I’ve recently taken part in hiring new people for the company I work for. The Agile Hiring book was a decent foundation to gain knowledge in this process. The author of this book is Sean Landis. This publication presents overall process of hiring, starting from reviewing résumé and ending on closing a deal. Thanks to reading it you can get to know how to become an interviewer and conduct the hiring process. This is a guideline for interviewers on every level of sophistication. Special attention is put on beginners. There are given detailed check lists which may be helpful for them.
The author’s point of view is a company which hires people from around the world, people with different experience. The position to hire is software developer. Attention is mostly put on hiring permanent employees for a long term cooperation. Author suggest to hire developers with strong social skills. He is a software architect with strong people skills which he proves throughout the book.
Author begins with foundations on hiring in general. First he presents core parts of such a process. After that he takes into consideration preparing job description. In next parts focus is put on support how to review résumé, prepare and conduct phone and on side interview. Finally there is taken into account part of preparing an offer and closing the process. He says how to go about candidates who already applied for a position. There is not covered how to source people.
When you read this book please pay attention on a context. There are given assumptions and circumstances which create a context on which a certain story or advice is build on. Beware of direct transfer clues into your environment. Recognize your context and apply mapping when necessary.
Author tries to be objective. Sometimes certain parts seem to be subjective and they base on author’s conviction. Author says about feeling judgmental as on a difficult and inconvenient issue. Difficulty in evaluation is mentioned very often. I’d suggest to pay attention on reading about the judgments. Author always leave us free to decide by our own.
The book is on agile hiring and this fact is mentioned throughout this book. Because of agile nature of the hiring, the book also should be treat in an agile way. The publication gives some proposals about agile process. Incorporating the knowledge into life should be in consequence agile. Adjust it to a certain context. Author takes care of being agile during recruitment process. Every candidate is different and every process by definition is unique.
The book’s structure and content distribution is clear and intuitive. The content is appropriate to the title of the book and probably will meet requirements of many readers. This is a rich collection of advice in the hiring process. Author claims that a good reviewer knows the foundations and the rest is experience. This publication will be a good start point on theory side while the rest is practice. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in hiring as an interviewer or an interviewee.
References
[1] Agile Hiring