Last week at SD, I met up with Brian Robertson of Ternary Software, a small consulting company in the Philadelphia area. They have a different approach for their first contact with a candidate: they ask candidates to fill out essays (scroll down to see the essay questions).These essay questions reflect the culture of the company. So the people who are likely to write the answers are already self-selecting the company’s culture.Not every organization can use essay questions such as these, or any essays at all. And if you do, talk to your lawyers to make sure the questions don’t discriminate against people. But I do like the idea of looking at people first, not resumes.
September 21st, 2006
I hope that when you read these posts, you came to the same conclusion I did. It’s almost impossible to detect from a resume whether or not a candidate is accustomed to an agile project, or could work on an agile project successfully. Keywords, especially, are useless when it comes to reviewing resumes. So what’s a recruiter or hiring manager to do? Look at domain expertise, glean what you can about the kinds of team the candidate has worked on, and develop a phone screen or an audition that you can use before the interview.
Phone screens don’t have to take a lot of time. Sure they’re inconvenient. One technique I saw at SD last week was the essay as a pre-interview assessment. Sure you’ll still have to read the essays, but fewer candidates will write them, so you’ll have fewer people to screen.Phone screens and essays are time consuming and possibly inconvenient. But a bad hire is more than inconvenient–it’s much expensive than any time you spend phone-screening or reading resumes.
The other posts in this series:
September 21st, 2006