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