I’ve received at least a half-dozen requests for help finding people in the last week. So it’s certainly time to think about ways to find candidates. (I have a whole chapter on sourcing strategy and examples in Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds).
In the meantime, if you just want to consider technical societies, consider these:
For developers, try local chapters of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) or IEEE. Here in the Boston area, the GBCACM (Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM) holds 3 days of training in the spring and another 3 days in the fall, along with a variety of meetings. The Boston section of IEEE has a bazillion SIGs (Special Interest Groups), and monthly meetings on almost anything you can think about that’s a technical field.
For process, QA, test, and metrics people, try your local (or relatively local) Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN). The SEI has some resources for getting SPINs started. But once the SPINs start up, they take on the local flavor of the community, and especially the program chair. (I was program chair for Boston SPIN for a few years, and I definitely tilted the program towards more pragmatic approaches to process improvement.) I’ve spoken at a number of SPINs across the country. Some have more orientation towards process, some have more for testing, some are much more interested in metrics.
For project managers, try the local chapter of the PMI (Project Management Institute). I’ve spoken at a number of PMI chapters, so they’re not all PMBOK-by-the-book
For testers, try the SPIN meetings, possibly some IEEE meetings (depending on the topic), ASQ (American Society for Quality) and QAI (Quality Assurance Institute).
For writers, try the Society of Technical Communications.
For support staff people (especially senior staff and managers), try local chapters of the Help Desk Institute
For specific tools, look for user groups. For example, if you’re looking for a configuration management person, (build or release engineer), consider the user group for the tool you’re using.
When you network at a local chapter, remember that you’ll have more success if you attend a meeting rather than just send/email a position description. And you’ll have more success if you attend meetings on a regular basis, rather than just when you need candidates. The more frequently you attend meetings, the more people will remember you and the more likely you are to have other people suggest you as a possible employer.If I’ve forgotten your favorite technical society, please comment and/or send me email. I’ll add it to the list.
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 superficial questions and don’t ask follow-up questions.
They want to know what questions the candidates have–even if they haven’t asked the candidate any questions yet.
I generally need 45 minutes to interview a candidate with any experience. I don’t sell the candidate; I let my questions do that for me. I ask candidates about their questions at the end of my 45 minutes.Here’s how I structure my interviews:
First 30 seconds to one minute (I don’t time this): Greet the candidate, walk the candidate to our private area, ask innocuous questions until we arrive at the private area for the interview.
Next 20 minutes: ask questions, in a conversational fashion, with the candidate. Focus on behavior-description questions.
Check on how I’m proceeding with the interview. Do I need to speed up/slow down? If I need to slow down, I’ll ask if the candidate has questions. If I need to speed up, I’ll mentally review the last few minutes and see if I’ve allowed the candidate to ramble on or move to a tangent. If so, I think about how I’ll ask the candidate to tighten his/her responses.
Next 20 minutes: Finish asking my behavior-description questions.
Last 5 minutes. Ask if candidate has any questions. Start moving candidate to next interviewer.
If you ask behavior-description questions and build one off another, it’s easy to use 45 minutes and to feel as if you’re using the time well.So review how you’ve been interviewing and see if structuring your interview time might change what you do.
I’m so pleased to announce that Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People is available in Japanese. Shoeisha is the publisher.See the picture of the book in margin.
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. If you’re an instrumentation company, imagine you’re bringing together some chemistry and physics into your already-existing biological analysis. Whatever it is, you’re looking for someone new and different from any of the current people you have–and you, the hiring manager, don’t know how to ask questions of candidates. What do you do?
Well, it’s job analysis time. When you analyze this job, one of the biggest pieces of it will be how well the candidate explains his/her knowledge of his/her field, and how well that person can integrate his/her knowledge into the team. I’m not sure what else the analysis would tell you, but these seem to be the minimum for me.
Converting that analysis into an interview plan, I would start by asking the person to do a presentation to see how well this person explains their domain expertise. I would ask a bunch of behavior-description questions about problem-solving skills solo and within a team. And, I would ask for an extended audition, probably spending a half-day or a day with the project team, seeing how everyone’s ideas intersect and how well people work together. (Be prepared to pay for a candidate’s time here.) And I’d ask for references and check on how much in-depth knowledge this person has.It sure isn’t easy. But it’s not impossible. You can hire people when you don’t know how to do their jobs. But spend time preparing, so you can ask good questions and assess the answers and any auditions.
Auren Hoffman has an intriguing post, It is too risky not to take a risk, suggesting that people take what appears to be the “risky” job rather than the safe job.I see it differently. I don’t see jobs as risks, but as opportunities. I tried to select my jobs based on where I would learn the most. The two times I took a job where I wasn’t going to learn, I got fired. (I was moving too fast for the rest of the organization.)
I see the risk a little differently. I don’t see the risk in what appear to be safe or risky jobs in terms of money or advancement or whatever. I see the risk in not matching the culture to the candidate. When I see unhappy employees or frustrated managers, I typically see a mismatch of culture–both in what the hiring manager hired for, and what the candidate was looking for.
The key for hiring managers and candidates is to match the opportunity (and culture) with the candidate. Otherwise, the match is too risky.
During a recent workshop, one of the hiring managers asked, “How do we attract people to unattractive jobs, such as contract or temporary positions?”
The first thing is to change your mindset. This job might be unattractive to you, but it’s bound to be attractive to other people. This job is an opportunity to some people. Think about who they are and what they would want from a job like that.
If you think about who would like a temp or contract job, start thinking about people who are not willing or able to work long hours or all year, or who would like to keep up their skills, but need to be able to take more personal time. Lots of people fit that description, including new moms who aren’t sure whether they want to work full time (or are sure they don’t), current undergraduate students, older people who might otherwise retire, people studying for a graduate degree, or people who have other family responsibilities. I’m sure you can think of more types of people. To these people, not having to work overtime, or all the time is a wonderful thing, an attractive job, not an unattractive job.
Part of analyzing the job is to determine what would make it attractive to some set of people. Remember that not all candidates are like you, and what’s attractive to one person is not to another. And vice versa.
If you haven’t yet read Why We Hate HR, it’s time. The main points of the article are:
HR should help find the best hires
HR should nurture the stars
HR should foster a productive work environment
Keith Hammonds, the author, says
HR should be joined to business strategy at the hip.
Ahem. I disagree. All the things Hammonds says is in the purview of HR is not HR’s to perform or manage. All of the people stuff has to be the job of management, from the first level technical lead through senior management. There’s a reason why HR is a staff position. HR does not make products. HR does not deliver services. HR does not sell anything. HR can only enable those people who perform line positions.Which means I certainly don’t hate HR. But I don’t believe that HR can do the things Mr. Hammonds says they should do. I believe he’s missed the whole reason HR exists.
HR exists to keep the company out of court.
Look, someone’s gotta do it. And since much of the time managers don’t know what to do or how to do it (Esther and I try with Behind Closed Doors to show managers), HR has to be around to pick up the pieces.But when I say I don’t hate HR, I have an even more dangerous opinion: in too many organizations, HR is irrelevant. And that’s just plain wrong. HR is in a unique position to help managers and staff perform their jobs better. They could facilitate retrospectives and see where people need training. They could train hiring managers and teams how to hire. They could train people on how to provide feedback and coach. All of those interpersonal skills are difficult for technical people to learn and they are all necessary to learn. I suspect many technical people started off the way I did: I thought I was going to sit in front of a computer all day and not talk to anyone — after all, that’s what I did in college
So, yes, HR should be “joined to business strategy at the hip.” But I suspect my joining is quite different than Mr. Hammonds’ joining. I think HR should act like a service organization. HR should help hiring managers analyze the job and write a great job description. HR should help with recruiting, by realizing recruiting is different from benefits, and a recruiter recruits full time, and by suggesting to hiring managers alternative recruiting techniques. HR should train people in how to interview and how to create auditions. HR should make sure the processes to bring people on board quickly work and work well. And, HR should read Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards and work on alternatives to yearly evaluations that make managers and employees nuts. So there’s a range of tactical to strategic work, all of which would make many HR groups I’ve met be much more useful to the organization.If you’re in HR, how relevant are you? Can you perform any of the tasks above? If not, why not? And if you’re already performing these tasks, bravo. You’re the kind of HR person we want and need more of.
