Hiring Geeks That Fit

KNOWLEDGE WORKERS – our geeks – are different from skill-based staff, which makes hiring great ones elusive at best. But whether you’re a manager or team member, this is the single most important decision you can make due to its long-lasting impact. Because GREAT GEEKS adapt their knowledge to your context, one developer or technical manager is NOT interchangeable with another. HIRING THE RIGHT GEEKS, the ones who fit your culture, requires you to analyze your culture, determine your problems, and define the essential qualities you want in your candidates. HIRING GEEKS THAT FIT removes the guesswork from the hiring process, reduces your risk for costly hiring mistakes…and allows you to find the absolute best person for the job. So, strategize, analyze, and hire the best! Hiring Geeks That Fit will help you: 1. Understand your culture to build a strong hiring foundation. 2. Develop the best hiring strategy. 3. Analyze your open position. What’s really essential? 4. Develop effective ads for different mediums, like social media and user groups. 5. Develop behavior-description questions to differentiate the talkers from those who’ve actually done work that’s relevant to your needs. 6. Use those questions in phone-screens, in-person interviews, and references. 7. Treat candidates with respect, so even those you reject are potential referrals. 8. Create great first-day hire experiences so your new hire doesn’t keep looking. . . AND MUCH MORE!

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Through Rothman Consulting Group, Inc., she guides managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to issues of hiring, project management, risk management, and people management. Johanna was the Agile 2009 Conference chair and is the current agileconnection.com technical editor. She has written over 200 articles, which have been published in such places as IEEE Software, IEEE Computer, Computerworld, and Cutter IT Journal. She writes a monthly management column for Stickyminds.com, a bimonthly project management column for projectmanagement.com, and is a blogger for Dice.com. Johanna publishes The Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and maintains two blogs, Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People, both on jrothman.com. She also writes a personal blog, createadaptablelife.com, about how she has dealt with hearing loss and vertigo. For more of Johanna's writing and her blogs, go to jrothman.com. People often describe Johanna as the "Pragmatic Manager" because she helps organizational leaders identify problems and risks in their product development and to and then seize opportunities and remove impediments. She is an internationally acclaimed speaker and consultant. Johanna's philosophy? "I'm big on action plans, short on theory, grounded in reality. If you can't apply the theory, why bother?" Her newest book, Agile and Lean Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization, will be available as a beta book later in 2013.