To build an Agile team, you have to recruit on skillset, toolset, and mindset. If your applicant is aligned with your team in all three areas, you’re onto a winner!
Why should they join your team?
Your first responsibility in hiring someone into your Agile team is to think about how you can make the idea of joining your team (or continue to be in your team) appetizing to high-demand applicants.
Take a moment to pause on this.
You are competing against everyone else in need of a superstar employee, so why should they choose you over them?
Attitude > Aptitude
Put people first! After all – the very first line of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.
Think about the kind of person you want to join your team. And I don’t mean in terms of their technical ability – I mean in terms of their personality traits, their experience, their values, their being. I know that sounds crazy, but hiring on attitude over aptitude will not only yield a successful hire, it will also give your team the ability to unlock future potential.
Build an incredible recruitment process
This is your opportunity to sell your team. I know that sounds ridiculous – nobody sells a job – but if you want top talent, that is exactly what you want to do. You want to highlight to the applicant that your organisation and – more specifically – your team, are total pros. This starts with a logical and structured recruitment process and ends with a friction free on-boarding.
This is SO hard to do, but I cannot tell you how important it is!
Make people your focus
Hiring is usually a painful task. Either you are really busy, need more help, and hiring seems like a distraction. Or you have recently lost a team member and need to re-fill that position, making hiring feel like just a mechanical process.
I totally agree with my HR colleagues on this: people should be your one and only focus as a leader – and that starts in the hiring process.