What philosophy do you use when hiring new members for the team? The tendency for many teams is to create an interview hazing process. Requiring interviewees to run a gauntlet of silly questions, riddles, etc. Is it not obvious that this will result in a poor hiring decision?
If you ask an experienced, knowledgable HR person they can tell you how poor the hiring process really is. Ask a researcher and they will tell you that it is one of the poorest business process for producing the desired results. Yet almost every organization continues this tried, but not true process.
Google, being a big data company has done it's own research on the topic. Read the results.
In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
It may amaze you the first several times you do this. The people you think did well in the Q&A might not do so well in the hands on the keyboard, pairing exercise. It may be that they just don't know how to code. It may be that they can code but have never used a modern IDE and haven't the foggiest idea about keyboard short cuts, or built in refactoring tools. Or it may be that you find out that they cannot pair program - they refuse to verbalize their thoughts, they don't want a pairing partner. If these aspects of being a rock star developer are important to you - a test is a really good idea.
Menlo Innovation has described an interesting an alternative interview process. While I'm sure it has continued to evolve they use a pair programing and skills observation technique to find candidates for their culture (A 2002 whitepaper - Extreme Interviewing). Read about it in Joy Inc. How we build a workplace people love by Richard Sheridan or take a tour of Menlo.
Does your hiring process end with the offer letter? Many companies court a candidate up until they arrive to sign the I9 document. But then the dating is over, sign the non-compete, the intellectual property, the first born documents and you are OURS (evil laugh).
A Closer Look at Behavior-Based Interviewing
How to ACE the Behavioral Interview as an agile candidate by Shirly Ronen-Harel. A nice set of tips and principles for the hiring group to perform their tasks, the results desired would be hiring people that show and behave in the open-mindset.
Many companies use the try-it before you buy-it technique. They hire new employees on a probation period, or they use the contract-to-hire option. It amazes me at how little they exercise the opt-out aspect of these techniques. I doubt they get the value out of these techniques.
Here's a technique that apparently works. Offer the new employee a bonus to quit, right now in the introductory training days, just leave and take the money. Yes, it seems a bit crazy, yet it works for some very high stress, high turnover support jobs at Zappos. Wonder why?
BusinessWeek: Why Zappos Offers New Hires $2,000 to Quit
Because Zappos takes the time to explain the real job, the dirty underbelly of the job, explains their culture and the way they handle terribly rude customers and then a Zappos trainer will make you an offer you can't refuse. That is unless you have already decide that this will be a great place to work, that you resonate with this crazy culture, that you will feel good letting your freak-flag fly in their offices. Wow - they get to cultural match in a matter of days. And they pay for people to opt-out. Turns out this is great business.
Does your company do an indoctrination training course. The military is famous for their boot-camp. Those are awesome, few companies put that much energy into training raw recruits. Now the typical is about 4 hours of the mandatory harassment training videos and about a VP speaking about the wow-factors of working here.
I just went through an awesome 2 day course at my new company. It didn't happen in the first week. They had an onboarding training but then scheduled the new employee training several weeks out. That was a nice touch. But the greatest part was that the executives all showed up to welcome and educate the new employees to the company. Taking time to explain culture, mission and the complex relationships that exist. It was a true learning experience. All the traditional HR onboarding crap was separate. This allow the focus to be upon the people and the relationships.
See Also:
Neil deGrasse Tyson - video clip: Knowledge as Process vs Knowledge as Fact
Creating a Product Design Hiring Guide - by Isaak Hayes
What would happen if you did this for your team's next hire - generalize beyond the UX/UI concept in this article to any role you wish to hire. See Show me the SKILZ of your cross-functional team.
Make Bad Hires by Bob Marshall - the FlowchainSensei
Joy, INC by Richard Sheridan - describes their group hiring process and practices. I just got a job at USAA and they were using the Menlo Innovation's model of hiring.
Scrum Masters valued higher than Project Managers empirical evidence via Indeed.
If you ask an experienced, knowledgable HR person they can tell you how poor the hiring process really is. Ask a researcher and they will tell you that it is one of the poorest business process for producing the desired results. Yet almost every organization continues this tried, but not true process.
Google, being a big data company has done it's own research on the topic. Read the results.
In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
There are many reasons people choose to leave a company, here is one top three list:So back to the hiring process. Do you use a practice of real life activity to assess the candidate? I would if I were you. I've done pair programming interviews with candidates. It is very enlightening. People that pass the verbal Q&A interview process then sit down at a keyboard and solve a real coding example problem. We use a TDD example. Something like the classic convert a roman numeral into decimal.
- Disengaged with organizational mission
- Lack of respect for co-workers
Google found that the boss aspect was the largest variable in attrition rates. So to mitigate it they started doing quarterly performance reviews (not less, but the non-intuitive inverse - more). This resulted in better review ratings for bosses.
- A terrible boss
It may amaze you the first several times you do this. The people you think did well in the Q&A might not do so well in the hands on the keyboard, pairing exercise. It may be that they just don't know how to code. It may be that they can code but have never used a modern IDE and haven't the foggiest idea about keyboard short cuts, or built in refactoring tools. Or it may be that you find out that they cannot pair program - they refuse to verbalize their thoughts, they don't want a pairing partner. If these aspects of being a rock star developer are important to you - a test is a really good idea.
Menlo Innovation has described an interesting an alternative interview process. While I'm sure it has continued to evolve they use a pair programing and skills observation technique to find candidates for their culture (A 2002 whitepaper - Extreme Interviewing). Read about it in Joy Inc. How we build a workplace people love by Richard Sheridan or take a tour of Menlo.
 |
| ACE the Behavioral Interview |
A Closer Look at Behavior-Based Interviewing
How to ACE the Behavioral Interview as an agile candidate by Shirly Ronen-Harel. A nice set of tips and principles for the hiring group to perform their tasks, the results desired would be hiring people that show and behave in the open-mindset.
Many companies use the try-it before you buy-it technique. They hire new employees on a probation period, or they use the contract-to-hire option. It amazes me at how little they exercise the opt-out aspect of these techniques. I doubt they get the value out of these techniques.
Here's a technique that apparently works. Offer the new employee a bonus to quit, right now in the introductory training days, just leave and take the money. Yes, it seems a bit crazy, yet it works for some very high stress, high turnover support jobs at Zappos. Wonder why?
BusinessWeek: Why Zappos Offers New Hires $2,000 to Quit
Because Zappos takes the time to explain the real job, the dirty underbelly of the job, explains their culture and the way they handle terribly rude customers and then a Zappos trainer will make you an offer you can't refuse. That is unless you have already decide that this will be a great place to work, that you resonate with this crazy culture, that you will feel good letting your freak-flag fly in their offices. Wow - they get to cultural match in a matter of days. And they pay for people to opt-out. Turns out this is great business.
Does your company do an indoctrination training course. The military is famous for their boot-camp. Those are awesome, few companies put that much energy into training raw recruits. Now the typical is about 4 hours of the mandatory harassment training videos and about a VP speaking about the wow-factors of working here.
I just went through an awesome 2 day course at my new company. It didn't happen in the first week. They had an onboarding training but then scheduled the new employee training several weeks out. That was a nice touch. But the greatest part was that the executives all showed up to welcome and educate the new employees to the company. Taking time to explain culture, mission and the complex relationships that exist. It was a true learning experience. All the traditional HR onboarding crap was separate. This allow the focus to be upon the people and the relationships.
See Also:
Neil deGrasse Tyson - video clip: Knowledge as Process vs Knowledge as Fact
Creating a Product Design Hiring Guide - by Isaak Hayes
What would happen if you did this for your team's next hire - generalize beyond the UX/UI concept in this article to any role you wish to hire. See Show me the SKILZ of your cross-functional team.
Make Bad Hires by Bob Marshall - the FlowchainSensei
Joy, INC by Richard Sheridan - describes their group hiring process and practices. I just got a job at USAA and they were using the Menlo Innovation's model of hiring.
Scrum Masters valued higher than Project Managers empirical evidence via Indeed.
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