This network brings me so much that I decided to give back to it.

I recently made a call to all recruiters in Montreal because I knew two developers who were looking for a job. I was able to put them in touch with 7 recruiters.

And here I asked myself: what would happen if I put my network at the service of job seekers in Montreal?

The experiment

On the Tuesday morning, I shared this image on LinkedIn:

During the 2 days that followed, I received private messages from about 30 people. I told them about what I was trying to accomplish. I asked them what they really wanted to do, regardless of their background.

I spent a good part of my Wednesday compiling the details of the candidates and the jobs they wanted to get.

On Thursday morning, I posted this image on LinkedIn, with a link to the list of jobs that the candidates were looking for:

This image was obsolete very quickly as other candidates were added to the experiment. In the end, 35 candidates were presented.

28 recruiters or managers came forward on that Thursday. On the Friday morning, I made 71 introductions by email (yes, all by hand or almost). I reused the same message, and customized it according to the position the candidate was looking for, and adding the names of the two interested parties.

On the weekend that followed, I sent surveys to both candidates and recruiters to gather feedback. The survey responses are presented below.

The hidden rules

As the experiment progressed, it went from “I can help my network help itself” to “there is something to be learned from this experiment”.

So I decided to impose rules onto my experiment. They were not explicit for the participants, they were more like my guidelines for myself.

• The experiment was to serve the candidates before companies.
• The experiment was to foster human contact and curiosity rather than traditional hiring processes.
• The experiment was to prevent candidates from being disqualified in advance by companies.

In the end, since all I do serves the promotion of people at the heart of the world of work, the idea was to encourage human contact. To make sure people would have to talk to each other first.

The feedback

Here are the results of the surveys. I did not include all the answers, many were similar, others were less relevant.

Feedback from candidates

22 respondents out of 35 (63%) candidates answered the survey.

What did you like about my approach?

• Very practical and well targeted. Sincere. Organized.
• The idea of putting people in touch and the condideration for us.
• Innovative, there is also a more humane element than presenting resumes. You introduce two people based on common interests, it’s like speed dating. The fact that Olivier took the time to put us in touch motivates us to make more efforts than simply sending a CV.
• The personalized approach in my case was great. Job search can become long and difficult. This is one of the most pleasant experiment in which I have had the opportunity to participate.
• The speed of the process: you took 2 days to put me in touch with 2 people.
• It was simple, effective and easy.

How did my approach differ from what you have experienced before?

• I have never been offered this kind of help on LinkedIn.
• This is my first experience and there was a connection with a job giver. I sent a note to the person but they did not answer back.
• I had answers very quickly after your introduction. You bring trust in the candidate / recruiter relationships.
• We feel that it is not “your job” but that you really are happy to help us.
• Simple and straightforward approach. The fact that you do not work for an agency, we go directly to the goal. Much more attentive to what we are looking for.
• The genuine interest for our success, the authentic side.
• I had never tried the networking way before. This method was less robotic, and allowed more contacts and results in my case than sending a resume and cover letter to open positions on LinkedIn or Indeed.ca.
• Normally, people do not want to help and if they say they will, they do not follow up. When I contact them again, I have no answer. A huge thank you to you Olivier. Excellent work!
• Less formality, speed of the answers, but especially the sharing of your own contacts.

What did you learn from the recruiting world by participating in this experiment?

• I felt less alone. I feel that my state of job seeker is shared with many others.
• There are many other ways to connect people. We are trying too hard to put square pegs in a round holes.
• That networking brings much more potential to finding a job that suits me, and many more opportunities can be considered too!
• That recruitment starts with allowing others to access our own professional networks.
• This method is not really meant for new graduates, I think it is more for people with previous experience.
• Why do we spend a fortune on head hunters who don’t even take the time to meet us nowadays?
• This approach is different, it is authentic … it changes from “formatted” discussions and tense candidate-recruiter relationships.

Should more people take the initiative of putting their network at the service of job seekers?

• Yes: 95.5%
• Maybe: 4.5%

Do you believe that your chances of getting a job following this experiment are good?

• Yes: 59.1%
• No: 22.6%
• I was not selected by a recruiter: 18.2%

Feedback from recruiters

13 respondents out of 28 (46%) recruiters responded to the survey.

What did you like about my approach?

• Human approach, positive support for both job seekers and recruiters.
• The sensitivity to the needs of others, a real feeling of wanting to help.
• The direct offer sent to the network. It’s like jumping over the first step of our process.
• I liked the simplicity of the approach, based on the professional interests of the candidates.
• The initiative to connect your network of job seekers with me, spontaneously and without any particular expectations, in networking mode.
• Your human side, as always! 🙂
• The will to help without monetary intention.

How does my approach differ from what you have experienced before?

• It was “real”. Non-profit objective.
• It’s more than just sharing on the newsfeed. There is a human commitment behind it: that of simply wanting to help with a little push.
• Having an intermediary in my sourcing: I usually source directly via Linkedin but it is difficult to target potential candidates.
• No other interest than to help.
• First initiative of this type seen on Linkedin (this type of approach exists, but via recruiters attached to recruitment firms only – or in isolation for 1 friend to refer – you have put many people in contact).
• It is a volunteer approach.
• Sincere willingness to help without any other particular expectation in return.
• Often, people expect for something in return ($) and forget that it’s good to help people for the simple act of helping.

What could have I done differently?

• In my case, the candidate is not on the Canadian territory so I suggest to better target or better communicate information. Maybe mention “availability of several candidates from around the world.”
• It satisfies me, given the time it took to have done that already.
• The candidates could have provided a small paragraph explaining their background.
• For a relationship, it’s good. If you want to go further there are plenty of things to do without falling into the services of a recruitment agency.
• You could have qualified a little more your candidates and your contacts. As you know, recruitment, before being a title + a city is a project for everyone with many criteria that are more or less displayed. Not to mention values ​​and the cultural aspect … In short, it is a profession and intermediation will eventually be replaced by machines.
• In our case, it would have been helpful to know if the candidates were in Canada or outside Canada, but after all, it’s up to us to analyze the profiles. 😉
• Being a reference on Linkedin, we could (potential candidates and recruiters) contact you to be put in contact with potential candidates as you did, to facilitate your work, a platform could be put in place.
• 1st very positive experience.

Following this experiment, do you believe that your chances of hiring a referred candidate are good?

• Yes: 15.4%
• No: 23.1%
• Maybe: 61.5%

Notable observations

Two unexpected things happened during the experiment, one that amazed me, and the other that disappointed me.

A touch of disappointment

A recruiter asked me to disclose the identity of the candidates in order to be able to filter them in advance, and ensure a good “fit”, all this to avoid creating false expectations.

I was surprised. I explained that the idea was precisely to put people in touch on the basis of common interests, and therefore, to communicate with people, not to discriminate / favor them upfront. They might have very surprising discussions with these candidates, and the worst that could happen was that would be a time loss of about 10 minutes.

Having had no response from this person, I still sent the introductions by email. I do not know if this person has agreed to talk to the candidates.

No bad feelings, of course. Had I posted the hidden rules of the experiment, it is likely that fewer recruiters would have contacted me. We’ll never know.

The experiment has proven an important point

Another recruiter contacted me. The candidate I sent him had already applied for the position prior to the experiment. They had put his resume aside, judging that his technical profile was too junior.

However, after speaking to the candidate, the recruiter had an excellent feeling, and they reconsidered their decision and agreed to meet him in an interview.

Human contact: 1
Curriculum Vitae: 0

It’s been a while since I decided not to update my CV anymore and not send it to anyone. Those who are interested in my profile can come and talk to me. We now have a tangible proof that the CV does not say everything and can cause more harm than good. For my part, I consider it more like a nuisance. That’s one more step towards the death of the Curriculum Vitae. After all, even its name comes from a dead language.

My conclusions

The fact that it was free made the experiment more noble

In the feedback I got, it is very obvious that both the candidates and the recruiters appreciated that it was voluntary, and that the goal was not to make money.

For the candidates, I understand. Those who do not have a job right now are probably living on whatever money they have left, and being offered help because someone cares about their future must bring back some faith in humanity.

If helping candidates went without saying for me, you can believe me when I say I didn’t do this experiment for free out of pity for the recruitment firms. I know that most recruiters can appreciate a genuine concern for job seekers. On the other hand, I did a part of their work, so of course, the fact that it was free was very much appreciated.

Several people have suggested to automate this service and make a profit from it. I thought about it. But the automation of this initiative would remove the human element of the act, and would risk creating another hiring platform as there are already so many. Also, I must live from my work, and am not interested in copying / pasting emails all day long.

In short, this experiment cost me 15 hours in 3 days and was quite profitable in terms of networking (300+ new LinkedIn connections in one week, and one of my posts having reached 200+ likes and 25 000+ views), for my values and for my curiosity, but absolutely not profitable for my fridge and my mortgage. But that wasn’t the intent anyway.

It was more human than traditional recruitment

Both candidates and recruiters liked the humanity of my approach. I saw it in the survey responses and in the thank-you messages I received from participants.

I did not use a mechanical and dehumanizing process, I was attentive to the candidates’ aspirations and dreams, I did not care about their past experience, their seniority, their technical skills. I was mindful of their potential. And even if I did not know them, I had faith in them and their desire to succeed.

Recruiters, wake up!

I take advantage of the disclosure of the result of this experiment to give a bit of tough love to my recruiter friends. “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, they say.

When I think that an improvized experiment like mine was perceived as “more humane than traditional recruitment”, I feel sorry for the candidates, and I ask the recruiters of Montreal: what are you going to do now?

Will you tolerate the fact that a guy like me, who is not a recruiter and comes out of nowhere, can step on your toes by improvising an experiment, and do part of your work for free only to be told that he is more human, more attentive and more effective than you?

Do something! Right now! Start by challenging your processes and throw your checklists out of the window. You are humans too, not slaves of your tools. Go back to the basics. Who do you do your work for? Who do you serve? Your bosses or your candidates? Would the company still be in business if you had no more candidates? Bend the rules, break them and create new ones. This is exactly what I did in this experiment. You will be astonished by what you will be able to accomplish!

OK, good. Now that you are awake, what are you going to do?

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

That does not suit me. I decided to do the opposite, and put humans in the heart of my hiring process. In short, I wanted to create a way of hiring that is primarily centered on the candidate.

Recently, I met a lot of people in interviews at Marine Press. And I took these opportunities to refine my approach. And it works very well so far. People who are interested REALLY are interested, and not just for the money.

We are a medium-sized company and have salaries suitable for a medium-sized company. But for candidates, their motivation to work with us is highly intrinsic, and that’s exactly what we’re looking for. People want to work here to satisfy their need for creativity, autonomy, innovation, accountability and meaning.

So, what did I find out, and how did I manage that? I would be remiss if I didn’t share my discoveries with you. 

1. The first contact in person

Not always obvious, I know. As of now, we are dealing with a headhunter who sends us candidates, and they are all very interesting. So we set interviews directly with them.

I know it would be more difficult and really different if we had to sort resumes ourselves. But the feedback I got is: we are rarities to want to meet people directly. Those who do business with a headhunter, after meeting with him, must go through a phone interview with the company, an interview with a recruiter, and then a technical interview or an interview with the manager.

With us, they meet the managers right away. It’s really appreciated by the candidates. Much less waste of time, and an immediate human contact.

2. I start by defusing formality

After the candidate arrived, the first thing I do, while showing them around the office, is usually to explain to them that this meeting is absolutely informal.

In general, I say that while pointing at my t-shirt that’s usually sporting one or another pop-culture item. Today is a Transformers t-shirt. Those lucky meet me while I’m wearing my Bob-Ross-painting-the-galaxy t-shirt.

Very quickly, I start to see the relief. Shoulders sag, jaws relax. We are not very corporate. We aren’t obsessed about our image, we are obsessed only by people, their potential and the value they can bring us.

3. I manage expectations in terms of interview performance

In our temporary office, we have tables, chairs, sofas. I let them choose what they prefer, and I explain to them how this will go:

• This is an informal, two-way discussion
• We do not want to know if candidates are good at being interviewed, we want to find people with whom we want to work, and who want to work with us
• There are no good or bad answers to our questions. We only want honest answers, and we are committed to giving equally honest answers
• It’s not just about what they can do for us, but what we can do for them and their career.

The level of comfort increases, and that’s when I start hearing stuff like “wow”.

4. It’s not about a position

One of my biggest frustrations back when I was on the candidates’ chair was when I was shown a box and then asked “Are you a cube? Jump in the box!” 

My interviews are not based on a position. At the moment, all my teams need help. We do not bias our interviews by having one particular team in mind. We reiterate the objective: We want to find a good developer with whom we want to work. In our interview, this is the goal.

So the first discussion is not about a particular position. It’s about the candidate. I ask them “Where are you going in life? What are your aspirations? What makes you vibrate?”. The discussion begins just like that. People First.

5. We talk at least as much about culture as we talk about products or technology

Candidates are all very interested in the “what”, of course, since they will be directly involved in the products. I give them an overview of our 3 products, I answer their questions when I can (I am a people manager more than a technical manager) and then we talk about the “how and why”.

I first explain the mindset of our department which encourages ownership, how teams are self-organized, how we include teams in decision-making as best we can, especially for decisions that will have a big impact on their work. It’s not always possible, but it’s our ideal.

I can see a sparkle in their eyes after this discussion. Most candidates did not work in this kind of environment.

The interview also contains a more technological portion, which is covered by a fellow technical manager. In this part, they have discussions about the candidate’s knowledge and interests. There are a few questions and answers, and the opportunity to discuss everything they are passionate about.

6. Our “People First” policy makes the difference.

What is refreshing is that if many are already interested when I tell them about the culture of our department, it is in the small details that they are downright astonished.

Our Group Insurance Plans and Group RRSPs are the most common. When they ask questions about vacations, holidays and all that, they are quickly taken aback by the answers. Here are some concrete examples of recurring questions, and my answers.

Q: How many sick days a year do you have?

A: How many days are you sick in a year? If you are sick, do not come and contaminate others. And even if we gave you a number, say 5, are you going to just be sick just 5 days? We decide to trust you on this. Sick = rest. If you are sick 29 days in 2 months, we will come to see you and ask you if everything is fine:)

Q: How are vacations managed?

A: It will not affect your managers if you are on vacation, but it will affect your team. So if the team is comfortable with the holidays, it is automatically approved. If the team is uncomfortable, it is their responsibility to find a contingency plan. When the team has a plan, the holidays are automatically approved.

I also add that if the person has two weeks of vacation, and that she finds the deal of the century for a trip to her dream destination that would last 21 days, that she take the deal, and we have will arrange well with the rest. We are not here to break people’s dreams!

Q: What is the work schedule?

A: Everyone is expected to work about 40 hours a week. We are not here to control your whereabouts and calculate 40 hours to the minute. We are results oriented. Everything we do, we do it so that our product is delivered on time and with quality. You have the latitude to do what you think is the right thing to do to achieve that goal.

And also, talking about trust, we do not fill time sheets. It is only done on sick days or holidays. The time that is worked is taken for granted. People do not have a relationship of trust with a computer software, but have one with their team and their manager. It’s easy to abuse a system without having the least scruple… but abusing the trust of your colleagues is different. People really appreciate this, and wish to be worthy of that trust.

We do not force overtime, teams volunteer for this because they care about delivering on time. There are good chances, however, that a manager will ask you when you expect to take some time off when you work overtime too often.

Basically, we stand out by our products (which, for a change, are not related to finance or insurance), but especially by all these trivial things of everyday life that very often end up stuck in heavy bureaucratic processes elsewhere. But in our workplace, they simply have to pass the test of critical judgment. “Ask your team.“

Being told that they deserve trust from day one, that they will be listened to when they have something to say, and that we will consider their whole context when they need to take vacations and days off makes all the difference.

7. They meet their future colleagues

It has not been done often enough for my taste, but recently, we organize a meeting between the candidates (sometimes the same day, sometimes during a second interview) and representatives of our teams who volunteered.

Our colleagues will be those who will live 40 hours a week with the person who will be hired, and we want them to give us the GO for hiring.

Their role in this meeting is to determine if the candidate will be able to help them, and will flourish in our technological environment. They do this by presenting our products in a concrete way (while I have only talked about them), and by finding what makes the candidate’s eyes sparkle. And most importantly, the part that interests me a lot recently, trying to evaluate the potential of the person.

Having the opportunity to talk to the developers with whom they would work (and this without supervision, my colleagues know that transparency goes without saying) is really welcome.

8. My commitment to candidates

The title of my LinkedIn profile is “I cultivate people’s awesomeness“. It’s true both at work and outside work. No one can cultivate the awesomeness of people by only creating short-term relationships.

One of my biggest frustrations in the recruiting world is seeing how many candidates end up falling into oblivion. Single use candidates. They were interesting, and all of a sudden, because of a “mismatch“, because of certain expectations or needs that do not suit the company or the candidate, they suddenly become disposable. “Thank you for your time, we will never speak again“.

I reject this reality and substitute my own. 

My message is the same for my colleagues as for my candidates: I will do what I can to help them achieve their aspirations, even if that means they will work somewhere else than at Marine Press. Fulfilled people are is better than miserable people, and we’d rather have happy people in our company, or anywhere else. With the candidates, if we can not help them flourish (or if they can not help us flourish as a business), this offer always holds.

Whether it’s by coaching them on their LinkedIn networking, putting them in touch with other recruiters, giving them tips for interviews, I offer them my help. As long as it stays within the laws and contractual agreements that I might have (for example, if they were referred to me by a headhunter, I can not refer them to other companies or recruiters myself ).

This is my added value, and it is something that I would like to see spread elsewhere in the company, and in the Montreal market.

In conclusion, here is what they said

At the end of the interview, I ask them how they experienced this. Most are unequivocal: they have never experienced such a humane interview. They do not feel scrutinized from head to toe, we do not just ask them questions while ticking checkboxes.

All of them, without exception, told me that they were getting tired of being mechanically approached by recruiters who, very often, only care about their metrics and their hiring goals. They are tired of feeling like cattle that we just walk from one pen to another.

All, without exception, were delighted to be treated as humans, and see their aspirations as much as their experience considered.

All, without exception, were stunned not to be forced into an interview process that’s optimized for the company, but absolutely not for them.

One person told me something important: “I go to an interview to find a great company to work for, and I feel like you are working for your employees and even for candidates.“

And this, my friends, is how we create ambassadors.

When speaking of all this to one of my fellow developers who likes to participate in the hiring process, we came to this conclusion: “For a human interview, one only has to be human…”.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

Having to go through frustrating pain points and turning them into springboards is not something uncommon in my career. The dehumanization of the recruitment world is hurting my values? Well then, I’m going to be the one to rehumanize it.

In my manager’s role, I sometimes have to hire people. I must admit that it is an art, and the one holding the brush is fully in control of the painting. Even though I’m not a regular painter, I know what kind of painting I want in the end. The first thing I had to do was to acquire a brand new canvas.

Here is how we completely repainted the recruitment approach in my department at Marine Press.

Decentralizing recruitment

We are about 60 employees in our company, and our HR department is proudly represented by its director, and that is pretty much it. She’s alone. So when I offered her to take charge of recruitment for developers, she happily delegated this responsibility to me and made sure I would reach for her if we needed guidance.

The first thing I did was to see who wanted to volunteer in participating to the hiring process. Four or five developers raised their hands. Some wanted to help find candidates, and others wanted to play a role in the interviews. I have to mention that the ownership level among our employees is quite high, and people are included in the majority of decisions that are taken in our department.

We created an environment where people volunteer to do the work rather than having it delegated to them. Since we believe that people who will live with the impact and consequences of a decision are often better suited to make the decision, it was elected that the developers would meet people in the interviews, and would decide who to hire.

So we got in a meeting room, and we tried figuring out what is it that made hiring difficult in the past:

• We were mostly taking into account the technical skillset of candidates
• The teams need soft-skills, not just technical skills, and those needs were rarely fulfilled by candidates
• We were very interested in knowing what candidates could do, but not what they wanted to do
• Our job opportunities were quite formal and zombified, not very welcoming or friendly
• The hiring was mostly done by two more experienced developers (who would be called “seniors” in more traditional companies). We just fixed this by asking for people to volunteer.

In light of this information, we took many action items to create a new approach that was more human.

People first, then technology

Equal consideration of soft skills and hard skills

That’s what got out almost immediately. My colleagues determined that while hard skills were important, the mindset was equally important. It has caused us problems in the past, since what we were doing was closer to ensuring candidates had all the required skills from a checklist.

We then agreed to also consider people’s attitude. We didn’t just want to find good developers, we wanted to find a colleague with whom we would enjoy spending 40 hours per week. The first thing to do, then, was to find which personality traits we needed to really fulfill our team’s needs. We wanted curious developers who contribute to the development community, who can take ownership of their product and do what’s necessary without having to tell them. All right. How can we implement this? Let’s see…

An inspiring job opportunity

This proved to be a difficult exercise: coming up with a job opportunity text that not only told about what we believe in our department at Marine Press, but that could also indicate that we were looking for colleagues, and not code monkeys.

I came up with a first draft during the weekend and sat down Monday morning with my colleagues and we ended up changing half of it. After gathering some feedback here and there, we were able to improve it to a point where we felt it was pretty solid.

Its title was “People first, the rest will follow“, which tells a lot about us. The first paragraphs were about what we believe: our guiding principles that put the focus on people. It would then be about what kind of people we’d like to work with, followed by basic responsibilities and a high-level list of required technical skills. Nothing too much in detail. The last paragraph was “About Marine Press”. People first, and the business will follow. You can still access an example of this job opportunity on the Marine Press website.

Selecting candidates: the résumé is not enough

Most personality traits don’t appear at all in someone’s résumé. We had to invest much more time in getting to know people by accessing their LinkedIn profiles, see if they have a GitHub account, if they contribute to StackOverflow, etc. Sometimes we couldn’t find anything and we had to ask them about it.

And it is this part that was the most difficult to apply: with the number of résumés we were receiving, I would have needed to do this full time for months, something which I couldn’t afford. We still had to sort the resumes based on what we could find on LinkedIn or the CV. Something I didn’t like doing, and I’m still looking for a better solution. But I’m not losing hope.

Leveraging people’s aspirations

At Marine Press, we work in self-organized squads. We needed to increase our capacity. But we didn’t use the “case of beer” approach I wrote about in my previous article. We decided not to bias our choice by hiring for a particular squad. Everyone can find a place in our department, so we kept our focus on this mentality: “We are looking for good developers, and we’ll see in which squad they can bring the most value”

This stopped me from saying “Hey I have a position for you, do you fit the mould?” but rather “We are looking for developers. What is it that you want to do?”.

In the end, the selected candidates were a good fit for the new squad we created earlier, and that’s where they started their journey with us.

The benefits of our (re)humanization

One thing that I find quite hypocritical about organizations is that they seem to care a lot about candidates when they have a position open, but when there isn’t… “Sorry, we’re not hiring”. The interest fades almost instantly.

I believe we need to reverse that trend immediately, and that’s why I make myself available to meet with any developer throughout the year, no matter if there is an open position or not. This creates very interesting relationships, and I know that if ever there is an opportunity, I will already have 3-4 people to call. Otherwise, I would still offer to help them find a job elsewhere if they are actively looking. That’s what it means for me to apply the “Make People Awesome” guideline from Modern Agile.

Reaping the rewards our hard work

I had a nice surprise last week. A candidate who fell very sick during the hiring process back in February hadn’t been able to turn in his results to the technical test in time. He took for granted that the battle was already lost for him. I wrote to him a few times to see how he was doing, and I told him “When you feel better, send us your test results anyway. We look at all the test results”. He was stupefied by this answer and sent his results a week later. We liked it, so we met him in an interview. He wasn’t selected by the squad, but he liked the humanity of our approach so much that he referred one of his friends to me last week, with whom I had a long discussion.

It is at moments like these that I can tell myself “It was a lot of work, but we made a difference for someone”.

We created an ambassador for Marine Press just by interviewing him.  

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

When I say “dehumanizing mindsets”, I’m not necessarily targeting recruiters themselves, but rather the organizations. The current job market, especially in I.T. and software development, is short on candidates. Everybody is looking for front-end developers, Scrum Masters, name it. And they are ready to do anything to hire.

But it is the way the job market uses recruiting that makes it dehumanizing. Please take good note that I’m talking about the job market that’s about hiring people in permanent positions, and not the contractor market in which candidates are first and foremost looking for contracts.

When there’s a price on your our heads

Big corporations, especially those that deal with intermediates who are headhunting, are creating a job market that is not sustainable in the long run. The result is also a market model that’s less and less human. We want heads, and there are prices on them.

When the hunting season is open

I’m a former Scrum Master, and even if I don’t pursue this career anymore, I’m very in demand as of now. There are days where I’ll receive, either on LinkedIn or by email, tons of messages from recruiters and headhunters who are all offering me the same position. On these days, I know that a big corporation (generally from the finance world) is looking to find one or more experienced Scrum Masters.

I would say it happens every 3 months, more or less. A tsunami of recruiters all looking to fill the same position, and who are all looking for senior Scrum Masters (whatever that means). I’m generally nice enough to let them know I’m not interested and promise to do due diligence if I think of someone who’s open to new opportunities.

The fact that these situations exist means that the hiring organizations are ready to invest in finding someone fast. The recruiter who can find someone as quickly as possible will win the contract. We’re talking about fulfilling a very immediate need. The salary that’s offered is generally proportional to the emergency of the situation, which definitely helps to find someone. But the discussions in regards of what kind of future the candidates are hoping for, who they will work with, what they need to be at their best will very rarely happen. Going through proxies who are ready to react at any moment works really well for companies, but generally to the detriment of candidates.

The market of “Everything, right away”

The previous point created another monster which mere existence is troublesome. Several times, recruiters contacted me, saying “I need to create a team as fast as possible, and I need a Scrum Master”. When asking about their timeline, the deadline was sometimes from one week to a few days.

A few days to build a team.

“A team”.

I don’t know for you, but in my experience, creating a team is a process that takes many months. You need a cohesion, dynamics, a minimum of performance. In a few days, the best you can end up with is a list of people who are available. People who never talked to each other, but have the required skills. They are not a team.

There’s no indication that they will complete each other, work well with one another, or will be performing together. Nothing indicates if they can come to an interesting level of maturity, or can communicate properly. Of course, a team needs to be born in one way or another. But can we expect to see an actual team within days? Certainly not.

And even if it was only one person being hired. I hired 2 developers in my current roles. Because I wanted to be sure they were a good fit, it took me 2 months and a half to find the right people that will, in the long run, bring optimal value to the team and the organization. I greatly doubt we can achieve this in 3-4 days.

How did we get there? Is everything in the work world that short-term, that pressing? The exponential amount of “Everything, right away” needs the market has frightens me. What are we doing to the recruitment world?

When recruiters insist to recruit you

Often times, people approach me using car seller techniques. I know it’s a minority, but this minority didn’t appear by chance and is getting traction.

The aggressive recruiter

One day at work, my boss tells me “A recruiter is calling every developer here and tries to recruit them. He’s very insisting”. I told him I’d take care of it. One of the devs let him know what was happening. The recruiter in question called an employee on the company’s phone. He also called another colleague many times, sent him multiple email messages, and even called his mom! It was easy to get his name.

After a short research on LinkedIn, I found someone responsible for recruiters in his company. I contacted this person and explained the situation, and let him know it creates a very unflattering perception of his organization and of his colleagues. The manager was curious and suggested a phone call. He didn’t know the recruiter in question and didn’t agree with his methods. He swore that they didn’t have personal goals that were too aggressive and that the pressure to recruit was quite mild.

After a few minutes of courteous discussion, we deduced that it was probably a new recruit trying to impress and build himself a reputation. He promised to try and contact the manager of his colleague and see if he could be provided with the necessary coaching.

The story took an interesting turn when I learned that someone from management in my workplace tried to call the VP of their company to deal with this case. It apparently ended in a refusal to cooperate, followed by “My clients will be very happy that my recruiters do these things!”.

And that’s how what I always say gets confirmed: Those who are the closest to a problem are better suited to fix it.

That person who insisted that I change career

There was a time when I was approached with great compliments: someone gave me as a referral and talked about my Scrum Master skills. As always, I nicely refused and opened a door to an eventual collaboration if ever I found someone else who could be interested.

But the discussion took a turn and he asked me why I didn’t want to be a Scrum Master. I told him about my pain points and the fact that the most interesting problems to solve are at the head of organizations, in their mindsets, rather than on the floor with people who are the victims of those traditional mindsets.

The person really insisted that his organization was way above all these problems, that they really offered to their employees to change things, to take initiatives, and that frankly, it would just be better for my future is I went back to being a Scrum Master. I already knew I wasn’t interested, but to have it shoved in my throat left a weird taste in my mouth. I will never work in this great, big and heavy organization.

The “Case of beer” approach

I came up with that name. It is more an observation than a problem for now. In fact, that’s me challenging the status quo (for a change).

When I was in transition between two professions, I was quite irritated by the fact that I was always offered jobs I didn’t want to do anymore. It’s certainly my fault, as my LinkedIn profile was screaming “Scrum Master”, and I had to remove almost all of it. Rather than tell about where I was from, it would now tell about where I’m going.

I noticed that almost all the job market is based on punctual needs. And it bothers me profoundly. When an candidate has a phone interview, he will always be told about a specific position. “I have a position that might interest you”, am I told. I’m being offered a box, in which I must jump.

And the positions are all determined in advance, with the necessary qualifications, expected experience, and the available salary. It’s somewhat flexible, but not that much. That’s where I got the reference to the case of beer. The case is of a certain format, and one must find bottles that fit in it.

However, all bottles aren’t of the same shape or size. I’m starting to find it difficult to receive calls to see if I fit the mould, and if I answer the immediate needs of the company. The interviews that I prefer are generally those that aren’t about the position to fill, but where I’m asked: “Where are you heading in life?”.

I decided to allow myself to have that during interview calls, and starting telling recruiters “You know what? Before you tell me about the position, I’ll tell you about where I’m going. Then, maybe there are 4 positions that will be interesting for me, rather than the one you’re thinking of”.

Innovating while recruiting?

There are a lot of ways to find interesting candidates. I think we need to innovate. There are multiple approaches that exist already, like organizing a hackathon that’s open to any developer to see how they work, and already create a real experience of working together, a real contact… then the team of devs can provide you with the names of 2 or 3 participants which they had a great synergy. Then, if everyone is interested, these people get absorbed.

To absorb rather than recruit, I find it an interesting idea. Rather than making a choice based on theory, why not use a real work experience? Observe people in action. There’s definitely something to it. There must be a lot of interesting things like this in startups. How can we scale that up to bigger organizations?

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

In my career, I ended up sitting on both chairs of recruitment : as a candidate, and as a hiring manager. I observed (and I’m not the only one) a stupendous progression in the appearance of tools and approaches to recruit faster. This also comes with its share of dangers.

As a hardcore agilist who always had a strong bond with the first value of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools“, I would like to expose you to some tools usage that I judge questionable and dehumanizing in the recruitment world. It goes without saying that these also represent automatic red flags when the time comes for me to look for a job.

That time when I cheated the hiring process

It was in 2016. Following a phone interview, I had to take a psychometric test and a maths test (for a job that requires 90% of soft skills?). I had only talked to a recruiter so far. Not with my future team, not with my future boss.

After the call during which I was told I’d receive both tests by email, I already knew things wouldn’t go any further. I simply didn’t want to work with a company that chooses employees using algorithms. I want a warm, human connection. I want to be chosen unanimously by people. But I decided to play the game anyway. Why? Well, I was between jobs, I had some free time, and I like doing experiments.

I don’t really recall the psychometric test, but I remember answering very haphazardly, sometimes giving real answers but pushed to their extreme, and sometimes answering the opposite of what I was thinking.

As for the maths tests, it was pretty funny. One had to take it using a desktop computer, and the software would know if I used the calculator, so watch out! I’m not very good at maths, so I got my smartphone, disconnected it from the wifi, and unleashed my calculator using skills.

Since I took the test any old how, I wasn’t expecting much from the results. A few days after accepting an offer in another company, I got a call from the recruiter, letting me know that I passed both tests with brilliant success. Bewildered by this information, I answered that I already accepted an offer elsewhere.

To this day, I still regret stopping there. I should have engaged in a discussion with the recruiter, tell him what I did and see how he felt about that. But I was too astonished to think of doing so.

Personality tests used in hiring processes

Around the same time, another company asked me, following an in-person interview, to fill in the MBTI personality test (Myers Briggs Type Indicator). I know the MBTI personality types quite well myself, as I use these often in team building activities. While it should be taken with a grain of salt, knowing the personality type of a colleague can be of great help when it comes to communicating.

As I already know my personality type, I immediately answered that I’m INFP, excited to learn that a company was interested in these sort of things. Some hesitation, however, slowly started growing in my mind. For anyone who knows this tool, it is tempting to be biased on the how two types relate to one another. One can easily judge that they are incompatible with the type opposite to theirs. Not to mention that there are many prejudices caused by a global misunderstanding of what introversion and extroversion are.

I am an introvert. People who meet me have a hard time believing it. I’m extremely efficient in  small groups discussions. I often take all the room. What I don’t say is that I need to isolate myself afterwards to recharge my batteries. But I digress. Extroverts have had the wind in their sails for so long. I was often given warnings: “watch out, this candidate is introverted”. With this in mind, I started feeling that it was a slippery slope to use such a test in an interview. It makes it easy to compare people, to become biased towards certain types at the expense of others, and it’s especially dangerous if one is required to pass that test even before being met.

It is only some time later that I  found, on the Myers Briggs Foundation’s ethical guidelines page, the following paragraph:

It is unethical and in many cases illegal to require job applicants to take the Indicator if the results will be used to screen out applicants. The administrator should not counsel a person to, or away from, a particular career, personal relationship or activity based solely upon type information.

Upon reading this text, I understood the hesitation that I previously had.

Convenience and ease of use, but at what cost?

Monster, Indeed, Jobboom, LinkedIn. And probably a lot of other tools that I don’t even know of, including in-house tools. There is a wide range of technological means to boost our brand, and it goes for candidates as well as for employers.

When one is suddenly open to new opportunities, it can very quickly spread like a wildfire. And sometimes, it cannot even be stopped. I still get approached to know my interest in positions such as developer (I haven’t touched a line of code since 2013) and as Scrum Master, two roles that I can’t imagine going back to in any foreseeable future.

I love technology, but not at the expense of the human experience.

I once got an offer, with salary and social benefits, without even having talked with someone in person. Their need must have been quite urgent (and I’ll tackle this topic in the second article of this series). No one wondered what I was aspiring for, it was simply taken for granted that the high salary would interest me. Which means they knew nothing about me, and that’s exactly my point : it would have been easy to get to know me by meeting me, or at the very least, calling me.

I don’t believe that these practices are widely used. But it’s the extreme at its worst. Let’s do whatever it takes not to get there any time soon.

Tools are not of great help when it comes to understanding people’s aspirations, what motivates them, the organizational culture they need to be at their natural best, and, most importantly, if they will fulfill their future team’s expectations.

Tools can help us find someone quickly, and hire quickly. But is quantity so important that we need to sacrifice quality? Like all tools, it’s what we do with them that really counts.

And, just to be true to myself, if I’m ever asked the very popular question “What tool should I use to select my candidates”, I shall answer “Have you tried speaking to them?“.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

In fact, a large number of them seem to be copy and pasted from a project manager job posting with the additional requirement of a scrum master certification and possibly some agile experience. If that is your case, your agile endeavor is in a heap of trouble.

The goal of this article is to shed some light on what to look for in an agile professional. There are a lot of emerging titles, certification acronyms and different frameworks out there. It is also easy for the non-initiated to see scrum masters and product owners as nothing more than traditional project managers with a fancier name.

The situation is not helped by the fact that many companies who ask for agile personnel have a limited understanding of what agility is, believing it to be simply a new delivery method involving only superficial changes.

I hope the following will shed a bit of light on how best to approach hiring agile professionals.

What is Agile again?

Agile is not a delivery framework (although there are agile delivery frameworks).

It is not a management method (although several management philosophies such as Management 3.0, Tribal Leadership, Teal organizations and the like are arguably agile).

Agile is a mindset that involves:

• Being adaptable in the face of changing contexts.
• Putting a focus on the need of the clients and users.
• Delivering tangible value continuously or in short bursts.
• Being able to experiment, learn and improve in very short cycles.
• Trusting self-organizing professionals, and being worthy of that trust.

There is more to it, but these are the main characteristics.

Finding a good agile professional is first and foremost about finding someone with the right mindset. Certifications and even years of experience should be secondary considerations.

What you should stop doing now

There are two habits that seem to be standard in recruitment that does not work when you are looking for agile personnel. Using these practices will simply cut you off from the best candidates. Those are:

• Copy-and-pasting typical project managers requirements to agile job posting
• Pre-filtering by credentials and years of experience

Agile approaches are product-oriented, not project-oriented. That difference alone is a huge deal. If a recruiter is asking for an agile project manager with an MBA, PMI-PMP, and a decade of experience in being accountable for delivered requirements, there are two possible explanations: either your organization is doing A.I.N.O. (Agile In Name Only) where it’s business as usual with agile nomenclature slapped on top, or the recruiter has no idea what he is looking for.

Many companies get lured in the agile movements by promises like “twice the work in half the time”, without any understanding of the changes required for that to be remotely possible. You end up with accountability without responsibility or authority, a traditional project-based approach based on predictive planning, inappropriate funding scheme, matrix-based environment, etc. It’s business as usual, but far from what agile is about.

For agile personnel, environments like these are a nightmare: typical project management jobs with a layer of unrealistic expectations and opposition to change added for good measure. Candidates who have experienced working in true agile settings will flee these types of openings.

What should I ask for?

Asking for the correct agile role for the situation shows that both the recruiter and the hiring company know what they are looking for. Please keep in mind that these roles are full-fledged jobs, and not meant to be tacked on a more traditional role (like business architect/product owner, or the ever popular project manager/scrum master), especially since the duties of these roles are often conflicting.

Product Owners are the people in charge of a product. They are different from traditional Product Managers, as product owners work directly with the team while traditional product managers are higher up the hierarchy. Products Owners do not manage projects, they make decisions on the product (like prioritizing work) and represent the interests of the stakeholders.

Scrum Masters are support people in some frameworks. The term originated with the Scrum framework, but nowadays it covers the support role embedded in an agile team. Alternative names for this role includes facilitator, team coach or, team support. They have no authority over the team, except to enforce the framework. Their role is to keep team members working at peak efficiency by removing impediments, building the team culture, smoothing relations with other teams and doing some administrative work. The skill set of a good scrum master tends to be quite different than for a good project manager, as the role is completely different.

Agile coaches are, like the name says, coaches. Their role is to help with agile transitions, training, and coaching agile personnel. They set up new teams, they are advocates for agility and they bridge discussions between agile groups and other groups within the organization. While many of them started as scrum masters, those are two different roles with the coaching role requiring more solid experience.

Agile business architects, agile enterprise architects, and agile software architects are like the non-agile version of these roles but who are agile-trained and who can produce work especially designed for agile teams. In a nutshell, that means work designed as small independent chunks, with little dependencies, aiming at producing a minimum viable product quickly and then building on that.

Agile managers refer to any type of senior managers with the training and experience required to work in an agile organization.

You can note the glaring absence of an agile project manager role. Such roles occur when a non-traditional organization wants to label a project “agile” without the necessary associated change to the environment.

What should I look for in candidates?

Unless a candidate has some experience working for organizations that are well-known for being agile, his resume will sadly give you little information about his agile expertise. You are looking for someone with the right mindset, and who can display a solid knowledge of agile.

Agile expertise

The best way to measure agile expertise is to talk to candidates, or even better to research what they have written. Presentation letters, blog post, white papers, slide decks or video presentations are all good sources, as long as they are not simply reports of someone else’s work. If no such documentation exists, then it might be interesting to ask the candidates to explain in writing either their approach handling a certain situation or a specific concept.

Agile experience

You might find it surprising but a large number of agile professionals have never had the chance to work in a fully agile environment. Most have been working in hybrid environments, often with little more than agile labels on a traditional framework. Having more experience in a purely agile environment is a big plus.

In the same vein, a lot of traditional experience (especially in project management) is not necessarily a good thing. The dynamics in traditional and agile work are very different, and leftover habits from a traditional dynamic can hamper greatly your agile efforts. Still, if your organization is starting a transition and is not yet ready for it, having someone able to work in a hybrid way might be a boon.

Keep in mind also that an agile expert will gain experience rather quickly. In just six months, an agile team will have delivered usable value a dozen times, or even more if they use continuous delivery. In a traditional setting, a team will have delivered maybe once in the same amount of time. While delivery isn’t everything, these events always bring a fresh crop of unexpected issues that need to be addressed ASAP. Have your candidate talk about those events. It will be revealing.

What about certifications?

Let’s not be coy about this one: certifications are products, or part of products, offered by training organization in order to make money. Very nearly all of them cover a framework or another. My advice is: do not let those (often virtual) pieces of paper define your selection for a good candidate. Many good agile candidates will have learned through non-affiliated consultants and won’t have a costly certification to show.

That being said, there are a lot of different certifications out there and it can quickly become confusing. Many Agile professionals show their credential by stringing as many certification acronyms at the end of their name as possible.

The Scrum framework has by far the largest number of certifications. Those shown below are only the most frequently encountered. Other frameworks, like Disciplined Agile, also offer certifications, and some Lean frameworks, like Kanban, should also be considered if you are looking for an agile professional rather than specifically a Scrum professional.

As you can imagine, your candidates’ budget will be a limiting factor for certifications. Many agile experts will have both the knowledge and the experience to cover several of those certifications but are unwilling to pay for the seminars, the exams and, in many cases, the costs for the continuous training and the periodical renewal fee.

Buckle up, we’re going to see quite a bunch of letters.

Scrum Master certifications

CSM: Certified scrum master from Scrum Alliance. Like all Scrum Alliance certifications, this one requires attendance at a costly 2-days seminar. This is by far the most common certification out there.

PSM: Professional Scrum Master from Scrum.org. Granted after a somewhat difficult online exam. Comes int three tiers (PSM I, PSM II and PSM III) of increasing difficulty.

SMAC: Scrum Master Accredited from International Scrum Institute. Granted after an online exam. This is the lowest cost solution for certification, making it very popular in some regions of the world as well as with people who have been mentored or trained by experts not affiliated with Scrum Alliance or Scrum.org.

Scrum Product Owner certifications

CSPO: Certified Product Owner from Scrum Alliance. Like all Scrum Alliance certifications, this one requires attendance at a costly 2-days seminar.

PSPO: Professional Scrum Product Owner from Scrum.org. Granted after a somewhat difficult online exam. Comes int two tiers (PSPO I and PSPO II) of increasing difficulty.

SPOAC: Scrum Product Owner Accredited from International Scrum Institute. Like the SMAC, this is the low-cost alternative.

Scaled Scrum certifications

SPS: Scaled Professional Scrum from Scrum.org. This certification covers the Nexus framework, which is basically a scaled version of Scrum.

SSEAC: Scaled Scrum Expert Accredited from International Scrum Institute. Covering the “Scrum of Scrums” classic approach to scaling (rather than the newer Nexus, LeSS or SAFe).

Other Scrum certifications

CSP: Certified Scrum Professional from Scrum Alliance. This is a second-tier certification that requires either the CSM or CSPO in addition to 36 months of experience and PDU-like learning credits.

CST: Certified Scrum Trainer from Scrum Alliance. This certification is required to give official Scrum Alliance trainings leading to certification.

STAC: Scrum Trainer Accredited from International Scrum Institute.

LeSS Practitioner by the LeSS company: LeSS is a framework for scaling agile software development over several teams. It is based off Scrum.

Disciplined Agile certifications

Disciplined Agile is an agile framework, but of a much larger scope than Scrum. It is described as a decision-making framework and cover aspects of the entire business, not just software engineers. Disciplined Agile is also one of the scaling frameworks (along Nexus, SAFe and LeSS). As a framework, I believe it to be the most complete one available, but a very difficult one to get into for the uninitiated.

CDA: Certified Disciplined Agilist from the Disciplined Agile Consortium. This is the basic certification, earned after a solid online exam covering a large number of agile techniques usable across the company. A CDA is also able to act as Scrum Product Owner or Scrum Master.

CDAP: Certified Disciplined Agile Professional from the Disciplined Agile Consortium. The advanced Disciplined Agile certification, requiring verified extensive experience with the framework and a difficult exam.

SAFe Certifications

SAFe is a lean-agile scaling framework based on Scrum, but it covers the whole chain from the portfolio level all the way down to team level. It is popular with many large companies who can see their existing structure in SAFe. It is very controversial with many agile pundits for the very same reason.

SA: SAFe Agilist by Scaled Agile Inc. Aimed at executive, managers and change agents.

SPC4: SAFe Program Consultant by Scaled Agile Inc. Aimed at external consultants who are brought in to help with a transition toward SAFe.

SP: SAFe Practitioner by Scaled Agile Inc. For project and product managers, software developers and other people involved in a SAFe organization.

PMPO: SAFe Product Manager/Product Owner by Scaled Agile Inc. Aimed at product owners, product managers, Product line leads, program managers and business analysts.

PMI Agile Certifications

PMI-ACP: From the prestigious Project Management Institute, the Agile Certified Practitioner certification covers many frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, extreme programming (XP) and test-driven development (TDD). It offers three advantages: its certifying entity is well recognized, it must be maintained through continued training and it’s far more versatile than specialized ones.

Agile Coaching certifications

CEC: Certified Enterprise Coach. Aimed at coaches, it requires them to have sufficient experience in addition to holding the CSP certification for at least a year.

CTC: Certified Team Coach. Similar to the CEC, but aimed at people specialized in working with agile teams rather than the whole enterprise. Requirements are a bit easier than the CEC.

SCAC: Scrum Coach Accredited form International Scrum Institute. Attainable with only an online exam and no other requirements. This certification is a bit lacking by itself and says little about the experience of the coach.

CDAC: Certified Disciplined Agile Coach from the Disciplined Agile Consortium. This is the highest level of Disciplined Agile certifications, requiring lots of involvement and a review panel.

There are others. So many others.

If I missed your favorite certification product, feel free to mention it in the comments.

The TL;DR version

When looking for Agile personnel:

1. Stop asking for agile project managers with non agile credentials
2. Demonstrated expertise should trump certification
3. Agile experience, even a shorter one, should trump long non-agile experience
4. If you are confused by all the certifications, just don’t ask for any and leave it to the candidates to justify theirs. That’ll teach them!

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca