SlackerManager agrees with me in his How do you hire great people?. I said Hire for Intangibles; You Can Teach Technical Skills.
It’s a person’s attitude, passion, and ability to work with other people that counts.
2 comments February 23rd, 2008
I spoke with a couple of recruiters this week. They’ve been specializing in finding test people for the last 10-15 years. (I used one of them 15 years ago, the last time I was hiring testers.) They both asked a question like this, “With all this Agile stuff, where am I going to find the testers I need?”
Agile breaks the some of the barriers between developers and testers. Both developers and testers need to write code (or scripts). The developers write small internally-facing tests. The testers write small and sometimes larger externally-facing tests. The difference is that the developers write some code that ships. All the testers’ code stays on-site.
If you’re a hiring manager, make sure you train the testers who are interested in writing code and scripts. If you’re a tester, learn to write some scripts, in some programming language, not a test tool’s proprietary scripting language. If you’re a recruiter, have a talk-to-talk with your hiring managers and tell them the testers they want to hire are worth what developers are worth–because they are developers.
Add comment February 15th, 2008
You’re interviewing someone for a position at your company. You remember working with that person years ago, and you were unimpressed. Maybe it was the jerk factor, maybe it was the way he didn’t quite finish work, or maybe it was her perfume. Whatever it was, you were not excited about the candidate then, and you would like to avoid working with the candidate in the future. What do you do?
Tell the hiring manager. Explain with examples. “Back 10 years ago, when the candidate and I worked at SmallerCo, I was unimpressed by these things.” (Explain the things. If it’s not finishing, explain what you thought done meant and what the candidate did.) “When you check references, can you please check on this?”
The hiring manager should then ask the references, “Can you give me an example of a time the candidate did a great job finishing something?” and “Can you give me an example of a time the candidate had trouble finishing work?” and “How often do you think the candidate was great at finishing and how often did the candidate have trouble?” (Change this question to be the issue concerning you.)
You should let your manager know about your reservations–that’s the unintentional reference part. But you should make allowances for people having changed over time.
2 comments February 11th, 2008
Kristan Vingrys has a great post, A question I have found useful when interviewing candidates. His question:
You are allocated a training budget, what is the first course, conference or workshop you would attend?
This is an excellent question to see if people are keeping up with thinking about what they want to learn. I would follow up with “Why?” The one concern I have is that there are some great candidate who’ve been beaten unto thinking they don’t “deserve” training. They might not have an idea. (Even when my management refused me training, I always knew about some course I wanted to take.)
3 comments February 8th, 2008
In a recent workshop, one of the participants explained, “I like to ask personal questions to see if the candidate will fit in with the team socially.”
Well, that’s an illegal discrimination. * in the US, but not in other places. (It’s illegal because if you reject a candidate based on their answer, you’re discriminating about something not work-related, a big no-no in the US.) Even for non-US interviewers, I still think it’s a bad idea.
People enjoy different activities at different times in their lives. Before I had children, I took bicycling vacations, camping and cycling for a week or two. But by the time I had children, there was no way I was going to spend precious vacation time doing something active when I could sleep in 
Even without the obvious difference of kids/no kids, people choose to spend their time and money differently–a difference that doesn’t make a bit of difference for the job.
Assessing cultural fit is important, and the questions you want to ask might be some of these:
Now you’ve got a conversation about work, and how people fit in (or not) at work–a much more relevant set of questions than what people do in their off time.
1 comment February 6th, 2008