Hiring Great People: Focus on Non-Technical Skills
February 23rd, 2008
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.
Entry Filed under: hiring decision, hiring strategy
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1 Comment Add your own
1. Fazal Majid | February 24th, 2008 at 1:54 am
You can teach specific technical skills. That said, programming requires a certain mindset or wiring in the brain only about 5% or so of the population possesses, and I have seen too many people who do not have that mindset yet go into programming because it pays well, with the predictable result that they suck at it and are miserable working in that line. In the interviewing you need to make sure the candidate has at least that kind of analytic mindset, usually by watching them solve real-world problems (not trick problems like Microsoft is alleged to do).
Good testers similarly all have a slightly different approach than coders, less analytical and more exploratory “what if I do that, will it break?”, that is unfortunately very hard to test for.
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