Hiring Nerds

Computerworld - A new book will take a lot of the angst out of staffing up for those IT shops lucky enough to be doing so. Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People (Dorset House, 2004), by Johanna Rothman, is a highly practical tome about hiring IT folks. Rothman talked with Kathleen Melymuka about strategies and pitfalls in IT hiring.

What's the biggest mistake IT hiring managers make when they prepare to hire someone? I see mistakes in these areas: 1) Hiring based on a tools checklist -- some number of years of Java or WinRunner -- as opposed to hiring someone who can adapt his/her knowledge to the products at hand. This is the biggest one I see. 2) Hiring for the future instead of the present. I see this one almost as much. Hiring someone who the manager thinks will have the skills to grow into a new or different role in the future. 3) Not considering how a new hire will fit into -- or not! -- the team. People are not just a collection of technical skills. If they can't get along with the rest of the team, it can be close to impossible to use their technical skills to move the work forward.

Isn't hiring for aptitude the same as hiring for the future? No. I see people saying, "I need someone to be a tech contributor now, but I want him to be a tech lead in six months," so they hire someone with management experience and hope he or she can do the work. I see that a lot in hiring developers. But they're managers, not architects. They're capable of doing the management, but they can't actually do the architectural work. If you need an architect and a manager and you can only have one, decide which you need now and hire that person. Figure out how to deal with the other part later. You can't get both.

Johanna Rothman