How We Hire Great Agile Coaches

What makes an Agile Coach successful?

We have been asking this question a lot lately. What makes an Agile Coach successful? Hiring is notoriously difficult in general, and we are in need of hiring top tier Agile Consultants and Coaches. Being a small company, we get to select and improve our methods through experimentation and refinement.

Recently, I stumbled across a nice way to conduct and assess our interviews. I will share the high-level approach here along with a couple of the key details so that you can see how this compares to your approach and maybe try something new. Reach out in the comments to share your own take!

This interview method is centered around assessing the candidate against six characteristics:

The first four of the six characteristics we assess, regardless of the role, are our four core values. Each of our four core values represents who we are and who we want every new hire to be. The other two are unique to the role, e.g. Agile Consultant, DevOps Engineer, etc. For instance, for an Agile Consultant we want someone who champions agile fundamentals and is a cultural catalyst.

Each question asked in the interview must help assess the candidate’s strength in one or more of the characteristics. For some extra spice, we throw in a real-time consulting scenario in the middle of the interview to see how they respond to the everyday challenges of the job and further ascertain their strength in each area.

During the 30-45 minutes outside of the role play, we give open-ended questions and prompts that candidates must answer from experience and know-how. We avoid asking hypotheticals because the answers can easily be faked. The best predictor of how a candidate will perform is how they have performed in the past, and we dig in further based on the candidate’s responses. One of my favorite prompts that highlights a candidate’s courage and servant leadership is:

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