Transitioning teams to Agile is never easy and requires a vast amount of change. Usually, the focus is on the team itself, but at some point the organization has to make changes. These changes ripple out to a myriad of departments including Human Resources and Facilities. There has been a lot of discussion around how to “measure” people on agile teams. Human Resources demands metrics to measure performance and regular reviews among other things.

However, one area where there isn’t a lot of discussion happening is around “building” Agile teams from a Human Resource perspective. Many Human Resource departments are very strict on interview processes and find it difficult to adapt to the effective ways to hire people for a self-organizing team. On such teams more importance is put to how someone reacts within the team than on their individual skill set. This is much more difficult to interview for and requires some non standard approaches to get a view of a persons compatability to the companies values, culture and the existing team.

Some resources on this topic can be found at:

Articles
“We’re Hiring” by Lisa Crispin
“Improving Our Interview Process” by Lisa Crispin
“Hiring for a Collaborative Team” by Esther Derby
“Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, More than a Title” by Esther Derby

Blogs
Hiring Technical People Blog by Johanna Rothman

Books
Agile Hiring by Sean Landis
Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers by Johanna Rothman

Tell us about your story getting hiring practices changed in your journey towards an Agile Organization!