Matt Shelton

I wrote this several months ago after a particularly annoying set of calls with a “recruiter” from a local staffing firm. At the time, I was helping another team in my division interview candidates for a Senior Developer with exceptionally strong JavaScript skills. In one particular month, the same recruiter called me four or five times, each time using a different name from the same “services” firm. It is entirely possible that he actually was someone new each time, but each call sounded the same to me. Every time my response was nearly identical:

I don’t make financial decisions related to hiring, so I’m not in a position to hear about recruiting services, nor do I have any interest, but thank you anyway.

Each time, he kept talking.

Dude. I know you’re just doing your job, but you’re doing it wrong.

As a hiring manager, I have a strong personal distaste for recruiting firms and staffing agencies. I know that sometimes, these services are necessary in order to find the right candidate for a specialized position, to find a short-term whiz to save the day on a tough project, etc. I have nothing against recruiting companies that are working for me. I am, of course, notably complacent when it comes to the one time I needed a staffing firm in order to find gainful employment. That experience was incredibly painless, having met a representative from the firm at a job fair and starting work the next week.

No, this sort of experience has nothing to do with what ails me. Instead, my beef has to do with the cold calls from folks I’ll refer to as Job Sales Engineers, or JSEs for short. I absolutely will not paint them with the same brush as I do the recruiters I work with on a more regular basis inside of my company for the primary reason that the technical recruiters in the office are pretty darn good, and it would do them a serious disservice to be categorized in such a way.

So, Rant on:

JSEs are never technical enough and/or have not worked in the industry

Every JSE I speak to, which is currently averaging one every two weeks or so, has about 20% of the technical knowledge required to find the right candidate for a position. So, when the recruiting department posts a job saying that we’re looking for a Senior Web Developer with experience integrating a Java Applet with a JavaScript-driven user interface, and the recruiter calls and thinks that their ASP.Net candidate with the term “AJAX” on their résumé is qualified, I hang up on them. It’s not even the platform disparities that are so bothersome, it’s that they don’t know what these terms mean. Here I am, looking for someone who can sub-class a language (whose object-oriented nature is basically a hack) in their sleep, and a recruiter toddles around each word.

JSEs lead with acronyms, not accomplishments

Yes, the irony of using an acronym to complain about someone using acronyms is not lost on me…

Every call starts with something like “I see you are looking for a web developer. I have a candidate coming out of XYZ Blue Chip Company. He’s got Struts, AJAX, HTML, XML, Oracle and SQL…” Ok first of all, why do I care that he has both Oracle and SQL experience? The syntactical differences between PL-SQL and SQL (I’m presuming SQL92 unless they’re using a new revision of an engine which supports one of the later standards) are insignificant enough for a developer who isn’t solely a database developer, that no one should ever put both of them on a skills list. I could possibly consider them individually important if you’d been responsible for writing specialized database connectivity modules. Then again, if you’re listing AJAX without mentioning JavaScript, what exactly do you mean?

Secondly, brevity is just as important on the phone as it is on a résumé! Tell me what the person DID. Say “I have a candidate who just finished a very successful cross-functional project utilizing similar technologies to the ones listed in your posting. They have a long track record of delivering quality work on time.” That might catch my attention, should I be in the position to care. Heck, I know a guy whose nickname was something like “the bugless wonder”. If you’ve got someone like him, tell me about that.

JSEs cold call rather than establish relationships

This shouldn’t even be an issue. Even the most tenacious, annoying salesperson knows that the best way to make a sale is to use an existing relationship to get you in the door and into the front of someone’s mind. Recruiters don’t do that, and if they’re trying to, they do a terrible job of crafting that initial relationship. You’re going to have to convince me to talk to you, so why not buy me a cup of coffee? You have until I finish drinking it to convince me I should ever want to pick up the phone again.

Careful, though, I can drop a cup of coffee in seconds, so talk fast.

JSEs don’t do their homework

This usually manifests itself in an obvious data-mining of LinkedIn without regard for the appropriate person to call. I’m sure many sales folks do things like this as well. They need to find any “in” and I can’t entirely knock the tactic in theory. In practice, though, it’s a waste of my time to talk to you, so don’t call me. That’s why my LinkedIn contact settings explicitly say “Please do not contact me on behalf of recruiting or third-party services for my company.” READ IT!

On top of that, I’m not the development manager. Nuance is a publically traded software company with thousands of employees. We have more than one division. There isn’t one “development manager”. I mean, I’m flattered that you think someone of my tenure could run such a vast empire of developers across several countries, but seriously? Flattery won’t make me want to listen to you, it just tells me you didn’t do your homework.

Besides, Nuance has an entire recruiting staff of its own to do the dirty workawesome task of finding candidates for open jobs — the “hiring managers” are only called that because they have positions to be filled, and get involved in the process once candidates are selected. Our recruiters do a pretty solid job at finding leads once they fully grok the position, which only adds to my annoyance that independent recruiters call me directly to try to get a foot in the door here.

Since writing this several months back, I’m down to about one call every six to eight weeks, which is tolerable. One of our in-house recruiters told me to transfer said calls right to him. Ever since I think they figured out that my easy out makes me a bad mark.

This is perfectly fine by me.

Image courtesy of us (design studio)’s Human Chicken project

management hiring, management, rant, recruiting

I don’t care how good you are at programming, finding bugs, whatever. If you’re rude, or if you speak poorly to people who don’t understand your… quirks…. you will wind up being shunted to the side. No one wants to work with someone who makes them feel beat down all the time, or someone who they simply can’t understand, or someone whose reaction to every issue is to start wailing about the end of the world.

– Catherine Powell (Via SvN)

This is such a great concept to keep at the front of one’s mind. Everyone, from your customers to your co-workers, family and friends, deserve your *niceness*. Their concerns and questions are real. Your attitude can go a long way toward keeping the peace!

Her follow-up post defining What Really Is Nice? also hits home for me:

To me, being nice is really about attitude and phrasing more than it is about the basic underlying message. It’s about taking the information you have to convey and making sure you convey it in a way that is respectful … and considerate of your audience.

geek habits, management, quotes customer service, management, quote

Bruce’s Thoughts » Down with Generic Resumes!

One popular strategy for job hunting is to build a nice generic resume (or have some resume agency build it for you), then blast it out to all the employers that you can find. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that this is about the worst strategy you could adopt.

A former colleague of mine hits the nail on the head with this one. As a hiring manager, I need you to sell me on yourself within 5-10 seconds of reading your resume. It should scream applicability. It should scream “fit”. It shouldn’t scream “Jack of all trades”.

There’s a time for a skills-based resume – when making a career change, for instance – but that isn’t the same as a generic resume. A skills-based resume should still utilize your previous position, but when you describe your accomplishments, they should be phrased in a way that shows the applicable career-shifting skill, rather than the domain-specific skill.

management hiring, management, resume

There’s a great article over at squawkfox about words and phrases which should never touch your resume:

Are you experienced? Sexy. Rather than cite Jimi Hendrix on your resume, pleeease just say what your experience entails. Saying you’re experienced at something and giving the facts on that experience are two very different approaches.

Via Lifehacker.

management management, resume

Urgent and Important

I seriously considered not even writing about the first Quadrant of the Time Management Matrix. I’ve written previously about keeping tasks from sliding down the slippery slope towards becoming both urgent and important, so I figured that I’d already covered my utter hatred for getting stuck working in Quadrant I. That being said, it’s not just about effective planning. Planning will certainly stave off the slide toward Quadrant I, but you can’t prevent every fire.

The best response to a fire? Call a fire-fighter. (Bear with me? I know the analogy is corny.)

As a manager, we can’t try to put out every fire. For folks like myself, who started out their career being the problem-solver, giving up the need to fix things is VERY difficult. I have a constant desire to tinker and a constant desire to fix what is broken. I hope I never lose that entirely. However, if we choose to be the go-to problem-solver, we’ll end up living in Quadrant I. We’ll never sleep, never plan, and never keep all of the other things we have to do later in line.

This is where delegation comes in. As a manager we have people (well, those of you who have been able to completely staff your teams, anyway). These people have jobs to do, but one of the best ways to effectively groom people to succeed and improve is to give them new, difficult things to do. Enter the fire-fighter.

Penelope Trunk, over at The Brazen Careerist, wrote a great post titled 7 ways to be a better delegator. I happen to agree with all seven ways. She also makes a fantastic point about how this relates to mentoring:

Hands-off management isn’t respectful — it’s negligent. People want mentoring and guidance from their manager. If you give that in a way that helps them grow while also treating them with respect, they’ll love having you around. And when your direct reports love having you around, they do their best work for you out of loyalty. Even younger workers — those notorious job-hoppers — are loyal to respectful, hands-on managers.

After reading the article, I was somewhat relieved that I’d figured most of this out already, (though I admit that I try to put out fires every now and again just to remind and be reminded that I still can). I make a real effort to keep my staff from needing to do any of the busy-work or crap-work that has come down the line. For instance, in functional and design specification writing, it makes more sense to have an engineer concentrate on the concepts and communicating them effectively than on document formatting. I can handle cleaning up a document… it takes me only a few minutes to re-format a document in Word, and hey, it’s kinda fun making everything line up perfectly.

Managers have to become ok with being good at silly things so that they can give the fun, interesting and difficult tasks to their employees. This is a two-outcome strategy. If they succeed, two things happen – first, they look good; second, you look good for having good employees. If they fail, it’s a learning experience for them and also for you as you get to find out by example what they’re capable of so that you know where they need to grow.

This is about to lead into a post about mentoring. Maybe another time… I don’t want my new employees who might google me to get all of my management secrets right away.

Back to the central point – handling Quadrant I tasks. If you don’t have someone to whom you can delegate, don’t spend too much time trying to get out of doing the work. It has to get done, and the sooner it’s done, the sooner you can get back to Quadrants II and III, which is where you should spend the bulk of your time. Obviously, if you have an appropriate person to whom you can delegate, you should do it with prejudice! It’s your job as a manager to keep the nonsense things out of the way of your employees. So, by giving them emergencies to handle, they grow, you look (are) good, and everyone’s happy. Eventually, you look like the person who can handle anything that gets thrown their way.

The funny thing about that is that at said point you actually are that person. To me, that’s a great goal. It requires some strategy to how you handle what gets thrown at you, but if you combine that with proper planning, proper prioritization and proper maintenance, you should be pretty effective at it.

management, productivity habits, management

Important but not Urgent

I love to plan. Making lists, brainstorming, hypothesizing. I love it all. If I could design my perfect day, I wouldn’t do a single urgent thing. Rather, I’d spend the time getting done anything that I thought could become urgent in the near future. Everyone would think I was so completely on-top of my game that they’d probably hate me.

Well, just a little, anyway.

From the Time Management Matrix, the common set of Quadrant II activities include:

• Preparations
• Presentations
• Value Clarification
• Planning
• Relationship Building
• True Recreation
• Empowerment

An aside: I made an argument relationship building being a Quadrant IV activity, but other than that, this is a good list with my favorite “preparations” squarely at the top.

Ideally we should spend the majority of our time here in Quadrant II, handling activities that are important but have low urgency. This is wise; it serves to keep your deliverables and responsibilities from actually becoming urgent. Once something is urgent, you’re stuck. If you want to keep your job/family/life/etc., you have to do it NOW.

Taking care of that looming task when it’s still in Quadrant II (or ideally, IV) empowers you. It puts you squarely in charge of the tasks about which you are already aware. I don’t know if this is what is meant, in the list above, by “Empowerment”, or if that’s about empowering your delegates. I’ll go ahead and presume I’m right and it’s about empowering your own ability to do things in a particular order. If I’m wrong… meh.

I spoke about a previous life previously, in which I spent a vast majority of my time in Quadrant I. One of the most helpful things I ever did in that life was to shut my door for an entire day and re-plan absolutely every facet of the next week. I took the time to stop and plan how my week would follow, giving myself about 30-40% of my time to deal with all of those urgent and important activities that were bound to attack me as the week went on. It meant all of the difference to me in the world. David Allen talks about this a bunch in Getting Things Done, though he doesn’t explicitly link it to the TMM. The closest analogue is when he discusses task collection and the process of emptying one’s head. This is an interesting enough process that I’ll write about it another time. It has, recently, led to the creation of a few sets of goals and milestones, such as:

• A list of 101 things to accomplish in the next three years.
• A list of achievable work-related goals for myself for the year.
• A list of (hopefully) achievable goals for my team for the year.

The point of all of this is simple – make the time to take the time to plan at least enough to get you through the next short period of time. A proper plan (or at least a proper set of goals) gives you the flexibility to adjust your workload as you encounter the more urgent tasks along the way. This is what I meant when I started to talk about breaking down your list of projects into smaller, quickly completed, tasks. That, at the core, is what GTD is all about, for me anyway. I’ve read posts by several other users of the GTD methodology who center on an important concept – Getting Things Done is about finding the best possible framework for you to get said things done efficiently with overall lower stress. Each person is different, so any blanket approach will fail some of the time.

..as much as I want to think otherwise, blogging will always be a Quadrant IV activity. I suppose that, until someone wants to pay me to do so (who would ever want to do that??), it’s smart that it remains something I do with bits of free time.

management, productivity habits, management, planning

Urgent but Not Important

Lennon said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

He could have been talking about the Time Management Matrix when he said this. I’m nearly certain that he wasn’t, but his quote is no less applicable. Life happens in and around every single plan you’ve made. It does not matter how much you plan, something else will happen at some point.

“Life” happens: The phone rings. Email arrives. A knock at the door.

Each is an urgent activity that, while bearing some small level of importance, is not important in the grand scheme of things. It must, however, be attended to NOW. This is life and we must grin and bear it.

There are a few strategies for dealing with an interrupt-driven life, but the most effective one (in my experience) boils down to being as flexible as you can with a set of tasks that are each as short as possible. If all of the things you need to do have a short duration, then each interruption doesn’t skew your ability to get work done at any given time. One trick to doing this effectively, about which I’ll blog another timE, is the philosophy of GTD, on which David Allen makes a living training folks.

The natural path for a Quadrant III activity is for it to end up in Quadrant I based solely on how its level of importance changes over time, determined by one of a few things:

• External Force (customer, supervisor, etc.)
• Internal Force (You decide it’s more important)
• Circumstance

On average, I find that my customers (both internal and external) determine the importance of any given activity. For instance, if I need to create a report about the number of wompums per minute that are completed by a given wompumator, this may seem to me to be of little importance, even if it’s needed soon. I’d prioritize it thusly and move on to activities of greater importance (Quadrant I). However, if the customer needs this report to be able to complete other, more important, activities, I may find it sliding down into Quadrant I and getting completed NOW as they call and demand ask that it be completed now. This is what I call external re-prioritization. The remainder of these activities are internally prioritized – I determine that they are important enough to be completed now.

On an average day in a previous work life, I was interrupted about thirty times, each for a need that varied in importance, but was almost always urgent. I spent nearly 80% of my time working in Quadrant 3/1 (a set of activities that aren’t that important in the grand scheme, but are VERY important to someone else, so they end up being done now). That type of work moves in the direction of burnout quickly, and realizing that I was digging a shallow grave for my career was the first step to manging what time I have more effectively.

The other option is to work multiple 10+ hour days to stay ahead. Don’t do that.

management, productivity management, planning

Not Urgent, Not Important

According to The Time Management Matrix, activities that are neither urgent nor important fall into Quadrant IV, a position that I refer to as “The Procrastinator’s Corner”. These are the trivial, unimportant things that you do when you don’t want to do anything in Quadrants I through III.

This is solitaire. This is reading the news. This is, unless you get paid for it, blogging.

You know you do it. I do it. Everyone does it. We waste time… if we didn’t we’d go nuts! Filling the day with high-priority issues without any relief will lead to certain burnout. The human brain can only take so much stress before it pops, so we play minesweeper. (I don’t anymore – I’ve given up video games in 2008.)

This is ok. The TMM’s quadrants can also be lined up like a slide, from IV down to I. An uncompleted activity in Quadrant IV will eventually trickle down to either Quadrant III (if it becomes time-sensitive) or Quadrant II (if it becomes important).

Minesweeper is probably the exception and not the rule, of course. I personally handle Quadrant IV by living by a suggestion I read somewhere (probably Lifehacker):

When you procrastinate, don’t do nothing, do something else that you’ve been putting off.

This is somewhat similar to the concept of “Structured Procrastination“, though admittedly I only found out about John Perry’s essay when trying to find the site that originally gave me said advice. It’s also a good read on the concept.

One disagreement that I have with the traditional matrix is that I put Relationship Building activities (Networking, Inter-Departmental mingling) in Quadrant IV instead of Quadrant II. This is a personal choice that really comes down to a simple rationale: I already have strong relationships with most of the rest of my company (I know the names of just about every single in-office employee since a majority of them have been hired since I started).

For folks that don’t have strong inter-departmental working relationships, getting to know your co-workers should definitely be in Quadrant II! For me, getting to know newer employees might fall into Quadrant II, especially since hiring season is going to be ramping up in another month or so!

Since I’m big on lists, on a particularly slow day in early December, I “procrastinated by thinking about procrastination” – I made a list of several arguably low-effort tasks that can be accomplished when I have free spots of time or need to hop out of Quadrant I and II for a few contiguous minutes. A few examples from this list:

• Tidying up the office
• Processing a list of general task collection triggers (more on this another day)
• Networking (Rocking the LinkedIn, Facebook, Email, etc.)
• Casual, Job-Related Reading

For the most part, anyone who needs to make a list of such things probably does not have to try to make time for them since inevitably they will want to leave Quadrants I and II often enough that these things will get done anyway.

Personally however, I find that having a list of things I could do if I need a break is very helpful. It keeps me from actually playing minesweeper.

management, productivity habits, management

Several years ago I was required to take a two-week seminar on Steven Covey’s 7 Habits for Highly Effective People. I’ve forgotten almost all of it, which is what happens when you don’t put something into practice and stick with it. Nonetheless, there were a few key points that come back to haunt me now and again.

My company gives managers quarterly training on management technique, skills and habits. Covey would call this “Sharpening the Saw”, which is Habit 7. I find these sessions to be incredibly helpful and am very thankful that we spend so much time working to improve ourselves. In one particular session in mid-2006 we spent half of the day discussing time management and Covey’s groovy Time Management Matrix. The matrix breaks down all of the responsibilities and tasks which we must do into four areas, defined by two critieria, Importance and Urgency:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important, Not Urgent
3. Not Important, Urgent
4. Not Important, Not Urgent

Each time I was trained on this topic the trainer would ask us how much time we spend in each quadrant now before telling us how much time they thought we should spend. Invariably, every single participant was spending way too much time in Quadrant I. Each time I completed this exercise I was in a Technical Support role so my Quadrant I number was around 50%, which is sickeningly unhealthy. I won’t post what the actual values should be… you should pursue Covey training if you’re interested!

The instructive premise is simple: If you don’t take the time to do the things that are not yet urgent or not yet important, they will become both at some point. In tech support, everything is urgent in the eyes of your customer, so you constantly feel like you are operating in crisis mode. For adrenaline junkies, this works very well, and explains why I have loved such roles during my career. For everyone else, they burn out.

I really like the time management matrix – it reminds me that every single task falls into one category and should be given a certain amount of time based on that. It’s an easy rule that removes (some) stress from planning one’s day/week/month/life.

I am going to write a few posts in the coming weeks about each quadrant and what I’ve found helps me to both keep things in their respective places as well as keep me as sane as possible while managing these tasks.

The image above was mirrored from www.careerdevelopmentplan.net. I didn’t ask to use it, rather I found it in a Google Image Search, so if they are annoyed and would like me to refrain from using it, my email address is readily available.

lifehacks, productivity covey, habits, management, planning

In my current position, I’m doing a lot of hiring right now. I have a new team to build from scratch, and it’s tough! The job market seems to be chock full of candidates who want either way too much money for arguably little experience, or who think that a resume is supposed to tell their life’s story.

I mentioned to a co-worker that I was a little frustrated with the process and he asked me a very honest and thought-provoking question: Is it more enjoyable to look for a job yourself than to look for job candidates? He wasn’t asking if I’d prefer to find a job… rather if my own experiences trying to find one were better or worse than my experiences looking for a crack team of software engineers. (At least, I don’t think he was intimating I should look elsewhere!)

My experience with job hunting has been varied – after completing my undergraduate degree, the market was empty. The dot-com bubble had burst and jobs were simply gone. I applied for what positions I could, near and far. The best I could hope for was about 50% as much pay as graduates from the previous class had received. It wasn’t really enough on which to build a future (and start paying off student loans, of course), so I chose graduate school.

A year later, new Masters Degree in hand, I searched again. Salary rates were beginning to level off again, but now that I had a Masters Degree, I felt I had “matured” and was looking for “more than just a good paycheck”. I found “nothing”. I was unemployed for about eight weeks and finally got a nibble from a temp agency working as a level 1 support tech at a corporate help desk, fixing Outlook PST files 8 hours a day. Since then, on the other hand, I’ve been offered every single position for which I’ve applied. While that sounds self-inflating, it was really my experiences hunting for jobs (and utterly failing) that got me to the point at which I could go into an interview and secure said offer.

New graduates tend to expect a position. In general, they believe that the world is supposed to “give them” a shiny new career as soon as they graduate. They also expect to be paid well. This is counter-intuitive as entry level positions almost never pay “well”, and college graduates have exactly zero non-academic work experience (save an internship, on-campus or retail job – they’ve never been a full-time employee in their discipline). This is one of many, many reasons, that it took me 10 weeks to find a job that I didn’t even want. I figured two degrees must bequeath me some sort of benefits such as, say, a $50,000 salary (in economically depressed Buffalo) and a cushy position with upward mobility.

Dead. Wrong.

First of all, I didn’t “deserve” squat!

Second, getting work takes work, and I hadn’t mastered the concept.

Third, a company pays you what they think you are worth as an employee, not what your degree is worth.

So, after being humbled by a short taste of jobless poverty, I changed my perspective, stopped talking about my degree like it was so hard to obtain, was perfectly honest with myself and interviewers about my lack of professional experience and need to increase said experience and landed the next interview I had.

Gone are the days when I even speak about my college degree work. It stops being relevant after about two years in the working world, or at least it should.

Fast forward to now. I’m in my fifth position since graduating from college. That might sound bad, but it’s only the third company and the first was a six-month contract position. It’s the third in which my role includes hiring people to do my bidding work for me, one of which barely counts because I was hiring current students. My perspective is vastly different now than it was then. My resume doesn’t include a lengthy technical skills/languages list any more because it’s far more interesting to potential employers when you can describe what you can do with real-life experiences. (It still helps to list your top few skills and areas of expertise for keyword-searches.) I also stopped listing my responsibilities for jobs I haven’t had in several years. Who cares how many students I managed in 2002?

So, as I look for candidates, I’ve noticed that multi-page resumes have become the norm with every single position, project and language ever used (or even heard of) listed in great detail. I’ve also noticed folks with 2 years’ experience expecting to make a salary grade for those with 5-7. I don’t understand the phenomenon, but it helps me to weed out those I’m simply not going to hire!

To answer the question, I think, in some sadistic fashion, I liked being job seeker more than I do looking for them. It boils down to one very important contrast: As a candidate, I can have a direct effect on the outcome of my interview and can even accept a position below my expectations just to pay the bills. As a hiring manager, convincing someone to take a pay cut is nearly impossible unless they came up with the idea themselves, which almost never happens. On top of that, I have to hire people that are capable of doing the job or else I might not have one! I can’t “settle” for a candidate who doesn’t really meet the requirements of the position just to fill the team.

The current hiring market is very job seeker-friendly. There are dozens of companies per applicant, so the competitive environment is a huge pain for me as a manager. I find I have to do far more to sell the laurels of my company than I do to sell the position itself, which is thankfully fairly easy since the benefits here are pretty darn good.

I hadn’t intended to blog about management geekery, but it’s what I do, so it makes sense. I’ll follow-up at some point with thoughts on interviewing, coaching and any other tricks I pick up along the way.

management management, recruiting, resume