I’m in Israel now, getting ready to work with a client tomorrow. When I travel, I watch CNN, and in Israel, I see the international edition. Jon Stewart had a funny segment on his show tonight, American Resolution: New Job. It shows a candidate doing everything wrong. I practically fell off the bed laughing. Enjoy!
I received an email from a reader today, along with an outline of their hiring process. They spend about 6-8 hours with each candidate, most of which is a series of auditions. They spend maybe an hour with behavior-description questions. These folks have an atypical problem—they’re hiring for consultants, so they need to know how
Amit Rathmore has a thought-provoking essay, Recruiting and the Butterfly Effect. His conclusion is that the people closest to the founding team need to be the ones interviewing candidates, so that the newest hires are as close the ideals and capabilities as the original hires. My only quibble with Amit is that this technique does
Recently, a manager asked how he could detect critical thinking skills in candidates. I had to ask him more questions, so I could answer. Here’s what he meant by critical thinking skills: The ability to think through a problem in a certain architectural domain The ability to deal with people across the organization in planning
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
Let me pose a situation facing one of my clients now. Their business is expanding, and they’ve agreed to develop a product that’s tangential to their current product line. This new product requires a new piece. If you’re a software company, imagine it’s a piece of hardware. If you’re a hardware company, imagine it’s software.
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
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