How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
So do the headhunters that you've dealt with know more about IT than you?
No, but I'm also their top person to place and the people that they sell me to already know who I am. I'm a bit of an anomaly. But they have a lot of experience that I do not have, for sure. These are all people who were seniors on Wall St. before switching to head hunting.
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well?
That would only be a good theory if you could test candidates with a test. But as we established that you cannot, then no one is a good test writer. Right?
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well?
That would only be a good theory if you could test candidates with a test. But as we established that you cannot, then no one is a good test writer. Right?
I guess it depends on what level you are at. At my level you absolutely can test and see what a person knows or doesnt know just by asking basic questions
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I'm a bit of an anomaly.
OK, fine. I'll rest my case. But please change your OP to "You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. Unless you're hiring Scott Alan Miller"
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Social media. People who are active on social media for IT will produce giant bodies of work that are pretty impossible to bluff. Look at sites like SW, ML, SF and so forth and see how helpful, logical, up to date and well rounded people are. You can't hide what you do online and someone who has years of good technical interactions will shine easily.
Uh-oh... runs and hides
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@Breffni-Potter said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Yes but a good head hunter does not just look at that, that is trivial and easy to discover.
I think we're in agreement here. What I'm objecting to is the assertion that a headhunter should be more skilled in the role than the person he's trying to recruit. So, for example, a headhunter trying to place a C# programmer doesn't have to be a better coder than his candidates. That's not a headhunters role. He has to know something - he just doesn't have to be better. I couldn't recruit a C# programmer because I know too little about it. But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If @JaredBusch would be a good candidate to run your interviews, would he not also be a good candidate to write a good test as well?
That would only be a good theory if you could test candidates with a test. But as we established that you cannot, then no one is a good test writer. Right?
I guess it depends on what level you are at. At my level you absolutely can test and see what a person knows or doesnt know just by asking basic questions
I don't believe that that is true. Can you give me an example of a universal question that by knowing the answer you'd show competence, by not knowing it you would show a lack of competence?
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The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
If you are completely unaware of a technology or method of doing something in IT, then that is one thing you will never be able to recommend to a company in order to improve business flow from better IT.
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I'm a bit of an anomaly.
OK, fine. I'll rest my case. But please change your OP to "You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. Unless you're hiring Scott Alan Miller"
Now you are just being silly. And I never suggested that the headhunters were a replacement for having a hiring person that is paid to represent you rather than paid to make the connection. I can't have made that clearer with my continuous talks on buyer's and seller's agents and aligned contracts. Headhunters make their money getting you a candidate that you will hire, you don't use them to replace the hiring process unless you are stuck getting a CIO and the CEO can't do it (they often can't.)
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
If you are completely unaware of a technology or method of doing something in IT, then that is one thing you will never be able to recommend to a company in order to improve business flow from better IT.
Then it becomes how do you know you are hiring the right person to ask the right questions. At some point you're taking a leap of faith when hiring.
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
Example of this... I knew the most standard Solaris question in interviews at a place where I worked was "What are the four running processes of NFS?" They asked this in every single interview that I didn't run.
Problem was.. candidates often knew more than the interviewers so this question would confuse them because they had to assume that the interviewer knew the answer. But in reality, the interviewers had all memorized this and didn't actually know that they all had it wrong. And they had it REALLY wrong.
- NFS is not one thing and there were several different potentially correct answers.
- The list that they had wasn't QUITE accurate.
- NFS only requires two, but often uses four.
So they always evaluated people as positive when actually having gotten the answer wrong. And marking against the people who rightfully got confused. They made assumptions and thought that they were right, but actually didn't know enough about the topic to realize they were asking something that wasn't answerable without loads of false assumptions that they were not filling anyone in on.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?
Headhunter: "How do you fix a VM that is non-responsive in KVM."
You: "In the options, you change the setting to use left-handed keyboard and then it should start responding to ctrl+alt+delete so you can reset the virtual CPU cache."Now if a headhunter knows nothing about IT, that may seem like an amazing answer.... maybe not, but just trying to make a point.
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Then it becomes how do you know you are hiring the right person to ask the right questions. At some point you're taking a leap of faith when hiring.
Not nearly the same. This is where the Claptop Hendrix thing comes in. You CAN hire top end people to do hiring roles. You can't realistically hire them to be your mid-range staffers. There are people and firms that do this stuff as a speciality and you can use the same ones for decades.
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
If you are completely unaware of a technology or method of doing something in IT, then that is one thing you will never be able to recommend to a company in order to improve business flow from better IT.
A great example is... how many shops ask candidates about managing a SAN, but don't ask if they should be using a SAN? They will often hire based on skills they assume that they need rather than the skills that they actually need.
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OK, so you're talking about employing someone, not a headhunter, to do the hiring. Someone who knows more about IT than the candidates. How do you employ that person? I could employ Jared. But how do I know if Jared is bluffing or is amazing? According to you I shouldn't be able to tell.
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The CIO role that I just turned down two weeks ago put specific skill requirements into their demands. I happen to have the exact skills, in spades (I wrote the certs for some of them) so that was no problem. But, I was also senior enough and privy enough to know instantly that none of those skills would be used because anyone even remotely qualified to be a manager there let alone the CIO would instantly have cancelled all of the projects using those skills and done something completely different. but they were so mired in thinking like juniors that they were trying to hire their head of department like he was going to be a tech following orders.
This was a major reason that I turned down the job - their CEO didn't have the chops to hire people in a management tier. He was used to hiring doctors which tend to be more like cogs, any legally certified doctor could have done the job to some degree. But IT isn't like that, IT is very opposite. IT is like business, you need people running it who get the big picture, don't just have "skills" and think broadly, just like you need for a CEO. Which is how I knew the CEO wasn't qualified to be a manager, let alone a CEO and turned them down. The CEO failed the interview.
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
OK, so you're talking about employing someone, not a headhunter, to do the hiring. Someone who knows more about IT than the candidates. How do you employ that person? I could employ Jared. But how do I know if Jared is bluffing or is amazing? According to you I shouldn't be able to tell.
You can tell, because he's someone you can't hire. That's the handy part. People who are significantly beyond what you can place internally are normally pretty easy to pick out. Especially using experience, price, social media and so forth. I can't hire a great CEO but I can tell you some great CEOs that could help me find one. I can't afford or entice them to be my employees, but I might be able to get them to be my consultants.
But moreso, this is where you hire firms, not people. Firms make more sense in nearly all cases. And if your goal is to get a CIO, then that's where a top head hunting firm makes sense. A firm that has CIOs with proven track records.
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My 2 cents
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Having some expert extensively screen people is expensive and isnt all encompassing. You cant tell if someone is lazy or doesnt give a shit even if they are knowledgeable
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Most enterprise companies are requiring at least 90 days as a contractor with limited access to make sure you are who you say you are
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In my specific focus they are hiring pretty much based on DoD directive 8570. So certification based... Even nearly all private companies are following it. If you have experience companies are willing to pay your full salary and give you 6 months and the necessary tools to get the appropriate certs.
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