I often say that there are two actions that defines the line management role: one-on-ones and hiring people. This is specially true in growing organizations. If you nail these actions, you have a great chance to influence your colleagues and organization, the ultimate goal, in my view, for a line manager.

One of the common strategies to speed up the journey from being an Open Source contributor to become a Good Open Source citizen is to hire talent with a solid Open Source background. The process of hiring such talent is different from what most organizations and recruiters are used to. That is so true that we have now companies specialized in hiring these profiles.

One key part of the hiring process is the interview.

The article is another one of those I am writing the last couple of years about management topics, based on my experience working in Open Source as manager and consultant. More specifically, it is an attempt to describe some of the key points that hiring managers with little or no experience in hiring Open Source talent need to consider to increase their hit rate.

As usual, I would appreciate if you add in the comments section or to me directly your experience, criticisms or missing points. I would add them to this article as update.

Evaluate the candidate’s work in advance

If you only have room in your hard disk for one takeaway, it should be this point.

Most of your candidate’s work is public. Take the time to evaluate it or have somebody else doing it for you, before the interview. If the candidate have public talks, watch the videos or check the slides. If she has written articles, read them. If she has code available, study it, test it, install it.

Having the candidate’s work in the open is a double edge sword. It is an advantage for the hiring organization because it can reduce significantly the hiring process, since you can evaluate in detail many of the candidate’s skills in advance, so the interview process can be reduced to a single interview, for instance (I strongly recommend this, by the way).

At the same time, if the hiring manager do not take the time to evaluate the candidate’s work or even worse, if she acts during the interview as if that work is not public, trying to technically evaluate the candidate prior or during the interview, the failure is almost guaranteed.

I always mention how wrong it is to ask a music group with published records or videos of concerts on their website if they know how to sing, or even worse, ask them for an audition during the process to hire them for your birthday party. Watch their performances, skip the audition and go directly to other relevant aspects. Their work is public, did you check it?

By the way, the world is significantly larger than GitHub, thanks God. The candidate might have a strong Open Source background without having a great GitHub profile… or no profile at all.

Interview goal

The interview is not just an opportunity to evaluate if the candidate fits in your organization, it is a chance to attract the professional and her colleagues. The candidates work, processes used, tooling… is public. Your organization’s most likely not. Who has more to inform about?

As result of this reality, the interview should look more like hiring a senior manager/expert than it is about hiring an engineer.

In summary, the goal of the interview shifts. It should be balanced between what both, the organization and the candidate looks for. This shift represents a challenge for hiring managers with limited experience in hiring senior talent.

Candidate’s future upstream participation

During the interview, be clear about the amount of time the candidate will have to invest in upstream work, her current work.

Remember that there are plenty of developers who prefer to keep their work in the open as a personal activity. On the contrary, some others want to make a living out of their participation upstream. The best way to ensure a sustainable relation over time is to be transparent about the expectations related with the effort in internal work vs work done in the open in which projects.

If by working in your organization, the developer will have to reduce its current involvement in the open, specially in specific periods of time, say it clearly. If you cannot guarantee that the technologies the candidate works with in the open will be part of the company’s tools set, state it clearly. If your organization has plans to move towards Open Source and you bring the candidate to speed up that journey, make sure the candidate understands the timelines and expectations.

No matter how experienced you are as hiring manager, there is always room for a candidate to surprise you about her motivations to participate in the interview and potentially join your organization. This is most likely true with professionals coming from an environment you might not be very familiar with.

Tooling, languages, technologies…

One of the great advantages of being an Open Source professional is that, because you use open source tooling, you can take them with you throughout your career, which makes you very efficient. You do not depend on having any corporation paying them for you or having to change them regularly, limited by commercial criteria. In other words, Open Source professionals has made their career supported in specific tooling and associated practices they have mastered and very often helped to polish over time. Some of them love to try new ones and some love to focus their energy in other aspects, not in the tooling or associated processes themselves.

In some cases, this specific point is so important for the candidate that using those tools and associated practices represents a requirement to join your organization.

You will need to consider and potentially embrace this reality. If you cannot or do not want to use those technologies or tools, make the point during the interview but…

Are you open to reconsider such decisions if somebody prove there is something better? Is it something that can be reconsidered next year, when the current support contract for toll X expires? Do you have any specific department or project where you are willing to try new tools, processes, languages…? Are you open to assume that you might have made a mistake in such decision or that those decisions will not stand the test of time?

Many Open Source professionals, for instance, consider that, doing Open Source with Open Source tools is significantly better that using proprietary ones. It make sense. At scale, adapting the tooling to the needs of the environment and integrate them with other tooling to improve the development experience is essential. Have full control of such evolution is another interesting point… there are many other strategic and practical reasons.

Learn from the candidate about those arguments during the interview.

Very often hiring managers see the candidate’s position in this front as religious or philosophical. Instead I would take it as an opportunity to improve and innovate within their organizations. I suggest to embrace such experience the candidate can bring to your organization as starting point during the interview and take the conversation from there, instead of questioning her criteria and define this point as a no-go.

Recommendations and referrals

Open Source is about trust and networking based on the work the potential candidate does within one or several communities. In many cases, the candidate recommendations and referrals come from peers from those communities.

If you are a hiring manager, take those recommendations as seriously as any traditional referral from a senior manager or a relevant figure in any big corporation. They are frequently equally valuable.

In Open Source, you are judged by your work and your influence, not by your position in any hierarchy of any organization.

Get help for the interview

If you have little or no experience with Open Source, bring somebody that do have it to the interview, in addition to the technical expert, specially if you are interviewing engineers. It is not relevant if such person is not an expert in the candidate’s knowledge area of expertise.

I am not a technical person and, when I join such interviews, the hiring manager often learn new things about the candidate because we both share a similar work culture. This is specially true when the candidate ask questions to evaluate if the company is a good fit for her. In addition, it often plays in favor of the company to show to the candidate that there is Open Source knowledge internally and professionals that feel comfortable working there.

Assume the candidate knows about your organization already

Do not underestimate how much candidates with solid Open Source background know about your company before the interview, even if your organization is not an Open Source contributor.

These kind of professionals might learn about your organization not just by interacting directly with your engineers or evaluating your products, but also by interacting with your suppliers and partners in the open, in some cases on regular basis. They might know about the hardware you use, the versions of specific software you ship, tools you use, release strategies you have, updates policies, etc. They might point at clear deficiencies and strengths of your products and services as well.

I suggest to ask the candidates what do they know about your organization and why do they want to join, during the interview. It is also interesting to ask about their evaluation/perception of your organization as a whole and your products/services compared to others.

It is not only about getting information from the candidate but also about informed perceptions. Such conversation might help hiring managers to tune the description about what the organization does and avoid providing superfluous information during the interview. It also helps to understand if the candidate is one of those who want to work in industry leaders or help you to become one which is something I am always interested to learn about them.

Why do you need a CV?

Even today, I still come across former colleagues and great Open Source professionals who do not have a CV. I have helped several of them throughout the years to create one or update it.

For an Open Source professional, their work speak for themselves. It is a better presentation that any CV will ever be. It is the outdated culture, your organization tradition, the one that should change and adapt to this “not so new” way of “filtering candidates”. It is simply better for all parties involved.

Many great Open Source professionals have a mediocre CVs or no CV at all because they never needed it. For some is even a way to filter organizations they do not want to work with. If you need my CV to filter me as candidate or evaluate my work, I am not interested in working with you.

Instead of questioning the quality of their CV, take the opportunity to ask yourself why do you or your organization need a CV when the candidate’s work is publicly available. It might be a great introspective exercise. Maybe you end up only needing a bunch of links and his contact information instead of a formal CV.

Myth: Open Source developers are not good communicators

Open Source professionals, specially developers, are used to having a great exposure to other professionals worldwide. In general, they need to become good communicators to succeed within their communities. It is common sense.

Open Source developers as people incapable to communicate is a myth. Such perception often depends on what you understand by communicating and to whom, but specially to myopia from people not coming from a technical background.

Evaluate the candidate’s written communication skills. Check the mails they send to dissent with others or describe their position, read the blog posts they write summarizing their latest work, check their presentations, their slides… Check how they interact with their users, code maintainers… You will soon realize they interact with profiles or groups of people on regular basis your engineers do not and overcoming greater limitations.

It is true in my experience though that, in general many Open Source developers do not do great interviews. But that is mostly because they do very few of them. They do not go to 10 interviews with four different companies to get a job. They do not need to. And what is more important, throughout their careers, interviews are not used to evaluate them as engineers. Again, their work speak for themselves.

When talking to managers unfamiliar with Open Source about this point I always ask them how many professionals they know that has done good interviews but are incapable to stand behind their opinions in a meeting with senior colleagues or customers. Or how many people in their teams excel at describing complex ideas in simple words, in a 10 min presentation for instance. How many of them did a great interview?

Public exposure to peers and users in Open Source projects are an outstanding learning environment for developing certain communication skills. Be careful with this myth.

English level

In Open Source, most of the communication among developers is in written form (letś include code here). Most developers have a better level of written English than spoken.

I always recommend to be careful when evaluating the candidate English skills only through the interview. To have a full perspective of the candidate skills, I always recommend to check her written communications and articles. If they have videos of their talks available, review them. You might perceive noticeable differences between their written and spoken English levels.

When doing an interview, it is very hard to be quick and provide sharp answers without thinking when you do not use English in regular conversations on daily basis. I have experience this myself.

My point here is that you might evaluate his English skills as poor based in the interview and, in many cases, they have solid written skills so they need little time to develop the required minimum skills to speak English fluently.

Agile fans tend to underestimate how important it is to have a good written level in English compared to the spoken/conversation level. In Open Source (develop software at scale), the trend is exactly the opposite, for good reasons.

Remote Work

Many professionals prefer to live by the beach in a cheaper place than to commute for an hour to go to the office in a big city. It should not come to a surprise that market is moving towards developing software in distributed environments.

The number of “remote first” and “remote friendly” companies is growing in number and size at a fast pace. Open Source is about highly distributed, asynchronous and high latency environments. Some of the larger software engineering projects has grown and mature in such environment.

The candidate has probably made a career out of mastering working on such environment.

Instead of questioning the efficiency of such environment during the interview (common practice among remote work detractors, like radical agilists), take the opportunity to learn about it. If you think that co-located, synchronous and low latency environments are more efficient, ask about how current tasks could be performed remotely, how ceremonies can be adapted, how testing can be performed remotely. Learn from the candidate about how to develop software at scale, how he has acquire such experience and levels of efficiency in such environment.

I have worked in organizations where even testing was done remotely, in a heavily distributed environment, for instance. Technology and creativity has made Open Source the best solution for developing software at scale. Even if your organization is small, the candidate skills might become an asset.

The network effect

Working in the open provides any professional the possibility of building a large network. The interview process might well be the first and only direct interaction that such professionals might have with your company. If the experience is not satisfactory, her network will know.

Would you recommend a person you trust or respect to apply to a company that did not provide you a good experience during the hiring process? And I am not talking about hiring them. I have had good experiences with companies that chose a different candidate during the process. We are grownups. We can take rejection.

By ignoring the above points (or others i skipped), you are not just simply making harder for your organization to hire Open Source talent. You are shouting with a speaker your deficiencies.

It is not a coincidence that some corporation have such a hard time hiring good Open Source professionals and some others are so successful. It is partly because of the networking effect.

Do it right a couple of times and more talent will come. On the contrary, fail badly and you will pay the prize for some time.

How to move the candidate out of her comfort zone

Part of any interview’ goal is to get out of the candidate things she did not plan to show or surface.

People used to work in the open, with high levels of exposure, develop a great sense of correctness and politeness when expressing opinions. That does not mean they are not passionate about what they do or that they do not have “radikal opinions”. They are and you want to know it.

Ask the candidate for her opinions about tools, technologies, projects from your competitors or technologies that the project they participate on are struggling with. I believe these kind of questions are a fair way to move the candidate out of her comfort zone and get their “essence”.

Just be aware of the trends and debates the candidate and/or the community she participates on have had about such topics. Do not make the mistake to make statements that are a no-go for the candidate simply because you did not prepare the interview well enough.

Avoid the typical myths around Open Source. Instead, ask for how do they see their community project in five years and which are the challenges and deficiencies they need to overcome, for instance.

Summary

Radical exposure to peers, upstream and users, communicate with them in the open, working with public code, sharing knowledge with professionals from different industries and global organizations, etc. are candidates characteristics that cannot and shouldn’t be ignored during the hiring process, specially during the interview.

Instead of applying the same template that has worked fine in the past for your organization, hiring managers will need to evolve it or even change it in order to attract people with solid Open Source profile. This is yet another of those transformations and culture changes that any organization will need to go through to fully embrace Open Source.

To me is very simple, if you want to become a Good Open Source Citizen, you will need to hire people with a strong Open Source background to speed up the journey. Either you adapt your hiring processes, like the interviews, or you will most likely fail in such goal.

To adapt, hiring managers and experts need to develop new habits. That can only come if they question the current ones. This evolution will take place faster and with a smaller impact for their organizations if they get help.

Sadly, I think in Open Source we have paid little attention to this challenge.