Posts filed under 'interview'
I ran a workshop recently about hiring for an agile team, and one of the people learning to interview said, “I want a candidate who can take criticism.” I replied, “Don’t you mean feedback?” He asked, “What’s the difference?”
Oh, boy. Plenty. Criticism is when you you’re looking at a piece of code and you say, “This seems brain dead.” But if you say, “I’m confused by this piece of code,” you’ve provided me some feedback. I guarantee you, you want candidates who can take feedback.
So, if you want to know if a candidate can take feedback, here are some possible interview questions:
- “Have you recently been in a position where someone reviewed your work?” (wait for a yes answer.) “What happened?”
- Offer to work with the candidate in an audition (possibly pairing) and review as you go.
- Ask for feedback on some of you work as part of an audition and see how the candidate provides feedback.
- “How do you know your work is good?” Wait and see where the question goes. You might be able to follow up with a question such as, “Is there a way you prefer feedback on your work?”
Asking candidates about their ability to take feedback is useful. Asking about criticism is not.
March 26th, 2008
Joan Lloyd has a great post that I saw at Don’t turn down the new job before asking these questions by Joan Lloyd bizjournals.com. Her questions are:
* What specific results are you expecting in the first three months? Six? One year? How will you measure those results?
* To whom can I go for questions as I’m learning my responsibilities? How much time will you have to devote to getting me up to speed?
* Who are the strongest performers on the staff and would they be willing resources to help me with day-to-day questions and processes?
* What are the biggest problems that need resolution within the first six months? What has been done thus far? Who would I have to work with to settle these issues?
* Why have you gone to the outside to fill this position?
* May I meet some of the staff before making my final decision? That way we can make sure it’s a good fit from all perspectives.
If you’re a hiring manager, you need to answer these questions before you start interviewing, so you can answer a candidate. Yes, you need to answer them.
March 4th, 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.)
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:
- “Tell me about your greatest successes. What caused your success?”
- “Tell me about your greatest challenges. What caused them?”
- “How has the work environment helped you or prevented you from being successful?”
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.
* Thank you to askamanager for your
comment. You are correct; unless you hit on a protected class, the questions aren’t actually illegal. Ill-considered, not helpful, but not illegal.
February 6th, 2008
I was supposed to be doing an informational interview with an upcoming college grad now. She cancelled because she felt terrible. She said, “I’ve been feeling nauseous all day. I really wanted to talk to you when I’m at my best. Can we reschedule?”
You betcha we can. If I’m going to give my time to someone, I want to know they will use it wisely. I bet you do too.
If you’re a hiring manager and you can’t give the candidate 100% of you, postpone the phone screen or pull yourself out of the in-person interview loop.
If you’re a candidate and you’ve got a bad head cold, please reschedule. If you can’t get the nausea under control, please reschedule. If you have pneumonia, please, please, please reschedule. I don’t want to get sick. I will respect you more for explaining you don’t want to infect the rest of us. You need to give 100% of yourself to the interviewing process.
January 22nd, 2008
I met a software developer recently, who studied physics as an undergrad. He’s now working in an IT organization on financial processing software.
He’s part of the interviewing team for his organization. They’re trying to hire 6-7 more developers before the end of the year. He told me, “I like to ask a question about physics, to see how smart the candidates are.” I asked him how many candidates he’d rejected due to his question. “Only 2 out of 5.”
Ouch. He rejected 2 potential candidates not because of an answer that’s relevant to the job, but to an answer that is irrelevant to the job.
Instead of asking a question that you think will get you information about how smart a candidate is, ask questions that really tell you what you need to know.
- “Tell me about a time you had to learn an application quickly. What did you do?”
- “Tell me about a time you had to bring someone else up to speed on a system. What did you do?”
- “Tell me about a time you got stuck on a problem. What did you do?”
All of these questions are much better than asking a candidate about physics, art history, Spanish, or anything else you took in school. And, they’re relevant to the job.
Don’t ask about physics. Ask about job-relevant experiences. You won’t be falsely rejecting potential candidates. And you won’t be opening yourself up to a lawsuit about discrimination. Ask about issues relevant to the job you have open now, not experiences you had in school.
October 3rd, 2007
Imagine this scenario. You have a number of openings, some for senior positions. Maybe you even work for a large company that’s highly attractive for potential candidates. To manage the phone screens and interviews, you send out a pre-interview set of questions. There’s a variety of questions, and the last one is about salary.Stop right there. Do not ask the salary question. Ok, maybe you can ask it of someone with up to 5-8 years of experience. Do not ask the question of an almost-senior person, and certainly not a senior-level person.Here’s why. The senior candidate has compensation in many forms: money and stock are just two obvious forms. More senior people may have more freedom to set strategy, both for their domain and for the business itself. They may have learning opportunities that are not obviously covered in compensation. They might have specific time off or the option to take more vacation. Maybe they get to fly business class for flights of a certain duration. (I do; I wouldn’t consider a job that made me fly coach over an ocean.) But senior people are not going to make these demands at the beginning of a salary negotiation. They want to discuss the context of the job with you, before they start asking.If you ask the salary question before you’ve built rapport in a phone screen or in an interview, you’re telling the potential candidate, “We want to save money on your position.” Of course you do. But do you want to save money before you know what the candidate has to offer?Be smart. Save the salary question for a real-time conversation with a technical hiring manager or a technical person. Too often, the HR folks don’t know the value of all the compensation pieces; just the cost.Salary is a complex issue the more senior the candidate. Don’t make it an elimination question for a senior person, unless you really do mean to eliminate people based on salary. And, if you need to make it an elimination question, why are you looking for someone senior?
August 29th, 2007
Last week, at the Agile 2007 conference, I ran a tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team.” As part of the tutorial, I ask people to group themselves into threes, where one person interviews, one is the candidate, and one is the observer.It never fails. An interviewer thinks they’re asking one question, but the candidate hears something else. The longer the question, the more likely the candidate is to answer a different question.The session went well, but with all the fire alarms, I didn’t take my normal notes. I’m paraphrasing here what I think the interviewer asked and what the candidate heard:
Interviewer: Think back on your career. Can you tell me about a time you found yourself challenged? What did you do?Candidate: Where have I failed?
The interviewer’s question isn’t bad; it’s just a little much. Here’s one way to make it more clear:
On your current project, have you noticed any challenges?This is a closed question, and gives the candidate a chance to think. It’s also time-bound to the recent past. And, it doesn’t specifically ask for challenges to the candidate.Assuming the candidate says yes, you can use this question next: “Ok, give me an example.” Listen for that answer, and then ask, “Were you able to change the situation that caused the challenges?” Wait for the answer. Assuming a Yes, ask “How?” If a No, ask, “Can you give me an example on this project when you saw a problem and fixed it?”If necessary, walk the person to the project before the current one.
If you keep your questions short and focused on current or most recent projects, you’re more likely to hear an answer to the question you wanted to ask.
Labels: interview
August 21st, 2007
A management audition is similar to a technical audition, but because the functional skills are so different, and because senior technical people may also require some management capability, I see these as two different kinds of auditions.As usual, your mileage may vary. Here are some possible management auditions:
- Facilitate a meeting
- Give a presentation
- Analyze some budget information. Don’t forget to ask what they would do with that budget and why
- Organize a project portfolio
- Develop an audition for a manager. (ok, that’s slightly evil
If you have other good ideas, please comment away.
Labels: audition, interview
July 27th, 2007
In his comment, John asked about auditions for a business analyst. The audition will vary, depending on the kind of projects you do. Here are some possibilities:
- For a more serial lifecycle, you could ask a BA to help elicit requirements. You’d listen to the way the candidate interviewed, if the candidate interrupted the speaker, if the candidate asked meta questions.
- For a more agile lifecycle, you could ask the candidate to make user stories from bullet lists of requirements.
- For any lifecycle, ask the candidate to explain his or her favorite way to express requirements. Then take a product and ask the candidate to write down the requirements for that product.
Make sure your audition matches your environment. I might not have described something useful for you, so adapt my suggestions.
Labels: audition, interview
July 24th, 2007
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