agent of change

I have been doing a bunch of interviews lately. My second one this week (thanks recruiting!) was tonight and it didn’t go as well as it should have.

Here’s my typical interview strategy for when I am interviewing Business Analysts for ThoughtWorks and some tips to help you if I ever get picked to interview you.

1. Show Up On Time And Be Ready

I know that you are busy, but this isn’t college. You’re such a hot shot Analyst that you could land a job anywhere, right? Well, first you are going to have to show me that you want _this_ job. Our recruiting department sends out a confirmation to you usually 3 days in advance of my call. I also get a confirmation sent to me. If I can’t reach you on the phone number you give on the day of the call, I’ll usually try again about 15 minutes later. If I can’t reach you, I’ll send a note back to recruiting to reschedule the call. However, if I reach you and you are not ready to take my call and don’t have a good explanation (I’ll understand if the house is on fire or something), that’s an automatic *No Hire*. My reasoning for this is simple: it takes nearly an hour to do an interview with you and you know about it in advance, so you should have that time blocked off. If you don’t treat that time as important, it means you won’t treat our clients that way.

2. Prepare

Do your homework on ThoughtWorks. Find out how we like to work; our company culture. Read our website, learn about agile, visit some blogs, talk to us at conferences. I’m going to ask you some questions about what you know about the company, so show me that you did a little bit of work and I’ll be happy.

On the flip side, I do almost no preparation for my interview with you. All I know is your name, phone number, and what position we are hiring you for (that determines my questions, more on that later). I get all of your information like your resume and notes from other interviews you’ve had with us, but I don’t look at a single bit of it before the interview. This is by design. I don’t want to know anything about you that will influence my decision to hire you.

3. The Interview

I have a pretty consistent interviewing style that helps me be more objective about your skills. ThoughtWorks has a set of questions that they like me to ask and I also mix in some of my own. Here’s how the interview typically goes:

1. Ice Breaker
2. ThoughtWorks Questions
3. Domain Question From Your Most Recent Position
4. Random Domain Question
5. Questions For Me
6. Wrap Up

Ice Breaker
I start off by letting you know how the interview is going to go. I care more about your thinking process than you getting everything 100% right on my questions. By this time, I still haven’t looked at anything about you.

ThoughtWorks Questions
The ThoughtWorks questions are mostly softball questions so that I can go over some logistical things about the job. Are you alright with lots (and lots) of travel? Have you worked with Agile professionally? Why do you want to be a BA? There are a bunch of questions, but they give me an idea of what to ask you further. I’ll go into something in detail if I get the sense that you are stretching the truth. While you are answering my questions, I’ll pop open your resume and look at your most recent job and title.

Domain Question From Your Most Recent Position
By now, you should be warmed up and I have a good sense of what I am going to ask you. From your most recent position, I’ll ask you something about the business domain. This way, I get a sense of how well you can understand what a business does. If you’re a TWU candidate, meaning you are just out of college, this question changes to ask about some of your classes. I’m looking for a deep understanding of what you are talking about. I’ll dive into small details to make sure you really know your stuff.

I may also ask you about some things you have done for your previous job (or school). Special projects, clubs, whatever. I want to see that you haven’t simply gone to work or school and taken the minimum to get by. It’s for your own good because you’ll get burned out quickly at ThoughtWorks if you aren’t into the work.

Random Domain Question
This is my favorite part of the interview. I’ll ask you about a domain that has nothing to do with business and run through a few exercises with you to see how well you can understand what I am talking about. It’s always something off the wall and will have nothing to do with what you have done before, but that is the point. I’m looking to see how well you can adapt to a new situation and think on your feet. I’ll play customer roles and ask you to elicit questions about things I want to do. I’ll try to trip you up and see how you recover. This way, I can get an idea of how you will do with our clients.

Questions For Me
This is the part of the interview where you get to ask me anything you want about ThoughtWorks. Some people trip up here because they think the interview is over. If you are really serious, you will have some questions about how we do our work, what our people are like to work with, etc. I also get to sell you a little bit on what it’s like to work here.

Wrap Up
The whole process takes 45 minutes to an hour. I let you know about the next phase in the interview process and that our recruiting department will be getting back to you within a week or so. After that, I hang up and write the last of my notes about you and read them over again. I make them readable by someone other than myself and then I make a decision about whether or not to pass or pursue.

4. Pass Or Pursue?

After the interview, I have a pretty good idea of how I am going to recommend you. I ask myself lots of questions like: Is this person smart and do they get things done? Would I want to work with them? If the answer is no, it’s a pass. If I wouldn’t work with you, then I wouldn’t expect anyone else at ThoughtWorks to. If I feel like you aren’t smart enough to walk into a client and immediately start to figure out what is going on, that’s also a pass. If I have a good feeling about you, I’ll mark you as a pursue and send you on up the chain for our intense face-to-face interview process.

I hope this was helpful to future candidates. I’m looking for aptitude and attitude in the way that you present yourself to me. If you’ve got both, you’ll have no problem being a ThoughtWorker. Good luck.

UPDATE: If you are looking for a referral, please email me at jhoms at thoughtworks dot com and I’ll point you to the right people.

I bought some RAM today for my laptop and had a great experience with crucial.com.

First, there was a program that they allowed me to download (if you use IE, it just runs right in the browser) that showed me exactly how much RAM I had and more importantly, _where_ it was installed. It showed me that I had 1GB of RAM in a single slot.

Then I got a recommendation for which RAM I needed based on Crucial knowing exactly what computer I had. Their suggestion was exactly what I needed.

Purchasing the RAM was my favorite part of the experience. In my opinion, this is where Crucial gets things _really_ right. I didn’t have to log in, sign up, or otherwise register for anything on their site. I just put in my shipping and billing information and I was done.

The last nice touch was this little gem that appeared in the middle of my order confirmation.

Nothing to fill out if I didn’t want to, but a genuine attempt at making my life easier if I was going to have multiple orders.

Thanks Crucial, it was a great buying experience.

This is an article that I have seen go past in my RSS reader a few times lately: Meeting Tip: Learning Names. It is something that I have used for years, but this is a great writeup of what to do. Simply stated, make a little “map” of the meeting table you are at and write everyone’s name along with any other information you might need next to them.

I’ve taken it further a few times and actually written notes under each person’s name so that I knew who came up with the idea. It was a common practice for me at NeoTactix where we would meet a ton of new companies all the time and I could _never_ keep their names straight in my head. I find it equally important in my consulting life at ThoughtWorks, but rely on it less when I see the people that I meet every day and their name eventually starts to stick in my head.

One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Evslin, wrote Google CSE – Why It May be the NBT. Go read the article first, because I refer to it a lot here. I agree with what Tom says about CSE (Custom Search Engine) being a big deal because Google is doing it. Rollyo, a product that I was an early beta tester in, came before, but as with the misnomer of first-mover advantage, it doesn’t matter if you’re first, it matters who has more users.

Now that I’ve had a chance to play with CSE, I can say that it is a nice tool, but I think that we will see more improvements.

Here’s something I think that Tom didn’t get to though. Google has always said that they want to organize the world’s information. CSE smells a lot like the dmoz.org project that started years ago, except that Google found a way to get people to *want* to create a human-edited search engine. _(What a novel idea huh? I guess those MBAs are still teaching us techies a few things)._ If you think that CSE is just a dumb tool to put sites into, you’re way off base. Google is giving you a great service by letting you limit search querying to some specific sites, but what you are giving them is much more valuable. You are telling them what sites to group with what categories. I would have to bet that Google is paying attention to what you put in your little search network and getting even more context out of that to help their main search engine too. So when you create a network about VCs or Entrepreneurs, Google looks at that and probably gives them a little more Google Juice for certain things.

The goal of a search engine is to bring back the most relevant data to you that you are searching on. What made Google a better search engine is that it went beyond simple keyword searching with their PageRank algorithm and other secret sauce. You are getting more valuable information because they made a bet that things that are linked to the most _by humans_ are the most relevant _to humans_. And since a human is going to be able to tell you much better than a computer (at least for now) what content is best for a particular subject, they are leveraging that “vote of confidence” from someone who links to something. Well, CSE is just an extension of that idea. You are building mini networks for them and they will leverage that knowledge too.

I’ll keep watching this one. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I don’t particularly like this law of power. It seems like an easy way to get ahead, but will hurt you in the long run. Keeping a clean appearance is important, but I believe there are better ways to do it. More after the jump.

I’ve been watching a few movies lately that have reminded me about this law of power. We’re constantly told what to do in life by many different people. Parents, bosses, friends, governments, you name it. It’s like a quote I remember from Joe Versus the Volcano when one of Meg Ryan’s characters is explaining her father. She says something like, “My dad says that most people in this world are asleep. The few that are awake are the ones who are in control and they are constantly amazed at what they see.” Well, I’m awake now and I’m not going back to sleep. More after the jump.

From what I’ve seen in business, it takes all sorts of things to make you successful. You have to have talent, intelligence, experience, humility, be comfortable with change, and even have a little luck. The most important virtues to have though are determination and focus. A sheer will to get things done will get you the furthest in business. More after the jump.

Is there a position within a large project for a business analyst that is half architect, half business analyst? Keeping with the subject of my current assignment, a coworker mentioned a role that might make sense in some situations. More after the break.

Being a consultant is a tricky job. There are usually plenty of political issues within the client to deal with. In particular, people don’t like to be told they are stupid. Bringing in a consultant to work on a project that couldn’t be done in house or was not able to be completed by internal staff seems to signal that there is something wrong with the people at the organization. While this may be true in some cases, people still don’t like to _hear_ that. A great trick to use is this next law of power. More after the jump.

In my relatively short time in business, I have made a few enemies. It was a painful process, but it taught me some powerful lessons about doing the right thing even if it wasn’t popular. More after the jump.