Now that you know what you expect from your Scrum Master’s job (the deliverables), and you know the essential and desirable skills (the first three tips), you can focus on creating the interview questions and audition. (If you have not yet read Six Tips for Interviewing Scrum Masters, Part 1 for the first three tips, […]
People want to know the “secret sauce” for hiring Scrum Masters and agile coaches. I wish it was easy to provide a standard set of questions. Because your agile team is unique, your questions should be different. However, there are some common qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills among Scrum Masters. First, do a job analysis
We often think about a succession plan for managers. But, if you’re not thinking about a succession plan for your technical team, you’re falling prey to local shortages, and hiring the same old kinds of people. You’re not getting diverse people. That means you may not be able to create innovative, great products. It also
I spent the day consulting with a client who might sound just like you. He’s a senior manager in a small company. He’s overworked, trying to perform too many roles by himself. Here’s a quick summary of his roles: The CTO Scrum Master for as many as three teams (!) The tool master (he chose
If you read Thomas Friedman’s interview with Laszlo Bock, How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2, you see that these qualities are the things that Bock discusses: Grit, which I refer to as perseverance Adaptability General cognitive ability, the ability to think and solve problems How does Bock look for those skills? He
When I taught that one-day workshop in Sweden, one of the questions we discussed was the number of essential skills to list in a job analysis, and by extension, the job description. Too few essential skills, and you don’t differentiate your position from anyone else’s. Too many, and you over-constrain the role. Surely, there must
Vistage is a peer coaching and advisory group that “helps executives become better leaders, solve their business challenges, and get better results”. I have been asked to provide a ‘Quick Start Guide to Hiring Effective Executives’ and it will go live on their blog on Jan. 8, 2013. If you are looking for practical tips
I just read Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about how a football recruiter agonized over his decisions: …“This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had
I read a bunch of blogs, and Evolving Excellence is consistently good. I was struck by this post, Homozygosity – That’s The Problem!. I had never heard of homozygosity before, so I looked it up. According to Merriam-Webster, it’s having the two genes at corresponding loci on homologous chromosomes identical for one or more loci
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