Dec 12 2008
Building a successful agile team
John Rae and James Shiell presented tips and tricks for hiring the right people for an agile team yesterday during their session titled “Building a successful agile team” at XPDay 08 yesterday. Their startup grew rapidly last year, and was almost constantly hiring. The traditional hiring techniques and practices did not work for them, as they wasted too much time and effort on finding and filtering out the right people.
When hiring through recruitment consultants, they got candidates who were very polished as consultants were asking people after interviews about the questions and preparing the following candidates, but rarely shared the values of the company. Rather than easily measurable features such as technical skills or years of experience, Rae and Shiell said that they were looking for team fit and eagerness to learn. Skills can be taught, but new members of the team must fit in otherwise the whole thing is not going to work (although they said that they were looking for people with some level of technical skills, as they expected new team mates to be productive very quickly).
Looking for people on job boards also wasted a lot of time, but advertising on specialist web sites (they gave an example of Joel on software) did give them a better signal to noise ratio. Referrals are a good way to find people as the reputation goes both ways, and people tend to recommend their friends who are genuinely a good fit for the company and the team. Unfortunately, the pool of people available in this way is very small. A very good solution which they suggest is hiring through the community. People coming to community events often share the same values as the community, have a keen interest to learn and are generally more interested in software development. This pool of people is relatively large and has a very good signal to noise ratio. However, this group of people is also more demanding and expects more out of their working place. Getting the company involved in organising community events is, according to Shiell and Rae, a very good way to get others interested in working for you. It is also a good way to share ideas and get introduced to new people. As an examples, they said that their company organised coding dojos and invited people from the outside to participate.
One other interesting idea that they presented is putting together a short technical coding challenge that is sent to candidates by the HR, even before any programmers review the CV. This allows them to quickly filter out people that do not have the basic coding skills or do not work in a way compatible to the team. For example, if candidates had agile and TDD on their CV and sent in the test result without any unit tests, they were filtered out immediately. This idea helped them save a lot of time by not interviewing inappropriate candidates, although they suppose that it also put off some good candidates who did not have time to do the test.
As a way to make the most out of the in-person interview, Shiell and Rae also suggested organising a pair-programming session during the interview. This helps to filter out people who did not do the test themselves and also allows them to check whether they can work with the candidate and whether he will fit into the team.
See other articles from XPDay 08
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