April 01, 2005
The Dream Team
Alexandra Weber Morales
What if you could have a staff of five software development superheroes? Whether it's building the Mars Rover or Amazon's new A9 search engine, no task is beyond this team of mythic proportions, endowed with the skills and experience of IT greats.
The Dream Team
The Brain
Chief Architect
Acting as a chief architect, the Brain blends the vision of Anders Hejlsberg, the wisdom of Steve McConnell and the iconoclasm of Bill Joy with the pragmatism of Rick Rashid. He channels the sociopolitical inklings of the late Anita Borg, wields patterns like J2EE wunderkind John Crupi, and writes influential e-mails with the erudition of Nathan Myhrvold. Subtle incorporation of the artificial intelligence concepts of Marvin Minsky and the psychological insights of the late Abraham Maslow make all his systems self-optimizing.
Data Grrl
Database Administrator
Data Grrl blasts through rows and columns with profound understanding of predicate logic and set theory as it pertains to the relational model. Her powers emanate from the distilled works of the late E.F. Codd, father of the relational database; Peter Chen, originator of the Entity-Relationship Model; and Jeffrey Ullman, whose work on automata theory and knowledge-bases served as a foundation for modern computer science. She's familiar with object-oriented databases, as well as the metadata and business rules concepts of Terry Moriarty. She's a master of Jess Mena's data-mining techniques, too.
The Blocker
Project Manager
The Blocker prevents people on other teams from hindering your developers' progress. According to Scott Ambler, "A blocker produces the documents that the bureaucrats request, attends their meetings and constructs a faade that makes it look as if your project team is, in fact, working with these other groups. This appeasement process keeps bureaucratic impediments away from your developers, allowing them to get their job done." ("Running Interference," The Agile Edge, July 2003) The Blocker embodies the career- and time-management insights of Johanna Rothman, the project-planning knowledge of Fred Brooks and the risk-taking aplomb of Tom DeMarco. He also acts as a team coach using the techniques pioneered by Watts Humphrey.
The Hacker
Software Engineer
The Hacker crafts code with the combined knowledge of C++ Standard Template Library creator Alexander Stepanov, Java chief architect James Gosling and Python's Guido van Rossum. He pushes new paradigms with the conviction of Gregor Kiczales, and is as open-minded as Linus Torvalds. His understanding of design patterns from Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, John Vlissides and Ralph Johnson is encyclopedic—but the Hacker also knows the value of process and discipline, embracing the agile concepts of Kent Beck, Robert Martin and Mary Poppendieck.
The Gatherer
Requirements Analyst
Where would we be if no one could communicate with the Other Side? No Ouija
board necessary here: The Gatherer deftly discovers system requirements with
the anthropological insight of the late Margaret Mead, the precision
and clarity of Karl Wiegers, and the creative care of Ellen Gottesdiener.
The Gatherer is blessed with the use case insights of Ivar Jacobson and the
CRC notions of Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. And forget the impenetrable dialog
boxes or random program flows—she's endowed with usability talent from
Larry Constantine, Lucy Lockwood and Steve Krug. Finally,
she understands that information is more valuable than gold, and has at her
disposal the algorithms and interfaces of Susan Dumais, human-computer
interaction expert.
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How to Build Your Dream Team
Poor hiring decisions and haphazard personnel strategies can hurt the
organization. Here's how to find top IT talent.
Do you have the right team in place? If not, it's time to create a talent-driven
culture. It won't happen by chance; you need a formal process. That's
how great companies like GE and Microsoft strengthen themselves and thrive
in any stage of the economic cycle.
Over the past 25 years, I've worked with more than 250 companies on
their hiring strategies, from startups to the Fortune 100. Although there
are exceptions, most handle hiring as a semiformal series of independent
activities. An operational review of your company's hiring processes will
reveal these flaws. One thing you'll want to ensure is that the best candidates
aren't being excluded inadvertently. While HR or the recruiting department
will do the up-front work, line managers and senior executives must take
responsibility to see that it's done right. Check out the process yourself.
Would you apply for your own jobs? Next, be sure that your interview,
assessment and closing processes meet the needs of top candidates. As
you conduct your review, be on the lookout for these symptoms and problems:
- Hiring competent, but unmotivated people. Don't look for people
who need a job, but those who want a better job. Excessive turnover
is a clue that you're not hiring people who are motivated to do the
work.
- Boring ads that are hard to find. Assume you're a candidate.
Now try to find one of your postings. Was it easy to find—and
was it inspiring? When one of my clients was hiring 20 software developers,
it took me an hour to find the 30-day-old ad on the 37th of 40 pages
of a dot-com listing. When I finally found the notice, it was boring,
exclusionary and demeaning. The top 20 percent of job seekers won't
spend the time to search for your ad.
Skills-based ads turn off and exclude the best. Read one of your
ads for a senior manager or staffer. Does it overemphasize skills?
It's better to include just a few requirements, giving more attention
to the challenges. The best candidates generally have 60 percent to
70 percent of the skills, but 125 percent of the motivation. Don't
exclude this audience by demanding 100 percent of the skills.
- Online tests that are negative or exclusionary. Be very careful
if you use any online testing, and always try it out yourself first.
I recently took an online test for one of my clients. The questions
were demeaning: Would I take a drug test? Did I live within 50 miles
of the facility? They never asked if I wanted a great job or were willing
to relocate for the chance to work with a company creating a leading-edge
Six Sigma customer-service application. You might be driving away the
best and not even know it.
- Emotional assessments. If you're hiring too many friendly and
outgoing people who aren't all that competent, you may be measuring
presentation skills, rather than performance. You'll never build a diverse
team of top people if assessments are filtered through first impressions,
personality, prejudices and stereotypes. Studies show that 75 percent
of assessments are based on first impressions and biases. This is where
training can help.
- A flawed voting system. Hiring the best is challenging enough.
It's impossible if one "no" vote based on a superficial interview can
outweigh three or four "yeses." Make sure that no single interviewer
dominates the selection process.
- Unprofessional interviewing. You're being evaluated, too. The
best can recognize an unprofessional team during the first round of
interviews. The clues: Everyone describes a different job, nobody asks
challenging questions, everyone's selling—and no one's listening.
Top candidates accept offers based on what they'll be doing, learning,
accomplishing and becoming, not on the use of their skills.
- It's not just about the money. For the best candidates, compensation
is third or fourth on the list; a great career opportunity is most important.
Ask the best person you've hired why she took the job. This will be
an important benchmark to improve your negotiating process.
Putting It All Together
I've found a number of individual managers and a few companies that
consistently hired good people. These six principles form the basis of
a hiring process designed to attract and keep top people.
- Performance profiles. If you want to hire superior people, enumerate
superior performance objectives; for example, "building a team to develop
a new software application by year's end." Whom would you rather hire—someone
with all of the skills or someone who can deliver the results?
- Define the job, not the person. When you focus on results, it's
easier to obtain agreement by the interviewing team on what's important.
Assessing competency is straightforward when a candidate's accomplishments
are compared to the required deliverables.
- Objective evaluation. Past performance is the best predictor
of future performance. Make sure everyone on the hiring team knows the
job's performance objectives and gets examples of comparable past accomplishments.
- Wide-ranging sourcing. The first step to effective sourcing
is a workforce-hiring plan. Most companies are too reactive, basing
their hiring on short-term needs. Instead, every department should summarize
its hiring needs for the next four to six months. Regardless of how
you find candidates, the best aren't motivated by the same needs as
the typical candidate. Capture their attention with want-ad copy that
gets at the best's motivating drivers: a challenge and an opportunity
to grow, learn and contribute something significant.
- Emotional control. More errors are made in the first 30 minutes
of an interview than at any other time. To control the impact of first
impressions and personality, wait 30 minutes and then measure your first
impression again. To stay objective, ask tougher questions of people
you like and go easy on those you don't care for. This helps put performance
before personality. While true personality is critical to job success,
an interviewing personality isn't the same thing. You'll see these differences
emerge after about 30 minutes and discover that about a third of the
people you thought were very good are really pretty average, and a third
you thought were weak are significantly better.
- Recruiting right. Top candidates always view a new job from
a strategic perspective. Managers need to offer sophisticated career-management
advice to their top candidates every step of the way. It's easy to "sell"
a candidate who needs a job, but it takes a pro to close a deal with
a top performer who has multiple job opportunities.
In sum, hiring should be a process, not an event—the first step
in creating a talent-driven culture. Hiring the best shouldn't be left
to chance. The cost of one bad hire at the staff level has been estimated
at two to three times the employee's annual salary, and it soars to five
to 10 times that amount for a manager. This is a tremendous amount when
applied across the organization.
A process that seamlessly links people, practices, process and systems
can serve as the framework for getting hiring under control. The performance
profile is the first step. My suggestion: Never hire another person until
every member of the hiring team agrees on what the new hire must do to
be considered successful. This step alone will change everything. Defining
job success up front gives managers a relevant benchmark to assess competency
rather than relying on their own biases and perceptions. The performance
profile is what attracts the candidate to the job opening, and why he
or she decides to accept an offer. This now represents a career opportunity,
not just another job.
Lou Adler is founder of Tustin, Calif.-based training and consulting
firm CJA Executive Search and CEO, founder and creator of the POWER Hiring
system. Adler is also the author of Hire with Your Head, A Rational
Way to Make a Gut Decision (Wiley, 1998). This article was originally
published in the March 2002 issue of Optimize.
Reprinted with permission.
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