Re-Imagining the hiring process…

One of the books that had an impact on me is “Re-Imagine!” by Tom Peters. In fact, when I was reading this book, I was tempted to post about it in our company intranet even before I finished reading. So, In all I have written about 3-4 posts regarding this book. This is the first of the posts…

I am currently reading a book call Re-Imagine written by Tom Peters. I have read only about 20% of the book but I am already tempted to recommend it. This is because, it sparked an idea in me.

 

So far, the book basically talks about how things are changing towards service. Having a great product is just the price for entry and great service is what makes a company successful. He also talks about customer success rather than customer satisfaction. More about this in a later post… after I finish reading…

One of the key points he tells is that we have to completely re-imagine the way we do things. Re-imagine everything to be successful.

 

In our current agile teams,there are always a bottle neck. Some times it is developers if the new feature being developed is investigation intensive or it is the testers if the sprint involves a lot of User Stories that have testing.  The agile methodology says that every member should be able to do everything. However, with our current setup, it is very difficult for a tester to learn coding and God alone can help our customers if we trust developers to do testing( Hey, I am a developer and I know how well we test :-)).

 

Even when we have opening now, we still seem to be hiring according to old department of dev,QA and Doc. 

Instead, we should re-imagine the hiring process and hire a ‘Agile team member’.  Since it is very difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, this new hiring process will work only for freshers.

 

Here is what we should do –

• Create a comprehensive aptitude test for freshers.
• One round of interview where the existing team members( not manager or lead) will interview the candidates. The team members select the candidates. This interview need not be technical in nature.

Once the candidates are selected, they are given 6 months to prove themselves. Their 6 months would involve doing the following –

• Learning about the product
• Start contributing to the team as a tester at the end of first 3 months.
• At the end of 6 months, they should have finished the following –
  • Learnt .NET
  • Passed a Microsoft certification. Company will pay the cost if the candidate passes
  • Create one cool project with the things the candidate has learnt. This project should be designed coded and unit tested by the candidate.Any standard project like “library management” or things like that will be rejected by the mentor immediately.

At the end of 6 months we have a truly rounded candidate who can do both testing as well as coding. I am not considering technical writing as it is rarely a bottle neck in the team.

Advantages-

• True Agile team member. No more QA,DEV,DOC business..
• We might just get a star amongst us. Since the candidate is still a fresher, the ROI for the company will be unmatched.
• We get 6 months to evaluate a candidate.

Disadvantages-

• A fresher might have ‘further’ studies in his/her plans and might quit soon.
• Management issues. If the candidate does both QA and DEV who evaluates the person. How will the appraisal process apply?

 

How does your company hire people?  Would the method I describe above work? Do comment