Scrum Masters hiring
Hello everybody,
Hope you are doing well. I need a little advice. I have lately been pulled by my managers to play a role in hiring new Scrum Masters. I have been unsuccessful in recognising imposters. Some of the Scrum Masters claim to be experienced but it turns out that they do not have a single day of experience. You as an expert how would approach a Scrum Master to make sure they have appropriate experience for the role. I did put some questions about the estimation and events, but it did not prove their experience. Any advice on how to catch this little missing demonstrable experience from newly CSM candidates? Thank you in advance. Kind regards, Danail
Danail,
My suggestion would be to ask potential candidates if they know the three Scrum components(transparency, inspection, adaptation) and the 5 Scrum values (focus, openness, respect, courage, commitment), and can discuss how Scrum supports each one (perhaps with real-life examples).
A true Scrum Master will find it difficult to be brief when discussing these topics. Good luck.
Try open ended questions or statements, e.g.
"How is the Scrum process managed?"
"Tell me about servant leadership. How does it fit in?"
"Tell me about organizational change."
This question can also be useful:
"Is there anything in the Scrum Guide you disagree with or think is controversial?"
There are few CRUM Masters around that have worked in real Scrum environments. Most were forced to work in hybrid environments and would never have been able to apply the Scrum Master duties to the fullest.
If your organization is one of the few that does real Scrum, then you can add questions of how the traditional project manager duties are handled between the Scrum Master and Product Owner.
If your organization employs the Scrum Master as the Project Manager (the Dual Role), then you're not really doing Scrum, and the few real Scrum Masters need to know because they don't see their role as a Combi and would rather not take the job.
Hi Danail,
1. Ask for referrals. If he has experience there are people who witnessed it.
2. Ask about difficulties he encountered and how he went about them. Come back to those difficulties later once or twice and look for inconsistencies.
Michael
There are a many lists with questions for interviewing Scrum masters that check a solid understanding of the values, principles and the overall theory. Here are some examples:
https://age-of-product.com/38-scrum-master-interview-questions-to-avoid…
http://lmsgoncalves.com/2014/09/08/40-scrum-master-interview-questions/
I personally find really useful the following two points:
1. For each question of your choice ask for the real-life example from his/her past experience.
2. Do a role playing of some difficult situations to see how the candidate will coach you.
I'd ask questions that are related more related to the experience rather than theoretical knowledge, something like:
What difficulties did you experience implementing Scrum within your organization?
Describe the most impactful thing you have done to improve your team.
What about having the candidats observe one of your Daily Scrum, and then ask for feedback and feedforward ?
Posted By Timothy Baffa on 28 Nov 2016 08:56 PM
My suggestion would be to ask potential candidates if they know the three Scrum components(transparency, inspection, adaptation) and the 5 Scrum values (focus, openness, respect, courage, commitment), and can discuss how Scrum supports each one (perhaps with real-life examples).
I would expect that a (certified) Scrum Master without experience would have learned these things by heart before going into an interview... ;)