Hiring For An Agile Team: Detecting Candidates Who Will Fit With the Team
Even the people who claim experience on Agile teams are not necessarily working the way your team works. And, because not everyone is using Agile approaches, some people who aren’t using strictly Agile approaches may be perfect for your team. If you’ve tried to hire people recently, you know you can’t reply on people with or without “Agile” experience to be just right for your open position—and it wasn’t a question of technical skill.
Hiring doesn’t have to be so frustrating. Instead, reframe your role as an interviewer to be that of a detective; in particular to define your culture in advance and determine in an interview whether a candidate can fit into that culture.
In this tutorial, we’ll define the essential technical and non-technical skills for your position, identify your cultural issues, and practice interviewing so all your hires can be successful.
10 minutes: Short intro about deciding what’s essential in a candidate (with an activity) (pairs or triads) 10 minutes: Use those essentials to develop behavior-description questions (in triads) 10 minutes debrief (all) 30-45 minutes: interview practice (triads, one interviewer, one candidate, one observer). I timebox each set of questions so each person has a chance to interview, be interviewed, observe. If people are adept at interviewing, wait to debrief at the end. Otherwise, debrief during. (Last year, this took all the time) 10 minutes: short intro about auditions 15 minutes: develop auditions in triads 10 minutes debrief rest of time: practice auditions and debrief
I could run this as a talk or as a 90 minute tutorial. In 90 minutes, I can’t get to auditions.