FNC Roundtable

Hey everyone, here is the outline from our meeting today.

fnc-roundtable-evaluating-people-07-0321.doc

We did not get to everything today, and we still haven’t solve the problem with getting good amplification on the conference call, but we got some good observations.

Everyone’s challenge in the next week is to post good interview questions. Think of questions that will help you really understand what a person is like. Remember the question about “your manager wants you to do one thing and the client wants you to do another, what do you do?” Make them up, keep them coming. We can all use these.

Next Topic: Managing a Project/Rescuing a Drowning Project. We do lots of projects, what have we learned. I think we will enlist a panel of “experts” to help us this time (that would be you, you are all experts at this one).

I’ll have some interesting materials for you shortly.

And don’t forget, Records Management Week, April 9-13.

While we are talking about evaluating people, you might find this article by Malcolm Gladwell very interesting. Called “The New Boy Network”, it talks about how we evaluate people, especially in employment interviews.

(Malcolm Gladwell is also on our book club list with “The Tipping Point“. He is also the author of “Blink” and a writer for the New Yorker Magazine).

What is it about evaluating people? I found it really interesting that everyone wanted to take on this topic next.

Are there special topics you would like to cover?

• Why do we find it hard to evaluate people?
• How do we “evaluate” people without “judging them”?
• Are there things that “bias” us when it comes to evaluating people? What do we do about that?

The comment lines are open.

And while you are at it, you might want to look at these three articles written by Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software on our blogroll) about how they look at prospective candidates at Fog Creek Software

• Sorting Resumes
• The Phone Screen
• Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing