-description answers to questions, not body language. Interpreting body language is difficult. Imagine you’re sitting across a table
I spoke at Boston SPIN last night, and facilitated the hiring initiative roundtable before the main presentation. One of the roundtable participants explained that he was looking for entry-level testers. And, since no one (okay, not quite no one, but almost no one) teaches testing in college, he wanted to develop an audition to see
Take a look at Success Through Failure. I really liked this: Software development is difficult in the best of conditions. You should always be failing some of the time, and learning from those failures in an honest way. Otherwise, you’re cheating yourself out of the best professional development opportunities. How do you ask about mistakes
My Inc./Fast Company column is up: Put Your Candidate to Work. Please leave comments here. When I write columns for a site or magazine, I discuss the areas to write about with the editor. What the editors originally wanted was a here’s-how-to-use-your-intuition article about hiring. I explained that was a bad idea, and I would
I was reading Good Interview Questions. I was a bit surprised by the first question: State, Strategy, Bridge, and Adapter are all similar patterns. How are they similar, and how are they different? But I suspect I was surprised because I’m no longer a developer and am not familiar with the patterns. I suspect I
Anthony points to Lou Adler’s One Question Interview. The one question is Please think about your most significant accomplishment. Now, could you tell me all about it? That’s a great stepping off question. And, I really like the second question, in one of the comments on Anthony’s post, by Jim Durbin Tell me about the
I thank Keith Ray who forwarded this gem to me from the XP mailing list: “Puzzles are fantastic. They’re an instant way of figuring out whether you want to work for the organisation or not.” — Adrian Howard When I teach interviewing, people tell me they like puzzles because they think they’re watching how people
Ego is a Good Thing. But the interviewers need to remember that interviewing a candidate is not about how great the interviewer is; it’s about understanding what the candidate will be able to do for you at work. Thanks to Rohan Kini’s “Scary interviews”, read Tips to technical interviewing. I don’t buy tip 4/5, where