Take a look at Boston Red Sox: Backstop Your Business. (Read the PDF or the printer-friendly version.) Here’s my big take-away: You have to know what differentiates your top performers from everyon else — and it’s not a single dimension measurement. If you live in a yank-and-rank organization, figure out what you need to do to measure everyone’s overall contribution to the organization, before you start ranking.Of course, defining those contributions for the roles in your organization will make it much easier to ask questions about them. If you’re not performing a job analysis now, every time you want to hire someone (or write a performance evaluation), start. The job analysis will tell you what you really care about.
As far as I know, this is the first review of the book. Take a look at here. I loved the part where Valentin said:
During the trip, Johanna will hand out numerous check lists that will help you organize your work more efficiently and prevent you from going too deep into the mud.
Thanks, Valentin!If you know of other reviews, let me know and I’ll link to them if they’re online.
I facilitated a roundtable at Boston SPIN last night, and one of the questions that arose was “How do I negotiate salary?”Compensation is not just your salary. This is your opportunity to think about how you make your life. Do you want more time off? Money for books? Training time and/or money? A different title? Something else?Employers may not have a lot of wiggle room for pay. But they all have much more wiggle room on other things. In previous jobs, I’ve negotiated:
Ability to leave at 5pm (because you can’t be late for day care)
A book allowance (at one company, the company owned the books. At another company, I did.)
More tuition assistance (especially helpful when I left a job and started another one in the middle of a semester)
More time off without pay
More time off with pay
Hiring managers: My advice is to learn early about what a candidate wants in an offer. Candidates: When it’s time to start talking about an offer, think about what would make you say yes. Ask for it. You won’t get what you want unless you ask.Remember that negotiating an offer is a two-way street with long-term consequences. Make sure you understand your principles around the negotiation, so whether you’re an employer or a candidate, you’re satisfied with the outcome.
Last week, at my PNSQC workshop, we talked about auditions. One of the participants said that when he auditioned testers, he asked each candidate how the candidate would test a stapler. Take a look at Mike Kelly’s answer. Bet you didn’t realize there were so many ways to test a stapler :-)So why is this a good question for testers? Because testers deal with work artifacts, and what a tester does when presented with a work artifact — even a stapler — is a good indication of how the tester will work when presented with your work artifacts.The beauty of this question, is that it works for lots of roles:
Writers: Describe how you’d write about stapler use.
Product marketing: Describe how you’d derive requirements for a next-generation stapler. Or, explain how you’d organize a product launch for a stapler.
Support staff: Describe how you’d deal with a customer who says he/she has a problem with their stapler.
Developers: Describe how you’d approach extending the design of a stapler.
I wouldn’t use this as my only audition question, but it’s a great start.
Dave Liebreich gave me feedback yesterday that I’d forgotten to include a template of a rejection letter (after the interview) in the book. Argh. I’ve started an errata page for this and other potential problems. A rejection letter has only three components:
No.Thank you.Good luck with your job search.
Write the no part first. Don’t apologize; just write something like this: “Your experience doesn’t fit our needs at this time.” Then, write the thank you part, “Thank you for inteviewing with us.” Finally, write the good luck part, “Good luck with your job search.”The reason I write the no part first is simple: if you haven’t called the candidate with an offer, the candidate knows you don’t want to hire him or her, but anything other than the no at the beginning can raise a candidate’s hopes. I don’t want to disappoint a candidate more than necessary.
At a recent conference session, one participant explained that he assigned roles to people on a group/panel interview. He assigned questioning/listening roles. Here’s a way you could take it one step farther, assinging roles in similar ways to a formal inspection:
Assign a moderator, someone to monitor the time, who’s asking which questions, and if necessary, to move the interview along
Assign listeners, people who listen to the answers. They may take notes. (Remember that any piece of paper you use while hiring is discoverable, so decide if you want people to take physical notes.)
Assing people to sets of questions. I like having people ask about no more than two areas.
You’ll still need to limit the size of the group interviewing and the duration of the interview. Make sure you allow enough time for each interviewer to thoroughly ask questions in his or her area.Look at this post also to see how to make group interviews work for you.
I’m still in the middle of my fall conference season, so I’ll be blogging intermittently.