Is HR in Your Middle?

Posted on July 27, 2010 by johanna

I hear this story again and again. A hiring manager can’t find the right candidate.

Why? You would think it would be easier to find great candidates, because so many people are out of work or are looking for better jobs. But that’s exactly why it’s so hard for hiring managers to find people–there are too many great candidates out there. That leads to looking for perfection. But eventually, if you decide you really need to fill a job, you decide it’s time to use a recruiter.

And, for many people that means HR is firmly in the middle. HR decides which recruiters you can and cannot use. HR does all the negotiation with the recruiter. HR provides the recruiter a job description. HR does a first pass reviewing resumes, looking for buzzwords or keywords. HR does the initial phone screen (and I’m not talking about the dirt-bag phone screen). HR sets up the interview. HR decides when to have a followup meeting to discuss the interview, and HR extends the offer.

But that’s not the best way to use a recruiter. Hiring managers need to work with the recruiters. I suggest HR has a real role: in selecting and negotiating with recruiters, in helping the hiring manager and the interviewing team make good decisions about how to hire and who to hire. If your HR person is an internal recruiter who knows your group and how they work, maybe that person can help. But too often, the HR person is not an internal recruiter, but an HR generalist. And, HR generalists have no business being in the middle of the recruiting and interviewing work.

For those of you in HR, I suspect this feels like a slap in the face. But here’s the reason I feel so strongly about this: as an HR generalist, you have too much to do to do a great job at recruiting. You not only recruit, you do the health care negotiation with vendors. You make sure the corporate policies keep the organization away from lawyer’s offices, and especially out of court. You make training decisions. You may even conduct interview training or management training. You certainly conduct new hire training.

If you wanted to be a full-time contract recruiter, you would be. Being a full-time contract recruiter means you network with candidates, that you build relationships around the local area, and maybe around the world. If you are in HR in an organization, it’s a formidable task to develop all those relationships and still do your HR job. I don’t see how you do it. (It’s just barely possible if you are an internal recruiter and you never touch the rest of the HR jobs.)

A contract recruiter needs to build a trusting relationship with a hiring manager. Every time a hiring manager rejects a candidate (even just reviewing resumes), the hiring manager needs to explain why to the recruiter. The whys are myriad: You explain how the job works, the corporate culture, what you are looking for, all the quirks of how things work for this position. The more the recruiter learns, the better the recruiter can source the candidates for this job.

When you allow HR to be in the middle, HR takes control of the transaction. That means delays. It certainly means someone else is playing telephone with your job description and analysis. Is that what you want?

Yes, it’s more work for the hiring manager, as you learn about recruiters and how they can help you. And, over time, you work with those recruiters and you build that relationship. It’s to the hiring manager’s benefit to build those relationships and make it work.

If you have internal recruiters, take the time to get to know them, and have them get to know you. Explain your group’s culture. Review resumes with them. But if you don’t have an internal recruiter, don’t let HR get in the middle of the sourcing process.

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Posted in HR, candidate, hiring decision, recruiting | 2 Comments

Waiting for the “Perfect” Candidate

Posted on July 23, 2010 by johanna

I received a call from a recruiter-colleague yesterday, bemoaning a hiring manager who was waiting for the “perfect” candidate. “I’ve sent her 5 great candidates, but none of them are perfect. Doesn’t she have to fill this position?”

Well, maybe not right away. And, maybe it’s not just technical skills that make a candidate a perfect or imperfect fit. (You and I both know it’s not!)

And, at some point, it’s time to hire a candidate who is good enough. Otherwise, you have to change which projects in the project portfolio you can staff, or how the people work on projects. (See Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People for more details)

But how long can you wait? How long should you wait? In this economy, chances are good that you can find good candidates relatively quickly. If you are a hiring manager who’s had an open position for several months and you haven’t found the right person, make sure you review your job analysis. Maybe what you thought you needed has evolved. Iterate on your job description–maybe it’s not working for you, helping you filter in the right people and filter out the ones who aren’t quite right.

The problem is that waiting does cost you capacity. Only you can know how long you can wait for the perfect candidate. And remember, the “perfect” candidate does not exist. You can hire people who are very close.

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Posted in Hiring the Best, cost of a hire, hiring strategy, job analysis, job description | 6 Comments

Updated Blog Look

Posted on July 5, 2010 by johanna

I have updated this blog to a more contemporary look and feel. Please comment if you read it as a web page instead of an RSS feed.

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“Raise the Bar” or “Increase Team Capability”?

Posted on June 28, 2010 by johanna

I recently had a conversation with a gentleman at a conference, where he said they hired “to raise the bar”. I asked him what he meant by that. He started discussing the mean of the capability in the team.

Well, if you’ve hired for zero diversity, you might be able to discuss the team’s mean. And, if you haven’t thought about diversity of personality or experience, you might be in that position. I don’t know how to assess the team’s mean, so here are ways to think about this idea.

Consider reframing the idea of “raising the bar.” I find that assumption about the team’s mean demeaning to the people who already work with you. (What are these people? Chopped liver?) Yes, I do want to work with people who can teach me something–that’s exciting. I don’t want to always be the senior person who knows how to do everything without learning anything new. So instead of thinking of “raising the bar” consider a reframe to “increase the team’s capability.” Now you are open to alternative kinds of experience, diversity that can increase the team’s capability.

If you only look for senior people who’ve done the same kind of thing you have, you may get the people you want. But instead of pigeon-holing people, consider experience diversity to increase team capability. You are likely to have more great candidates, and if they can learn your problem and solution domain, you can increase your team’s capabilities.

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Posted in diversity, experience, hiring strategy | 6 Comments

Hiring for Diversity, pt3: New College Grads

Posted on June 21, 2010 by johanna

It’s tempting to look for candidates with lots of experience for your open positions. But at this time of year, and through the fall, consider looking for new college grads. Not just because I have a daughter who just graduated, but because new grads offer you an opportunity to steer people without a lot of experience into great employees.

New grads have a huge advantage over experienced people: They don’t know the problem you need solved can’t be solved. They’ve been trained through 4 years of university that all problems can be solved before the end of the semester. They will bring that optimism to work.

Many new grads have worked somewhere, but even those who worked as interns or coops may not have had real professional experience. Back when I was a manager inside organizations, I was able to help new grads find their professionalism.

I have had some trying times as a manager. There was the new developer who thought he could come to work the way he went to school: after 1pm. We had several discussions about core hours. There was the new tester who thought he knew everything, but really didn’t know much about test techniques. I suspect that I was that arrogant when I started, so I had a fair amount of sympathy for him and gave him feedback about how he appeared to me.

I found these experiences, the helping people find their approach to work and their passion rewarding as a manager. I stay in touch with many of them now, many years after they and I moved on.

So, hire experienced people. But don’t forget about people with “no” experience. They may well find new and innovative approaches to your product development. Not because they’ve been trained in the newest techniques, but because they don’t know they can’t do something.

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Posted in diversity, experience, hiring strategy, new grad | 2 Comments

Hiring for Diversity, #2: Personality and Experience Diversity

Posted on June 17, 2010 by johanna

I recently led a workshop on Hiring for an Agile Team.  We discussed diversity and I explained my position: the more complex the problem, the more personality and experience diversity you want on your team. That’s because different approaches to solving problems and backgrounds help the team see what their options are.

I once worked with a team who were all introverted, quick to come to decisions, and all had the same kind of product experience. When it came time to develop a brand new product, they had trouble. They had no one who came up with wacko ideas on the spur of the moment, and no one who could keep options open for a while. They hired someone who liked to wait longer to come to decisions. That person also connected problems and solutions differently than the original team members did, so he was a very helpful addition to the team.

When I worked for my first machine vision company, I had no idea how machine vision inspection worked. But I had a product to deliver, so I experimented with different algorithms, different lighting, and different placement of the piece to be inspected under the camera. I didn’t know much about machine vision, but I knew about problem solving. One of the more experienced engineers told me that the color of the light would not make any difference. Except, that was the variable that made all the difference in solving the problem.

I wish I could claim brilliance, but I can’t. I can claim that previous experience of varying parameters in experiments and keeping a notebook of the potential solutions and how they worked was helpful. That, I’d learned in an instrumentation company.

Remember that personality and experience diversity is a piece of diversity when hiring. Do you need people who think differently? How about people with different kinds of product experience than you have? You might be pleasantly surprised. Problem solving skills transcend product experience.

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Posted in diversity, experience, personality type | 3 Comments

Hiring for Diversity, #1: Women and Other Traditional Diversity issues

Posted on June 16, 2010 by johanna

There’s a push in the agile community to recognize women and see if we can’t get more women on agile teams. Whatever you think about the program, the goal is a laudable one. Hiring women creates a diversity that is difficult to match with an all-male team. Women tend to bring more collaborative skills and more empathy skills to a team. (That’s a gross generalization. I realize that.) Rick Scott in his, Response: Diversity in Agile twitter convo said something profound:

Diversity’s Not My Problem

Screw that, it’s everybody’s problem.

He’s correct. That’s why I have several drafts lined up to discuss diversity.

The problem with hiring women is that if only about 20% of new college grads in computer science are women, are there enough women to work on our teams? Do we need to find women somewhere else? Is that what we want to do? I don’t know. (I am getting involved in a program to talk with middle- and high-school girls, so they can see that technology is a field to consider.)

Women are not the only disempowered group. Look around your workplace. How many people are white men? How many are not?

I want to hire people who are capable of doing the job. I don’t want to hire people to fill a perceived type of vacancy, an unfilled diversity bucket. But we need to do a better job of finding people who don’t look just like us to work on our teams. I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: if you are a hiring manager, look inside yourself. Do you discriminate against people based on their gender or school affiliation or first or last name? If so, please reconsider.

P.S. In case I wasn’t clear, I never advocate hiring anyone who is not capable of doing the job, just to fill a diversity bucket.

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Posted in diversity, hiring decision, hiring strategy | 6 Comments

What Can You Ask For, in a Job Interview

Posted on May 12, 2010 by johanna

A few of you had reasonable concerns about asking for code snippets in What Your Job Ad Can Do For You. So what can you ask for? Here are some ideas:

  • Pseudo-code that shows how you solved a problem as a developer
  • Description of an automated test framework or pseudo-code that shows the interviewer how you put the framework together
  • Description of a project schedule, explaining the iterative and/or incremental parts
  • Description of a project and what it was that made that project agile (or not)

If you are worried about sharing code or asking for code, it doesn’t have to be real code. And, notice that all of these items can be considered auditions of a sort.

Many years ago (more than 20), I wrote an FFT multiply loop on an embedded processor. If I had to describe that now, I would explain it this way:

  • The inner multiply loop had 7 or 8 steps. I can no longer remember.
  • During the steps, I loaded a different accumulator to perform some other computation, and then created another loop for the next few steps, testing for done for that computation along the way
  • The issues I had to deal with were:
    • What if I finished the other computation first? What happened then?
    • What if I finished the multiply first? What happened then?
    • How did I know the multiply was faster?

I no longer remember the answers to any of these questions, but I do remember asking them. At the time, I didn’t need the real code for that code snippet (or description). But explaining why I felt proud of that code and how I knew and resolved the issues was helpful in my next job interview.

So, yes, be careful about asking for real code or real tests or a real Gantt chart (or any other project artifact). But you can certainly ask for pseudo-code or the thinking behind code (or whatever artifact you want).

Asking for evidence of the thinking behind a real problem the candidate encountered at work is an audition. Asking for something the candidate feels strongly about helps a candidate retrospect.

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What Your Job Ad Can Do For You

Posted on May 3, 2010 by johanna

I’m teaching PSL this week with Esther and Jerry. I met one of the participants for the first time yesterday morning, and he thanked me for writing the Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers book. I thanked him, and asked what he liked the best.

He said that the advice about thinking about the attractors for the job advertisement was what helped him the most. He didn’t ask for technical skills in the ad; he discussed the work people would do. At the end of the ad, he asked for a code snippet of the work the candidate was most proud of.

This is one sharp hiring manager. He managed to avoid the laundry list job description, and ask for an audition in the ad. A candidate who doesn’t include a code snippet is a candidate you don’t need to consider for that position.

He had over 100 candidates for this one position–at a time of relatively high employment in his country. A number of candidates thanked him. Asking for that code snippet made them think about what was important to them as individuals.

He hired someone–a candidate with different domain expertise, but someone who would fit the culture and could perform the activities and deliverables required by the job. That person has gone on to be a senior technical leader in the organization and has won internal awards.

Here’s what the ad did for him:

  • It provided a filter (via audition) by which to eliminate unsuitable candidates, with the code snippet
  • It helped candidates see what it might be like to work for him
  • It enhanced his expertise as a hiring manager
  • It made him a mentor to these candidates!

I was happy if an ad filtered candidates for me. If the right kinds of people applied and the people who weren’t right didn’t apply, I was happy. Seems I set my sights too low :-)

Think about what you want your ad to say, when you are hiring for a job. It might do more for you than you can imagine

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Posted in Hiring the Best, attractive job, audition, job ad | 5 Comments

What Are You Hiring For?

Posted on March 16, 2010 by johanna

Maybe you have a job or two open. You’re reluctant to pay more than you have to for a given position. I understand that employers want to get the biggest bang for their employment buck.

I once consulted for an organization who had deliberately hired from the “bottom of the barrel.” (That was their phrase.) And, oh my goodness, they got less than what they paid for.

Getting to a release was a nightmare. And, because many of these folks were on H-1B visas, the people were desperate to keep their jobs. They would agree, as in say yes, to anything, because it meant they could stay here legally and keep working.

When the mix of work changed from commodity (keep the system going), to innovation (the market is changing, quick we need to change what we do), the technical staff was ill-prepared to deal with the changes.

Now, you don’t have to go outside the US to find not-highly-competent people. They exist here. We don’t need to import them. But the point is, the management in this organization had deliberately hired people they thought would be easily cowed, would be virtual slaves, and could do the minimum work for minimum pay.

Do a job analysis first, and know: what kind of hiring are you doing? Highly paid people can be competent for you–and they can be incompetent for you. You need to look at the environment in which people work, look at the problem, to find people who can learn the problem space and the solution space, and who can get along with others.

Don’t just look for the cheapest people. Look for the people who can do the work. Think about what you are hiring for, and pay for that expertise.

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Posted in job analysis | 2 Comments