Johanna Rothman, author of Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies and Nerds, was responsible for an interesting session on Tuesday afternoon. Her topic was Hiring for an Agile Team, and her premise was that it is primarily people, not skills, that make your agile team successful.
She differentiated hiring for a traditional team by stating that differences between people are more pronounced in agile teams, as successful teams tend to be more collaborative, cross-functional and indulge in intense focus while blurring traditional team roles. This creates a need for new team members to be flexible, take initiative and respect and like each other to the extent required by close week on a daily basis.
She therefore focuses on the people side of hiring – as she said, the technical side has been done to death. However, unlike the titans of the industry such as Google and Microsoft she actively discouraged riddles and other abstract approaches. Instead, she proposed the use of two primary methods: auditions and behaviour description questions.
Auditions are any method of viewing the candidates work first hand. This could encompass their solving a business problem, working with the team in an exercise or working together on the whiteboard. Instead of relying on the expressed abilities of the candidate you get a first hand view of their actual approach.
Behaviour description questions are those horrible sticky question everyone loves to hate – “Give me an example of a time where you…” or “Tell me about a time when you…” – open ended questions that force the candidate to articulate an experience. Both the articulation and the experience chosen offer a lot of information, as long as you limit it to a recent experience – after all, people mature and change, and an experience several years old tells you little about current approach.
She also suggested a few other tools – closed questions to establish facts, perhaps leading into an open question; hypothetical questions to see how the candidate may react to certain circumstances; and meta-questions to draw the candidate into the interview and force a switch of perspective.
Along with riddles, she suggested that traditional questions such as ‘why do you want to work here’ are pointless – after all, few candidates are honest, and if they really want to work specifically for you you’ll never need to ask that question. She also cautioned against non-work related questions, as they can easily run afoul of anti-discrimination laws.
Her closing thought was that a good interview should be like a conversation – finding a good cultural fit is a two way street, and each interview will demand different questions. And while planning never goes amiss, the interviewer must be as agile as the candidate to get the best out of the process.
