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NFJS2025

Agile Hiring: It's a Team Sport

When you think of hiring for your team, does the paperwork overwhelm you? Are you concerned about the number of interviews you seem to need to make a great decision? Do you ever have trouble making a decision, to know if this candidate is right for you –the team, the project, and the organization?? You know the cost of hiring people is high, and the cost of not getting the right person is even higher.

You can apply agile approaches to your hiring, iterating on everything. You can get feedback as you go, involving the entire team, including the sourcing. You can teach your recruiters to use a kanban board to track candidates and where they are. You can iterate on the job description (and job ad) based on what you see in candidates. When you involve the entire team, you can create questions and auditions that work for you. You can identify candidates who fit your culture and those who don't.

This session is a timeboxed interactive workshop. Let’s make your hiring more agile.

  1. Understand what cultural fit is and isn't.
  2. How to involve recruiters in an agile way.
  3. Quick intro to a job analysis (and create your job analysis)
  4. How to review resumes and what to look for in a resume. Warning signs.
  5. How to design questions to really understand candidates and what they can bring to you. Create questions.
  6. Question practice, interactive in 3-person teams.
  7. How to create an agile audition that will work for your organization and team.
  8. Practice an audition to see how it will work.
  9. Wrap-up and answer anything we haven't finished yet.

Johanna Rothman

About Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:

  • Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
  • Become a Successful Independent Consultant
  • Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
  • Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
  • Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
  • From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
  • Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
  • Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
  • Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
  • Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
  • Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
  • Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
  • Manage Your Job Search
  • Hiring Geeks That Fit
  • The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
  • Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)

In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.

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