Hiring and Interviewing
Understanding your team or organizations growth trajectory and how to meet it successfully while minimizing risk is the heart of any hiring practice. Here are resources to help you learn how to source, assess, and hire the candidates that will expand your team and organizations abilities without compromising on your values.
Apprenticeship Program Design
Are you starting an apprenticeship or internship program? We can help you set your newest reports up for success.
Empathetic Hiring: Understanding What Candidates Want
The hiring market is tough right now. Compensation expectations, job mobility, recruiting costs, and opportunity costs for unfilled positions are all high. Here's how to attract talent to your company without resorting to gimmickry.
Engineering Managers: It's Time to Write Better Job Descriptions
Part of what makes a poor manager is a lack of investment into the day-to-day activities of management and an over-emphasis on the day-to-day activities of a practitioner. One of these day-to-day management activities is understanding and describing the work that is being done, why it's being done, and how it's being done. Here's how to communicate the this in the form of a good job description.
Passion isn't terrible
Many companies seek passion in their candidates. But this can be counterproductive to the company's goals if that passion isn't aligned with the company's interests. What does counterproductive passion look like?
Designing a Directed Conversational Interview
This article shows how to take interviewing techniques from the field of user research and cognition and meld them into a directed conversation interview, suitable for evaluating candidates against a skill ladder. Learn how to design a directed conversational interview for the early stages of your hiring process.
Interviewer Skills Part 3/3: Timing your interview
The candidate has gone off on a wild tangent and you're not learning anything useful. What do you do? should you bring them back to the topic you want to cover? if so, how? This is Part 3 of a multi-part series covering some of the topics introduced in our RailsConf 2018 workshop, "Interviewer Skills".
Interviewer Skills Part 2/??: How to create interview questions
You know what attributes will make someone the right addition to your team, and have specific enough descriptions that there can be no room for ambiguity. How do you translate these into interview questions? This is Part 2 of a multi-part series covering some of the topics introduced in our RailsConf 2018 workshop, "Interviewer Skills".
Interviewer Skills Part 1/??: Why set specific goals
How do you know if someone will be the right addition to your team? What happens if you both agree it's important to hire "no jerks" or people who are "smart and learn fast", but have different ideas about exactly that might mean? This is Part 1 of a multi-part series covering some of the topics introduced in our RailsConf 2018 workshop, "Interviewer Skills".
Return from RailsConf + Interviewer Skills Part 0/??: Intro
You asked us for it in the halls of RailsConf and on Twitter. This article is the first in a multi-part series going over some of the topics introduced in our Interviewer Skills workshop. We have a list of WIP topics. What do you most hope to learn? Let us know.
Twenty minutes
Recently I was chatting with a friend who works as an engineer -- a real engineer, as in buildings and bridges and structures. I was curious what a technical, regulated industry's interview process might look like. What might I learn from her interview practice that could teach me about being a better interviewer in the software industry? Her entire interview process takes twenty minutes. For an industry where shoddy technical work could lead directly to human death. What's the secret?
Tell me about a time when...
When as an interviewer must you ask about specific experiences, and when can you ask what a candidate would do in a hypothetical situation? What can you ask yourself to know the right question to ask?
How to interview your future manager
What you need out of your manager may be different than what your colleagues, your friends, or your peers need -- and that's ok! What can you do to discover if the candidate interviewing to become your manager is the right person for the job?