Review By: Matt Gelbwaks
02/28/2012Sean Landis’s Agile Hiring is a mixed bag. It has great advice on résumé assessment, phone screens, and interviewing. However, he does not explore the concept of agile as much as I wanted him to and takes a very cynical view on organizational management that gets in the way of his valuable messages. Even with these deficiencies, this is a fine book and a great reference for those necessary steps to hiring.

First, let’s focus on the gems within the book. Landis does a great job of taking the reader though résumé review and interviewing. He dedicates three-quarters of the book to these two topics (actually three, because he divides interviews into phone and in-person interviews). This is the area that he has identified as the true need for focus and that in which people usually need the most practice developing their artistry. He invokes the aikido principles of Shu Ha Ri early in the book and sets the frame that great teams result from great hiring and great hiring results from great interviewing. He goes into quite a bit of depth and detail in each of the three key topics and includes templates to follow so that readers can start down the mastery path with a guide.

In the section on résumé assessment, Landis walks readers through the various clues and triggers for classifying what résumés represent and winnowing the pile of résumés to those which may represent individuals who will fit well within your organization and meet the objectives of your hiring. In the phone screening and interviewing sections, he covers most of the common techniques designed to help organizations continue to refine their choices and ultimately settle on a final candidate (or candidates) to whom to make an offer. The patterns that Landis offers within the book are nicely augmented by callouts and quick editorial comments. The callouts offer examples in areas that can be ambiguous or abstract, and the comments increase the readability by offering the reader direction and emphasis.

Landis starts the book with a comment that if your organization is outsourcing development, rather than implementing what his book suggests, you should use the techniques to find yourself a better job. I found that unfortunate because it recommends that the reader jump to a conclusion rather than understand the rationale for his corporation’s decision. Certainly, the decision may be a poor one, but the reader ought to at least investigate what is behind that position before reacting rashly.

Lastly, the title of the book is Agile Hiring. Though Landis has a quick section in the introduction about why he called it such, I did not find anything in his recommendations that are either specific to agile or would be different if you were hiring developers or other professional employees for a different development methodology. It certainly does not take anything away from the book’s mission, but it would have been interesting to see the agile concepts explored in more detail. Having helped companies hire people to work in more agile environments, I seen great differences in the cultures between organizations that have internalized agility and those that remain prescriptive. Regardless of the flaws, I found this a great book on how to help your team make better hires.