When you think about those personal qualities, think about these questions:

• With whom does this person work?
• What kind of deliverables does this person have in the short term and the long term?
• What kinds of interpersonal skills does this person need to do their job well?

Take a look at the job analysis template to see more questions. Now you’re ready to think about technical skills.

Here’s how I categorize technical skills: functional skills, subject matter domain expertise (problem-space and solution-space), tools and technology, and industry skills. Of these four areas, functional skills–how good a developer, tester, architect, designer, etc the person is, and subject matter domain expertise–how quickly the person can learn the internals of your system, matter the most. Most people can learn new tools relatively quickly. But it takes much longer to learn how to test first, or use combinatorial testing, or see the whole picture and what can go wrong, and so on. Functional skills require experience, and more than the same year of experience again and again.

When you think about the people you need, think hard about those technical skills, and which skills you really need. Tools, and familiarity with a particular tool may not be as important as the ability to work in small chunks and finish things. Or to explore the product to find really bad defects. Or to see how the system flows–or doesn’t–together.

People are not tools. Look for people, not tools.

Tweet This Post

Manual testing was never quality assurance; it was testing. And, manual testing is low-value, high cost work, especially when you compare it to automated regression testing. Now, before you assume I mean there is never a time for manual testing, no, I did not say that.

There is a time and place for exploratory testing, which tends to be more manual. There is a time and place for opportunistic testing. But the kind of system-level testing that says “Does this feature meet its acceptance criteria, and does the rest of the system still work and can we know that within a two-week timebox?” is not primarily manual testing. That’s what agile projects need. (If you’re using an incremental or iterative lifecycle, you need to know this too, just not in a two-week timebox.)

That means that agile testers have different technical skills and provide  different deliverables (and value to the project) than the kinds of testers this recruiter is accustomed to.

These testers have different functional skills, solution-space domain expertise, and tool capabilities than strictly manual testers. See Four Dimensions of Technical Skill for more information. In agile teams, some of the testers don’t look much different from developers, except that their code doesn’t release. Some of the testers might be better at sitting with a product owner and saying “What does done really look like for this feature?”

Whatever their skills, these testers are multi-dimensional people, capable of much more than manual testing. They are not second class citizens, but are valuable members of the product development team.

For you recruiters, think about what value the testers add to a project team. If you’re a tester, what skills do you need to acquire to provide more value to your project team? And, managers, does this make sense to you? Does knowing about the state of the product often provide you more value than having to wait days or weeks until you can manually finish a test run make more sense?

Tweet This Post

Instead, as part of the phone screen, say, “This job is in our ’senior engineer’ level, which has a salary range of $X,000 to $Y,000. We rarely hire above the middle of the range. Are we in the same ballpark for salary?”

If you’re a hiring manager, you don’t know what other people pay their senior engineers (or their junior ones, for that matter). If you want to control salary costs, you take the lead on this question. You already have all the power in this economy. You don’t have to put the candidate in a defensive mode before the candidate even knows what’s going on.

I was on an interview after I’d been in management for a while, and a junior HR person asked me this question. I asked, in reply, “What level is the job and what’s the range for that level? That will tell me if we are in the ballpark. I’m open for negotiation.”

The HR person replied, “No, I need to know your salary now and what you want.”

I asked, “Why?” (see why I’m a consultant now?)

“Because that’s what I need to fill in for my form.”

“Ok, say salary is negotiable.” There was no way I was going to discuss my salary with someone who didn’t know about stock, bonuses, and other potential points of salary negotiation.

“But that’s not a number.”

“Ok, Put down greater than 0 and less than a million, like this.” I wrote 0 < 1,000,000.

“What kind of math is that?” the poor HR rep said. I was unimpressed.

At the beginning of a conversation with a potential candidate, what do you care about: are we in the same ballpark, right? So, ask that question. Don’t ask another question that muddies the conversation.

Tweet This Post

1. Tell me about yourself. This question is too vague for most candidates and wastes everyone’s time. You want to know more specifics, such as how a candidate has contributed to current and previous projects, how they’ve added value to the organization.
2. Where do you want to be in 1, 2, 3, 5 years? Can anyone actually answer that question? It doesn’t provide you any information. One hiring manager told me he wanted to know how ambitious a candidate was. I asked him why he wanted to know that and he had no answer If ambition is something you’re looking for, a better question is “Tell me about a time you wanted a promotion. What did you do?”
3. Tell me about your strengths or weaknesses. This begs the candidate to turn all weaknesses into strengths and for candidates to tell you motherhood and apple pie stories about themselves. Better questions are: “Tell me about an achievement you feel proud of” and “What areas have you been working on increasing your knowledge of or increasing your skills in?”
4. Tell me about your boss. The candidate’s manager may not have been the one who hired the candidate into the organization. Without context, it’s not clear what you are asking. You might want to know “Tell me how you interact with your manager”although I’m not sure why you’d want to know. I want to know more about the candidate’s role on the team and how the team works.
5. Are you married/have children/belong to a church/<any other illegal question>? Don’t go there. Does it really matter if the candidate is married with two children or single with a dog? Or something else? It matters if the candidate can do the job. You can ask, “Are there circumstances that prevent you from being here 9-5, since we have our daily standups at 9am and we pair until 5pm?” or some other question like that.

Make sure you ask questions about the candidate’s ability to do the job, not anything to satisfy your curiosity about tangential facts.

Tweet This Post

One asked, “Is it ok to ask why?” Sure, it’s ok to ask. Just don’t have a fight about it.

When you ask why you didn’t get a job, it’s a form of feedback. And, the people providing feedback may not  be very nice about how they provide feedback. They may not be nice about it. If you are lucky enough to get this feedback, say, “Thank you.”

No matter how these people phrase it (one hiring manager said, “I don’t trust you to not look for a job once the economy improves), they are providing you valuable feedback. The colleague who heard this was astonished. “I wanted that job. I wasn’t going to look for a new one.” We discussed ways he might be able to use this experience to preempt a future hiring manager from thinking this way.

Something about your interviewing situation has created the rejection (maybe not you). Take the feedback, learn from it, and think about ways to apply it. Say, “Thank you,” and stop. Do not fight with the person giving you feedback. Who knows, that person might think of you in a while and re-open discussions. Stranger things have happened.

Tweet This Post

…“This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had the intelligence.” Shonka got as misty as a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound ex-linebacker in a black tracksuit can get. “He’s a concert pianist, you know? I really—I mean, I really—liked Joey.” And yet Harrington’s career consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and down the field. “How will that ability translate to the National Football League?” He shook his head slowly. “Shoot.”This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that?”

That’s the same problem as in technical teams, which is why we try to use auditions. But even an audition alone in front of one person or with a whiteboard is no guarantee of on-the-job success.

Read the whole article, because Gladwell relates this problem to the teacher problem: how do we detect great teachers: it’s not their degrees or strictly technical competence in their field–it’s more about how they engage everyone in the room and how they give feedback (and take feedback, although that’s just implied in the article).

Does that sound familiar to you? Working in a technical team partly about technical competence, because that’s how you get in. But that’s not how you stay in or become successful. You become successful in a job because you know how to help a team to evaluate and make a good decisions, to take and give feedback to peers, to use good judgement. These interpersonal skills are key to becoming successful in a technical job.

You can still be successful technically if you’re not superb at these interpersonal skills. But you can’t manage anything well unless you master enough of these (and other interpersonal) skills. Pay attention to your interpersonal skills in addition to your technical skills.

Tweet This Post

Luckily, we have an academic here in Massachusetts who has dedicated the past few years to looking at the impact of noncompetes. Matt Marx, who recently joined the faculty of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has made three important findings about what noncompetes do.

First, he looked at Michigan. During the decades of that state’s greatest economic growth, from 1915 to 1985, noncompete agreements were illegal. In 1985, the law changed – and Marx found that inventors were suddenly less likely to move from one company to another, and specialized inventors were much less likely to move. (I’d observe here that the last 25 years in Michigan have not been a good era to emulate.) Marx has also surveyed inventors in the speech recognition industry around the country and found that about 25 percent of those who were bound by noncompetes often took “occupational detours’’ into other technology sectors reluctantly, to avoid getting sued.

Finally, Marx’s research has found that employees bound by noncompetes tend to take jobs with large companies rather than small start-ups – in part because they believe that a larger company might be able to defend them against a potential lawsuit.

Holy moly! I knew I didn’t like non-competes, but I had no hard data on how a non-compete can work against you in hiring and in innovation.

FYI: Scott Kirsner, the columnist, has a blog, Innovation Economy, and several other articles about non-competes. See Should We Make Non-Compete Agreements Illegal in Masssachusetts? as just one.

If you are a hiring manager, learn about your non-compete agreements and see if they are preventing innovation in your organization or preventing you from hiring the people you want.

My non-US readers: are there non-competes where you work? Are they enforced?

Tweet This Post

Bob Sutton’s post, Handshakes and Job Interviews:Study Shows it is Especially Helpful for Women, explains why.

To me, the most interesting finding pertains to women.  The researchers found that, on average, women had weaker handshakes than men. Probably because their are different expectations for men and women, women’s weaker handshakes did not lead to weaker hiring recommendations (In fact, overall, the interviewers were more positively disposed to hire women than men).  BUT those women who had firmer and stronger handshakes, and used more complete grips, benefited more than men who had firm handshakes and complete grips — the researchers suggest that this effect may have been seen because men are expected to have firm shakes, and because it is more unusual among women, those women with firm handshakes were more memorable.

His post has a link to the study.

If you’re not sure how to shake, find another person because it’s hard to practice this yourself. Walk up to the other person, and respect their personal space, so stand about 2 feet away. Much more, and the person with the shorter arms has to extend his/her arm a lot and can fall off balance (that would be me). Much closer and you might be too close. Now, both people extend their hands to each other, bending at the elbow. It’s most comfortable to shake with a bent elbow. If you’re too far away, take a small step closer.

Now, slide your hand into the other person’s hand, palm to palm, and don’t stop until you meet the skin between their thumb and forefinger. All the way please. No shaking fingers. Take a firm grip. This is not a squeezing contest, so you don’t have to squeeze, just maintain a firm grip. Now, gently bring your hand up and down a couple of times. It helps to smile and say, “Nice to meet you” and use the other person’s name.

I let go after a couple of up and downs. I drop my hand to my side and maintain my smile. If you feel the other person let go, you let go too.

Handshakes are a social nicety, so learn how. And, they help establish rapport no matter where you stand in an interview.

Tweet This Post

Hiring managers: that’s a shorthand question. You know what it means, but your candidate may not. You’re looking for ways to know if this person will be successful, or what they want to do this job. Remember, some people just want a paycheck. That’s fine. Don’t assume they will be out the door as soon as the economy picks up–the economy has to pick up darn fast for them to be out the door soon. Instead of asking a shorthand question, ask the question you really want to ask. That question might be:

1. “What specific talents, skills, qualities, preferences do you bring to this position?” I prefer to analyze the job myself and ask questions about those things based on what I need, but you might hear interesting insights from candidates. One candidate told me she had the maturity to work with a relatively young team, and the young-at-heartedness to not hold them back from insightful ways to solve problems. She was right.
2. “Tell me about the things you’ve been learning recently.” (Wait for an answer.) “How does this job fit into your learnings?”
3. “Tell me about a time when you took a job you didn’t look perfect for. What did you do?”
4. “Tell me about a time you took a job you looked perfect for. What did you do?”
5. “Do you have any concerns about this job?”
6. “Tell me how you expect to help me with this job.” This one is particularly difficult to answer well, since the candidate may not know how she can help.

Avoid using shorthand to the question you really want to ask. If you want to ask “Why will you consider a job that pays 20k less than your most recent position,” ask that. Otherwise, think abou the question you want to ask, and if it’s legal, ask away. That makes you a more attractive hiring manager and the job much more attractive.

Tweet This Post

If you think of normal as conforming to a type (see normal) and as average, then most of us want to be abnormal Should you specifically hire for “abnormal”?

If you are in an entrepeneurial environment, yet. In a high innovation environment, yes. In a place that takes risks, yes. But not everyone works in places like that. Hiring for people who have a wacky way of looking at the world is part of cultural fit. Don’t just hire people who are not average, who don’t conform because it’s an interesting idea. Make sure you have cultural fit, too.

But I still like the idea of not hiring “normal” people

Tweet This Post