Recruiting for success

Notes de l'éditeur

1. How do people want to be sold to? IBM and Microsoft- my experience wasn’t always great: The sales team would often come in pairs: one smarmy sales person and one techie. The sales person would open the door, set up a meeting and then go on to try and establish credentials by telling you basic things everyone in the business know. I could wait for him (usually) to shut up and let me speak to the techie to discuss the issues and challenges we had. Price WAS often a deciding factor, but not the only one.You don’t get huge projects to start with, you start with a smaller one, the the company sees how that goes – doesn’t have to be perfect, but how problems and issues and handled, are crucial.THE PM: Crucial. We selected SDL to work on a Polish localization project. The PM was fantastic – she stood her ground when it was appropriate, but also implemented changes and improvements when necessary. Of course there was an organisation behind her, but on the strength of our relationship – and yes, trust – my team decided to give more languages to SDL for the next version of the software.
2. Do consider using psychometric testing to profile people – hunters are typically great starters, but probably not the greatest finishers. Farmers are often the oppositie.
3. Here to you can use psychometric testing or at least have a profile in mind – many of our clients do this – at least a verbal and numerical reasoning test. Not terribly expensive. These are typically used to find people who can come to the right conclusions quickly. Additional interviews will establish how good they are on the phone.Again, the smaller the company, the more roles a PM will have to fill.
4. Eg – French include a picture, the Germanic style ones are very short; some are in chronological order starting with the most distant past (I almost missed out on one of my best candidates ever after losing interest when I saw that his first job listed was as a German primary school teacher).
5. Phone interview – great for finding out about their phone manner.