A great article on How to Hire a Programmer.
A great article on How to Hire a Programmer.
Whiteboard programming puzzles are a very common interview technique for testing programmers, however they aren’t necessarily a predictor of the candidates performance in a real scenario. The team at Squared shared how they over came this by using pair programming during the interview process: … we try to solve this disconnect between the traditional interview [...]
Finding talent is hard at the best of times. Usually, great engineers are working for someone else. With the amount of funding available today, often they are working for themselves. Sean Parker recently spoke about this at the Technomany conference: Little startups are ridiculously overfunded. The market is ridiculously overcrowded with early stage investors. This [...]
The VP of Engineering at EngineYard, Tammer Saleh, shared his criteria for hiring developers: judgement. I take responsibility for figuring out if he has good judgement. To do so, I take him out for a beer, and I ask a couple of leading questions: What’s your least favorite part of Ruby and the Ruby on [...]
Further to my previous post about selection criteria, I found this great post from Elad on his: I have found that the two biggest causes of having to fire an employee at an early stage startup are a lack of culture fit, and the inability to Get Shit Done. I don’t care how smart someone [...]
Ben has a great post on how a good HR company can provide quality assurance (QA) for your management team. Part of the checklist specifically relates to recruitment: Do you sharply understand the skills and talents required to succeed in every open position? Are your interviewers well prepared? Do your managers and employees do an [...]
One criteria I recommend including on your list for selecting candidates is the ability to communicate Core Communication Skills Some of the areas communication is critical in: Teamwork – discussions with team members on ideas, both in finding more details from others, and in sharing their own ideas. Stakeholder communication – presenting ideas to stakeholders [...]
The Business of Software blog has a great interview with Scott Farquhar, the Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, where they discuss hiring among other things. As the competition for talent continues to heat up, your focus needs to be more and more on finding candidates to interview for your company. Scott covers some of the [...]
In a recent Ruby Rogues podcast, Josh Susser mentioned that the key performance metric Pivotal Tracker uses for hiring is empathy. Why empathy? For Pivotal, most of the time their programmers will be pair programming. The hiring criteria that they found correlates best with successful pair programming is empathy. Another criteria you may want to [...]
The worst time to go looking is when you need one, badly. — Seth Godin If there is a change you could be recruiting for a technical position it is worth keeping a list of the people you would love to have on your team; from anywhere in the industry. Even if you don’t recruit, [...]