Are you our perfect Senior Java Developer? 17 June 2009
Posted by Tracey in team.Tags: developers, do-it, java, recruitment, team, vbase, youthnet
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Yes, we’re still recruiting. For details of the role, please see the Work for Us page on the YouthNet website
More recruitment… argh!!! 20 May 2009
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: recruitment
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Our next round of recruitment is underway, as we look for a replacement for Ben, who was working on the NVD/do-it integration part of V-Base 3. After 7 years at YouthNet, he’s migrated back into the private sector – we wish him every success in his new role and look forward to hearing what it’s like doing agile development in a much bigger organisation.
Recruitment has been one of the biggest time-eaters on this project. We spent almost a full year recruiting a team of developers in a highly competitive market and although we’d finely honed our recruitment process by the end, it’s been great not having to deal with recruitment agencies, poorly written resumés and disappointing interviews for a while. Keep your fingers crossed that we find someone soon!
(re)factor8 21 April 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: iteration, recruitment, team
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iteration 8 is a refactoring/hardening iteration. no new business value gets added in this time; instead the team are laying the ground for the next lot of functionality to be added and tweaking the client to make it more stable.
we’re also inducting our new developer, sofia.
yes, you read that correctly - .net developer 3 is now in the house 
we’re not only extremely pleased to have her join us, but olivier has thoroughly enjoyed telling all the recruitment agencies that we’re no longer in need of their services.
when sofia’s had a chance to settle in a bit, hopefully she’ll do an introductory post.
Recruitment 19 March 2008
Posted by Olivier Van Acker in Uncategorized.Tags: developers, interviews, recruitment
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We’ve been recruiting right from the start of the project and have been fine tuning our recruitment process ever since. In the beginning we invited people in if their CV looked good. Soon it became very obvious that what is on paper is not always what you meet in person (This is a very big understatement). We interview with three people: me, the Product Owner (Tracey) and someone from Central Services, so a candidate who totally doesn’t live up to their CV wastes a lot of time. After several of these failures, Tracey gave me this little book: Smart and Gets Things Done. A very valuable book on how to recruit developers. One of the things I implemented straight away (the same day I got the book) was phone interviews, hooray! This is purely to see if a candidate lives up to their CV. Let me explain a bit more about this ‘phone interview filter’.
It consists of three parts:
- CV specific questions. I read the candidate’s CV and ask specific questions about technologies being mentioned. (E.g You have implemented cached program listings in XSLT/XML, how did you do that?) I’m careful not to turn this into a technical test, I just want to give the candidate enough room to talk ‘tech’ to me ;-P
- I present the candidate with a technical problem. This is to see how they approach a problem. Even if they don’t know the solution it’s good to see if they make an effort and how well they can reason. One candidate once bluntly said: ‘I haven’t got a clue how to do this’, followed by a silence. (Including my own silence) We skipped part 3 of the phone interview.
- Last but not least; I ask the candidate if they have questions about the project or YouthNet. This shows if they have a healthy interest, have themselves prepared and I think it’s good to have a two way interview.
With this ‘phone interview filter’ I’m able to decline about 80% of the CVs that get sent to me. A massive time saver. Also I’ve had some pleasant surprises where the CV was not very well written but the candidate made a good impression on the phone. So overall I can really recommend this, however I do keep in mind not to turn it into a full on interview, it’s just to see if the candidate lives up to his/her CV. The real test comes in our specially brewed ‘in house interview’ 
More about this in a later post.
Olivier
calling v-base… come in, v-base 18 March 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: recruitment, team
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after an enthusiastic start to our blog, we’ve gone a bit quiet. don’t worry, we’re still here – well, most of us are. camille has been on holiday for the last 3 weeks – her belated honeymoon in new zealand. can’t wait to see the present she’s bringing back for us (hint hint).
the rest of us have been beavering away on our 6th iteration or sprint. we encountered a few unforeseen problems which have been summarily dealt with but of course this eats into our developer days. baazi and martin have been working like trojans to get through the list of user stories we allocated to this iteration.
olivier is the new best friend of several i.t. recruitment agencies determined to find us candidates for our 3rd developer role. we’ve been recruiting for 3 months and to be honest, the market isn’t working in our favour. cv after cv gets consigned to the (virtual) wastepaper basket. where are all the good developers these days?… besides the ones we’ve already got, of course! the job market seems to be flooded with sub-standard developers claiming to have skills they can’t even spell and asking for way more money than they’re worth. it’s a good thing we started using preliminary telephone interviews to weed out this kind of blagger.
spirits are a bit low in some quarters. good thing it’s easter hols this weekend. then again, that’s 2 full days of development time we lose …argh!!!
