On hiring agile coaches

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

For anyone involved in a sufficiently large complex organization you can recognize how challenging it can be to get approval to hire people that seem like a fit.

This year I am challenged with hiring many agile coaches to enable our organization’s Agile Transformation and then on an on-going basis of continuous improvement.

This is the first time I’ve had to hire such a large amount of people and to make it even more challenging, I’m having to do this over five countries and three continents during a mostly post-pandemic era.

The key challenges and approach:

Update(s)

• A dear colleague has suggested a few ideas which I’ve added to the bottom of the list (Thanks to Nick Brown for the input!).

Passive vs active hiring

• Challenge: Finding good people is hard to do, if you are passively advertising your role on your company’s jobs page and LinkedIn you will get mixed results (it depends on the company, the country, and the role).
• Approach: Use your network both inside and outside of your company to get referrals from people you know, get your existing people to leverage their networks too. A word-of-mouth recommendation from someone I trust is often far more effective than waiting for the right person to come along to apply for a role. If you don’t have a network in certain regions / locations, find out about the local community / meet ups and try to find out who is presenting and reach out to them. Ideally someone in your team can join the community / meetup / conference in person, at least now days you can join remotely.

Know your market

• Challenge: Each country has its own job market culture e.g. employee vs employer type markets. A one size fits all model just doesn’t work.
• Approach: Spend time on learning the market, talk to recruiters and even hiring agencies to get your lay of the land. If you are hiring in a market where it is normal for people to get head hunted, then you should look to experiment and try that as opposed to just waiting someone will apply. The long term approach would be to establish a presence in the community (like the point above) so that you can be seen as an employer of choice. Quite often the community of practitioners is tight knit and, in some countries, quite small, so word of your organization can travel fast (beware: this can work both ways). Try to consider customizing your job offerings too so that they stand out and talk about why your team(s) / department / challenges you are solving for would be interesting to people.

What are you looking for

• Challenge: There are a few types / patterns of agile coaches and knowing what to look for, how to filter and how and individual could fit into your context can be tricky. Unless you know what, you are looking for (in terms of qualities and aptitude) — you are going to have to compare, and contrast based on personality and ability to interview.
• Approach: I would not suggest a super rigid checklist of things to look for, however I would recommend having clarity around the types of behavior, aptitude, and other traits you are looking for (e.g. admitting their limits, saying they don’t know rather than making things up, concise but thoughtful answers, ability to lean etc.). This can be really important when you are bombarded with fancy sounding answers that lack substance or nuance. As a group we are willing to trade-off knowledge / skills for willingness to learn, humility and able to demonstrate their passions. This is often where a left field type question can be useful to understand what books / topics is the candidate currently interested in as a way of showing if they are a 9–5 coach or they are emersed in the community and learning out of passion rather than referring to the Scrum / Kanban guide and not moving away from what they learnt years ago.

What to ask

• Challenge: Learning what questions allow you to quickly determine an individuals fit within the group is hard, hiring experienced agile coaches isn’t a cookie cutter type exercise. There are no certifications that allow you to assess for competence. They can only tell you their interest in taking the certifications in the first place.
• Approach: Consider creating a bank of questions that people on your panel can use / leverage throughout the interview process. People don’t all need to ask the same questions, but getting enough diversity into the hiring process will often ensure a better outcome. Having things to look out for in the answers will also be helpful too e.g. xyz is a junior answer, abc shows they understand the topic well etc.

Treat hiring as your priority

• Challenge: If you find people you like and you take too long to make them an offer you risk losing out on them. This could be one of many reasons, but you should not rest of your laurels.
• Approach: If you work in an organization that makes hiring slower than you’d like, you can hack this by having interview panels with groups of people (e.g. 3–4) that allow you to get a quicker gage of people’s feedback far quicker. If you need more than 3–4 people to interview, have 2 panels maximum so that you can move quickly (if the person is the right fit). This is an effective way to show that you are serious and are taking their application seriously. When I find people, I want to hire, my focus is to make sure that they feel like I want them to join the team, I take the time to answer as many questions as possible. There’s nothing more frustrating to either a candidate or an employer than a slow process zapping people’s will to live. You only get one first impression so make it a good one. Be aware of any biases you have, ensure all other people on the hiring panel are providing their feedback and capturing it systematically so that there’s a record of people’s observations and you are not just rushing to hire the first person that looks like a fit.

Shared understanding

• Challenge: Don’t rely on your recruitment team to deeply understand the role’s context and patterns to look out for in detail, especially if they have a big backlog of roles.
• Approach: In general, you should be speaking with your recruiters on a very regular basis anyway (when hiring many roles), keeping them up to date with your observations, taking the time to get them up to speed on what you are looking for (and what you are not looking for) is quite important. Recruiters cannot understand every role so spending the time with them to get them aligned and on-board only helps.

Putting things into practice

• Challenge: How do you get a good feel for people’s actual skills, you can’t do a coding interview like Google does
• Approach: Putting some situational awareness into the conversation would be quite an interesting approach — how do you respond to the following scenario (provide limited details / context).

Walk the talk

• Challenge: How do you know how the candidate would react in a real-life situation /scenario?
• Approach: Have a real person from a team / organization join with a genuine business problem to get them to respond and interact in real time. Sit and observe. Now there will need to be some confidentiality in the conversation as most people may not feel comfortable sharing their problems with a stranger so setting the ground rules would be key. Also letting the candidates know early on that they would be getting an opportunity to speak to a real life colleague.

There’s many other topics to explore on this as well such as what makes a good fit, what to look out for when trying to find a great agile coach, how to write a job description that inspires, building an internal pipeline etc..

Let me know if these topics are of interest and how you are addressing them in your organization. What works for you and what are your biggest challenges? What are the qualities you look for when hiring an agile coach?