Hiring Technical People

Hiring Strategy #7: Too Many of Your New Hires Aren’t “Working Out”

I coached a manager who’d hired seven people in the previous year–and had fired five of them. His manager was ready to toss him out, too. Instead, the senior manager decided this manager needed coaching about how to hire people.

When I asked the manager about his interviewing style, he explained that he used what I call irrelevant and hypothetical questions. (In the links, I suggest ways to use those questions. This manager was not a savvy interviewer.) In addition, he made all the decisions about hiring himself.For this strategy, review and possibly update your job analysis. Develop at least two behavior description questions for each quality, preference, non-technical skills, and technical skill. Develop some auditions. And, practice your interviewing with someone else, someone who will give you feedback. Finally, use your interviewing team to help make the hiring decisions.

When people aren’t working out, too often the problem is the hiring, not the person. It’s possible to make great hiring decisions. It does require some up-front work and practice–especially of learning how to interview successfully.

Add comment July 3rd, 2006

Hiring Strategy #6: You Need to Deliver Faster

So you thought the project was on schedule. And now, someone in power has requested you finish the project earlier. Earlier than you can manage with the people you’ve got.You have a bunch of options, including moving to 2-4 week iterations. But that’s something I would normally discuss on Managing Product Development So, here are the options you might use for this problem:

• Offload other work from the current project staff, and bring in new people to do that work.
• Reorganize the work so you can “surgically” add more people to the project, in a way that won’t negatively affect the project. (Brooks’ Law says adding more people to a late project makes it later. I agree. And, if you’re on a project where adding a certain kind of tester or writer would make it easier for the developers to make progress, you can avoid Brooks’ Law.)

I can only think of these two options, but there are likely more.When adding people to a team who’s already meshed, cultural fit is critical. Sure, the technical skills are important, because the team doesn’t want to have to train the new people. But cultural fit will trump technical skills every time in this case.

1 comment July 3rd, 2006