Hiring Technical People

Guest Blogging on Computerworld.com

I’m guest blogging this week on computerworld.com. It’s different from what I normally post here.

1 comment October 26th, 2005

Value, not Education or Experience

Experience and Education makes the point

We hire people to complete tasks and run functions (not really–we employ talent to create value, but I?ll try to stick to the point).

He goes on to say

The problem is, both of these (years of experience and education) are unreliable measures of whether someone can do a task or run a function.

I certainly agree. Previous posts are here and here.

The perceived ability to create value is what hiring managers pay for.

Add comment October 25th, 2005

Avoiding the Butterfly Effect

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 not scale.

In my opinion, Amit doesn’t take his thesis far enough. All too often, those founders use shorthand of some sort to describe candidates. It’s worth the time it takes to describe just what you want in an employee, so you don’t have to depend on only the original employees being the only ones who could interview candidates. (How will other people learn to interview? What happens when people move out of their original roles into other roles?) A little job analysis goes a long way. Especially if you want to avoid the butterfly effect.

1 comment October 20th, 2005

Detecting Thinking Skills

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 the next set of features and projects
• The ability to mentor others, choosing paths that would fit less-seasoned staff
• The ability to discuss product strategy with people across the organization.

Those answers weren’t what I expected when said “critical thinking skills.” But they are. (I walked him through a partial job analysis until he could explain what he wanted.) And now, we were ready to develop some questions.

Here are some of the questions I suggested he consider and adapt:

• For the architectural problem thinking: “When was the last time you worked on this kind of architecture? … How did you decide what to change? How did you change it?”
• For the cross-functional planning: “What was your role the most recent time your organization planned what to do when? … How did that work?”
• For mentoring: “When did you last take on a mentoring role? … What did you do?”
• Product strategy: “Has there been a time when you didn’t agree with the product strategy? … What did you do? … Has there been a time when others had to be persuaded to your strategy? … What did you do?”

These questions all start with closed questions to establish the candidate has done something like this, and then move onto behavior description questions to hear the story of the candidate has worked.When the manager asked me about critical thinking skills, I thought he was going to talk about test creativity or debugging/development creativity. Without a quick job analysis, we would never have been speaking the same language. And, without analyzing what he really wanted, he would never have asked or adapted these questions for his candidates.

It’s ok to say “critical thinking skills” as a shortcut when you’re initially thinking about a job. But the context of those skills will help you define questions that will elicit what a candidate has done and how relevant that work is to you.

Add comment October 20th, 2005

Guidelines for Candidates

Christian Sepulveda has a lovely post, Guidelines for Being a Strong Job Candidate. Some of his gems (these are all from his post):

• A prospective employer has no attention span whatsoever.
• You are selling yourself to an employer.
• What would make it a “no-brainer” to hire me?

Notice his emphasis on communication skills given that he does Agile projects. It’s worth a read.

Add comment October 19th, 2005