Hiring a Scrum Master

Suppose you are looking for a Scrum Master. You feel so good because that person will help the team to be self -empowered, meet commitments, identify improvements, and overall just make everyone's life easier. Yay 😊

But wait a minute...

How to find the right Scrum Master who will actually do all those things? 

Let’s have a look at some of the most frequently asked questions I’ve heard around this topic and what advice I can give based on my experience.

How to identify a good Scrum Master within the limited time of the interview?

Observing how a candidate actually does her job is the best way to evaluate a Scrum Master's skills. For that reason, include PRACTICE part in the interview as well. You can ask a candidate to facilitate a daily scrum or retrospective with the real team. This will tell you so much more than asking hundreds of questions.

It will be a little awkward as a Scrum Master will not know how the team works and what they are used to. No need to focus much on the outcome. The goal is to see how a Scrum Master communicates, what kind of questions she asks and how the team reacts.

Remember, you are looking for confidence, which comes from knowledge and practice only. An interview is an excellent showcase of how confident people are, specifically in stressful situations. You want to find someone who is secure about her skills. A Scrum Master often has to protect the team and her being insecure will make the team feel the same way. 

Make sure a candidate defines a successful Scrum Master/team to you. It will give you quite a good idea of what she will be focusing on the most.

Also, don't be fooled by years of experience a candidate has. I know it's easier to trust someone who has 10+ years, but quite often people stay on the same job without no skill growing at all. You are looking for the amount of achievements not years.

Who should do the interviewing?

To interview a Scrum Master, you will need someone who has a good knowledge and experience working with Scrum teams. The best choice for that is another Scrum Master or an Agile Coach. 

Also, if there is already an assigned Product Owner, let her do the interview as well. A Product Owner and a Scrum Master work together quite often, so it’s vital to get PO’s input. 

As a final step, let the team/s have a group interview. They will work with a Scrum Master on a daily basis, so it’s essential they are OK with the choice as well.

How to conduct an interview?

The best way to do interviews is face to face. Studies have shown that 55% of communication is a body language. You want to see a candidate in person.

If face to face is not possible, have calls with a camera on. Try to avoid filtering candidates based on a phone screening only. You want to see candidates even for the first round interviews. For that reason, use Skype, Webex, etc.  This way, you will not get biased or mistaken in any way.

Do certificates matter?

It’s nice to see certificates on a resume as it proves that a candidate has some kind of knowledge in Scrum. But that’s about it. For example, CSM certificate is very easy to get. It’s a straightforward test. The only net result of having it is that the person had 2-day training (it’s very basic by the way). PSM certificate is much harder to pass, but it only shows that a candidate has read 19 pages of scrum guide very well. We all know that Scrum is so much more than that.

It’s beneficial if a candidate is certified, but don’t filter anyone out just because she is not.

Is a contractor going to do a good job?

A lot of people think contractors are not any good. And that the only reason they are contractors is that they can not get a full-time job.

Well, there may be some truth to it. But there are many people who became contractors by their own choice. I personally know a lot of contractors who are great at what they do. Also, I am a contractor myself, and I love my job.

In fact, contractors most likely have worked on more projects than full-time employees. It is a big plus from the experience point of view.

What questions to ask?

There are plenty of questions online you can find so I am not going to create yet another list. What I want to emphasize is 3 things:

*  Make sure you focus on the duties, responsibilities, and goals, which you would expect the new Scrum Master to take care of.

For example, if your team or company overall is going through a transition from Waterfall to Agile, ask for possible challenges they would expect to see in this process and how to overcome them.
If there is no teamwork and teams are very dysfunctional, ask what could be the possible reasons for that in their opinion. Or ask how they would define a healthy and mature team.

*  When asking questions, make sure you get enough details. Candidates go through the list of possible questions online, so a lot of their answers are well prepared in advance. When you dig deep and ask for more details, only then you will understand whether they have real experience and actually know what they are talking about. Otherwise, you get just memorized answers scratching the surface.

*  Think of possible tricky questions you can ask.  For example, what makes a story too big? Who decides on the length of the sprint? What’s better burn up or burndown? What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous release? When do you let your team fail?

Even if the person doesn’t know the answer, it will show you the way she thinks.



Do you have any experience with hiring a Scrum Master? Please share below.