Finding new team members

You will have to test two different parts of you potential new employee:

1. Character/Personality
2. Competency

Now the second one is relativly easy. Give them some little work to do. You know how your team works, so in a team that works only remotly and never sees each other a github repository might be enough. If your team works in pairs with lots of communication, well, you should set up your testing scenario in a way that matches your every day work.

The first one, character/personality, is much harder. The way it is normally applied is by "just asking" some questions and then deciding if the person is "nice".

Instead of the usual and often failing way you can use these different models:

• "The ideal team player" is a book that describes hungry, smart and humble as the best team player traits. You can find a summary in the resources section of this website.
• The "cliftonStrengths"-Assessment is a professional assessment of 34 different traits with practical help on how you can best integrate that person. What are the things he/she is good or bad at? It only takes half an hour.
• Find and use a Big-Five-Personality Test. This test is not scientific, but known to deliver good results. From all character traits a person can have the creators of the test have taken the 5 ones, that are not likely to change over a persons lifetime. (Although it is known that the neuroticism result can be changed by applying psychological therapy). So these tests give you a good hint. There are not a psychological assesment. They reduce the number of different people types to 16, which is still easy to grasp.