Hey what's up everyone. It's me again Joshua Partogi. Welcome back to my
channel. I just arrived at Singapore after a five hours flight from Perth. It's
a rainy season at this time of the year in Singapore. I still hope I can get good
inspiration from Singapore in the next few days. So we'll see.
Stay on this video. Hey folks. I'm in Singapore right now and as you can see
Singapore is rather gloomy, it's been raining since this morning.
So after strolling around Singapore, I think in today's video I'm gonna talk
about how to recruit awesome Scrum Masters from the job market. The
reason why I want to talk about this topic is because last week when I was in
Melbourne somebody asked me to have a chat over coffee and he asked me what
are the things to look out for when recruiting for Scrum Masters from the
job market. During the conversation, I didn't have any kind of list or
criterias, the conversation just emerges and flows through. After having that
conversation I jot down the list, the things that I've been using when I'm
looking out for Scrum Masters from the job market over the past few years. So
this video is going to be about tips on recruiting for awesome Scrum Masters
from the job market. If this is something for you don't go anywhere. Stay on this
video.
So when looking for awesome Scrum Masters from the job market look for
learning rather than successes. As courage is one of the Scrum values,
awesome Scrum Master fail a lot because they experiment a lot. Awesome Scrum
Masters do not take the norm, they're willing to go to the unknown. They have
the empirical mindset rather than the predictive mindset. During the interview,
ask the Scrum Master: "What was the biggest failure that you have
experienced? When was it? How did you cope with that failure? What did you learn
from that failure?". You can be the judge how much learning they have based on the
answers they have given you.
When recruiting for awesome Scrum Masters from the job market, look for
Scrum Masters who have the product mindset. Awesome Scrum Master is
oriented towards the product success. So during the interview you can ask them:
"What are the success indicator of Scrum?" if they tell you it's on time, on scope
and on budget, you know they still have the project mindset and you should move
on to the next candidate. If they tell you that it's velocity,
you should also move on to the next candidate because velocity is a bad
metric as a product success indicator. Awesome Scrum Masters should know
Evidence Based Management (EBM) metrics. I have made a video on Evidence Based
Management, click the link up here to watch the video.
Awesome Scrum Masters are servant leaders at heart. They naturally want to serve
people so that people can become the best version of themself. They're not
centered towards themselves. They know it's not about their personal
achievement or their personal greatness. It's about leveling up the organization
or the team to the next level. During the interview you can check whether they're
centered towards themselves or they're taking it back to the team or the
organization and use the servant leadership stance and the coaching
stance so that the organization and the team can self-discover what is best for
them rather than what is best for the Scrum Master.
When recruiting for awesome Scrum Masters from the job market, look for Scrum
Masters who can coach. Awesome Scrum Masters uses several stances to improve
the organization agility and one of that stance is the coaching stance. I have
made a video on Scrum Master stances. click the link up here to watch the video.
After interviewing hundreds of Scrum Masters, I have found the majority of
them do not know what coaching is. In fact they confuse coaching with
mentoring. To test whether the candidate really know what coaching is, ask the
candidate to give you a sample coaching session for around 10 to 15 minutes
during the interview.
When recruiting for awesome Scrum Masters from the job market, look for those who
has coached at the organization level or those who has coached the management.
According to Scrum Guide the Scrum Master makes systemic changes at the
organization level and does not only serve the Scrum team. Focusing at the
Scrum team only will lead to sub-optimal result. However, many Scrum Masters in the
job market only focused on making changes at the team level. That's why in
that kind of scenario the organization feel the need to put another layer of
coach and the organization call it organization or Enterprise agile coach.
During the interview you can ask the candidate: "When was the last time you
coach the management or anyone outside of the Scrum team?". And as a follow-up
question you can ask them: "What triggered you to coach them?".
So that is all from me today folks. Singapore's weather haven't been really
friendly to me in the past few days but I still hope you found today's video
valuable to help you recruit awesome Scrum Masters from the job market. If you
have any other tips to recruit awesome Scrum Master from the job market, leave a
comment down below. If you like today's video, don't forget to smash that like
button and don't forget to subscribe to my channel so that you won't miss any of
my video in the future. Until then see you until my next video in another city.