As a subscriber to "Diversity Inc" my interest is always piqued when they get round to the core discussion of "values". This month's issue has a really interesting comment in their "Legal Section" simply they pose the question "Can you fire employees with different values?".
Weldon Latham a discrimination law attorney suggests that companies should exercise caution in these cases. He uses the example of those companies that operated in South Africa during apartheid, he goes on to cite examples of those companies who did not permit the external prevailing rules of apartheid to operate within the rules of their controllable corporate environment. Weldon gives a cautionary note however that a corporation cannot exist entirely removed from the country in which it operates. This is a great point, recently I've been reading about the rights of women workers in Iran - legally they are only allowed 1 term of maternity leave, if they become pregnant again they are forced to resign. In a similar vein, when women are ill, the social security office pays them 66% of their daily wage while men are paid 75%. In the face of national, institutionalised discrimination surely a corporation has a hard road to follow - they can fight the prevailing hegemony of the country in which they operate or chose not to operate in that region at all.
These are broad sweeping issues, polarising to those outside of the countries in question. The question “Hands up who wants to work for a racist company?” is pretty easy to answer, but then what “values” are we willing to negotiate on? As a consultancy should the values-led organisation be wary of which clients they are willing to engage with? Should an organisation ask expect an individual employee to put aside their personal values, attitudes and beliefs for the company’s profit margin?
At ThoughtWorks we do have stated values. They exist as in many other organisations as a web page, in some people’s email signatures and as handy “non-discrimination” notices at the bottom of recruiting ads… how then do we ensure that they amount to more than this? Too often “values” are sloganeering in the extreme, more about marketing position and candidate attraction as hollow as a sweeping “we recruit the best”. How can an organisation ensure that it’s stated values do not loose meaning overtime? In ThoughtWorks we have an answer. The values we publish are the subject of a constant conversation around their use, meaning and also as a set of checks and balances to guide decision making. There are often questioning voices as to the “values alignment” of a particular project and also occasionally of particular individuals, certainly it’s a feature of our recruitment processes, and figures as part of the “Cultural Fit” interview.
There are those people who would take a contract in Iraq at the height of the conflict as it came with a massive salary, “danger money” if you will! There are those people who would only ever consider working for a not-for-profit organisation and even then some are deemed “too corporate” or “only about the money”. I don’t think ThoughtWorkers exist at either of these extremes nor as a body of people are they stuck in a particular mindset – instead happy to measure the flow of information against their own checks and balances – filtering through their own personal values. It is this discussion around our values that gives them their strength – they cease to be meaningless corporate lip-service and become a living, breathing part of life at ThoughtWorks, we don’t expect people to recite them by rote but chances are they are already living them.
Monday, 16 June 2008
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Why you should make friends with Recruiters.
Johanna Rothman over at Hiring Technical People has recently blogged a colleague's comments about the benefits of befriending those of the Recruiting persuasion. Although being aimed more at those recruiters working in Agencies I'm not 100% sure I agree with them all.
1. Some of the best jobs / candidates are rarely advertised
This is largely true. When I used to work in an agency often we didn't advertise because we were already calling a contact we knew was right for that particular role. When a requirement arrived from a candidate it was immediately followed up with a call to discuss the finer points and acknowledge receipt, then with the call finished a "top 3" candidates landed in the client's inbox. These were people with whom I had an existing relationship and the only way you can get into this "first pass"...befriend a recruiter.
2. If you refer people to your friend the recruiter, there is the possibility of a finders fee
For some agencies this is true, I wouldn't hold your breath! The best way to supplement your income in dealing with a recruiter is to let them find you a better paid role. It's a little mercenary to trade on your friends. That said, referral networks are big business, look at commercial ventures like LinkedIn, now a billion dollar company. These networks are not closed shops to recruiters and if you have any form of online presence you should expect to be contacted.
3. They can keep you aware of trends in the local market
Absolutely, if you want to know about hiring trends, downturns and new projects launching it's the Recruiters who will have the inside track. Whether it's official or not, one of the first questions a recruiter will ask a speculative candidate is "Why are you thinking of leaving?". Ask that question to 100 people, a week and eventually you're going to build up a pretty good picture of the business landscape.
4. You might be able to get a free lunch every so often.
I'd hope this is a joke, and if it isn't candidates need to be aware that the impression they give to Recruiters will speak volumes about the professionalism the recruiter believes they will display to their clients. Chances are that to an agency recruiter a client relationship is worth more than a candidate relationship.
I'd add one major exception to the list, make friends with a recruiter you trust. It's all too easy to fall foul of an inexperienced "Recruitment Consultant" so it's important that your career aspirations are in the hands of someone you trust. Use agencies wisely and if there's a company that you know you'd like to work for contact them directly. Send a speculative CV if necessary and follow up with a personal touch of a call or email - you can further gauge the reality of that company based on the type of response you get. If you think you we're treated shoddily in the hiring process what makes you think things will be different on the other side? Recruiters are the reflection of the internal culture of any company, it's their job to find out what's best about their employer and project it further - a recruiter with nothing to be passionate about may well be working for an organisation that there is nothing to get passionate about.
1. Some of the best jobs / candidates are rarely advertised
This is largely true. When I used to work in an agency often we didn't advertise because we were already calling a contact we knew was right for that particular role. When a requirement arrived from a candidate it was immediately followed up with a call to discuss the finer points and acknowledge receipt, then with the call finished a "top 3" candidates landed in the client's inbox. These were people with whom I had an existing relationship and the only way you can get into this "first pass"...befriend a recruiter.
2. If you refer people to your friend the recruiter, there is the possibility of a finders fee
For some agencies this is true, I wouldn't hold your breath! The best way to supplement your income in dealing with a recruiter is to let them find you a better paid role. It's a little mercenary to trade on your friends. That said, referral networks are big business, look at commercial ventures like LinkedIn, now a billion dollar company. These networks are not closed shops to recruiters and if you have any form of online presence you should expect to be contacted.
3. They can keep you aware of trends in the local market
Absolutely, if you want to know about hiring trends, downturns and new projects launching it's the Recruiters who will have the inside track. Whether it's official or not, one of the first questions a recruiter will ask a speculative candidate is "Why are you thinking of leaving?". Ask that question to 100 people, a week and eventually you're going to build up a pretty good picture of the business landscape.
4. You might be able to get a free lunch every so often.
I'd hope this is a joke, and if it isn't candidates need to be aware that the impression they give to Recruiters will speak volumes about the professionalism the recruiter believes they will display to their clients. Chances are that to an agency recruiter a client relationship is worth more than a candidate relationship.
I'd add one major exception to the list, make friends with a recruiter you trust. It's all too easy to fall foul of an inexperienced "Recruitment Consultant" so it's important that your career aspirations are in the hands of someone you trust. Use agencies wisely and if there's a company that you know you'd like to work for contact them directly. Send a speculative CV if necessary and follow up with a personal touch of a call or email - you can further gauge the reality of that company based on the type of response you get. If you think you we're treated shoddily in the hiring process what makes you think things will be different on the other side? Recruiters are the reflection of the internal culture of any company, it's their job to find out what's best about their employer and project it further - a recruiter with nothing to be passionate about may well be working for an organisation that there is nothing to get passionate about.
Thursday, 1 May 2008
From "Social Experiment" to Memetic "Big-Bang".
ThoughtWorks says it's different. It's my role to communicate this "difference" in very real terms to candidates who apply to join us. As recruiters it's something we do everyday, what differentiates us? How are we different? What differences are more attractive that others?It is the communication of difference that causes a problem and if a skilled recruiter can use the cultural differentiators that an organisation holds to be true about itself then these can be used to marry up to a candidate's motivations for joining the organisation. e.g. at a basic level, their current company doesn't offer them opportunities to travel - ThoughtWorks has many of it's consultants working outside of their home offices and aids them in relocating for a short term, the life of a project or even emigrating for good. Obviously not all aspects are that binary, it can't always be "current dissatisfaction + "different" cultural aspect = reason for joining". If it were always the case then an organisation would have to be all things to all people all of the time, no company is a nirvana so there will always be pros and cons to joining an organisation. All this got me thinking about the difference of ThoughtWorks comparatively to other organisations and how I could illustrate this to candidates.
ThoughtWorks has already done a lot of thinking about how it wanted to be different from the day it was founded and still does. Roy's Social Experiment offers a model for a company based on humanistic or anthropological lines concerned with the human behaviour, belief and value systems, sociological and cultural norms, that matched the type of company the founder wished to work in. This is obviously already a marked difference from the established organisational model which owes more to engineering showing an organisation as human constructs to be planned and controlled by rational, formal, structures and procedures. Though I feel the first model still holds true, ThoughtWorks is now a much larger place, over 1000 "ThoughtWorkers" across multiple continents in a myriad of countries. In growing globally "cultural norms" are blurred and belief and value systems are disparate and sometimes even conflicting. How then does a "social experiment" of an organisation maintain "cultural norms". One answer is to regionalise and accept geographical/political boundaries as cultural way points - the other alternative is to create a culture of your own.
The third model I propose in communicating the "difference" of ThoughtWork's organisational structure is organic evolution by natural selection. In the case of ThoughtWorks it is an evolution punctuated by the imposition of selected "organic replicators" - the employees are selected through an interview process. While organic evolution is blind or without conscious design (sorry to the Creationists) organisational evolution is a conscious program of selected memetic replication, shaped by internal forces managers, recruiters etc as well as external forces market pressures, competitors and technological advancement.
Biological metaphors have long been applied to the world of business e.g. "Survival of the Fittest" to illustrate competition, but more recently new thinking around "Chaos" and self organising systems offer a better model for an organisation than the "engineering" approach. Allowing us to realise that organisations like economies "evolve" as self organising systems. If we take this "genetic" approach I think it's natural to take Roy's Social Experiment as the memetic Big-Bang that went on to spark the evolution into the organisation as it exists today
ThoughtWorks as an organisation has, from Roy's original primordial soup, developed surprisingly common sets of dominant motivators. People who don't share them don't join, or don't get on, or are the first to leave on discovering a culture than can be alien to the "norms" that exist outside. In creating and managing a "learning organisation" we can escape the genetic dominance of the simplistic "survival of the fittest" and move towards an assumption that companies are creatures of their memes in the same way that organisms are creatures of their genes, that is vehicles which the memes or the genes, the replicators, create in order to perpetuate themselves.
For me this is what ThoughtWorks has become, a memetic snowball rolling down a hill, growing as those that share the similar ideals and values join and growing larger with each new hire. The fact that this evolution is constant can account for the "bursts" seen in nature exploiting environmental factors, this has an obvious parallel with the exploitation of new technological advances and the fostering and cultivation of those advances that will give the organisation an edge. New memes can propagate freely and become "viral" within the organisation, undergoing a micro-evolution of their own as they pass among individual ThoughtWorkers.
Working outside of rigid and constraining forms of a "normal" organisation allows for freedom of communication, a flat structure free from hierarchical constructs and allows the collaboration that fosters innovative thinking to thrive. That's not to say that ThoughtWorks is a panacea for career ills, it is a company full of individuals and with that come individual opinions, ideas and all the flaws and foibles that make us human.
Thinking about the company I work for in this way enables me to better illustrate how "different" we are from other workplaces and allows me to assimilate all the tangents that a candidate might have questions about. Motivations for joining a company are diverse and it's rare that I talk to two people who share exactly the same motivators, however the ever changing and constantly evolving elements that go to make up ThoughtWorks as a whole enable me to offer an area of interest to most who apply.
Vive La Différence!
The ThoughtWorks Anthology - Calgary Book Signing
Last night I attended a signing and small soirée for the launch of The ThoughtWorks Anthology.Stelios Pantazopoulos and Ian Robinson were supposed to talk about their contributions and then go on to sign copies of the new book.
Stelios gave a great account of his theory about "Project Vital Signs" - the idea that quantitative metrics on a project can be expressed in the same way as a patient's chart in a hospital. He also talked about different forms of "Information Radiators" and dissemination of information on Agile projects and hinted towards a possible future project in this area.
Sadly, Ian didn't make it to Calgary in time to talk, his plane was forced to land for a medical emergency that eventually saw him taking a detour via most of Canada before arriving at 4am. The shy and retiring Jim Webber was forced into the spotlight in his stead and gave insight into some of Ian's contribution "Consumer Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern". Jim talked about the dangers of over coupled services and managed not to tarnish Ian's reputation too much!
A special mention to the MC for the evening Mike Mason who ensured things ticked along nicely!
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Recruiting: Gateway to the New World or HR's Dirty Little Secret
"My name is Matt and I'm a Recruiter."
...the rest of the group rise and there's a smattering of applause, the first step on the road to recovery is admission. Finally the guilty truth was out...
...the rest of the group rise and there's a smattering of applause, the first step on the road to recovery is admission. Finally the guilty truth was out...
Is being a recruiter all that bad? Certainly while at school it's not something you aspire to, others wanted to be astronauts and doctors; with recollection I think I wanted to be a fire engine. Note, not a fireman, a fire engine. So what is it that leads someone to become a Recruiter? Personally I enjoy the talking to people and, perhaps arrogantly, I think that in a Consultancy particularly Recruiting has a real and defined role to add value to the business as a whole. I'll explain, ThoughtWorks as a business model doesn't sell software, we trade on the ability of our people to create software - in effect we "sell" the skills of people. In my arrogant recruiter way I think that the success or failure of a project can be directly affected by our ability to hire the "right" people and the timeliness of those hires -both responsibilities of the Recruiter. If you don't have confidence in the ability of your recruitment team to do this then it might be time to change that team - or at least look at the motivations of your recruiters.
In my experience of working in an agency (the dark side) I continuously found myself talking to in-house recruiters who either wanted to change their role or were just plain unhappy. In my opinion a lot of this is due to the position that "Recruitment" as a function occupies in these organisations. Recruiters are often the first contact a candidate has with an organisation if at this stage they are made to feel insignificant or unimportant why wouldn't the candidate look elsewhere? Keeping the Recruiters in your organisation buoyant and motivated should be of paramount importance - too often the "People are the most important thing" maxim is touted and paid due lip service but not given consideration from an internal perspective. If your recruiters are sending the wrong message or are not the "Ambassadors" you want them to be then you should quite rightly give them that feedback.
There is much talk of the "War for Talent" and whilst too much of human ingenuity is given over to ways of killing other humans it can't be argued that a raft of innovation hasn't happened in the area of "defence" (better called "offence" in certain nations). How can this innovation happen? In the military money is given over to "think tanks" to R&D and people who are freed of the day to day military procedure and policy that works for the rest of the team, if you expect your Recruiters to be the "Special Forces" in this War for Talent (this metaphor is stretched pretty thin now) you need to give them the imaginative space and freedoms to do so. This is one of the main reasons why I feel the a Recruiting function needs to be separate of a HR function.
Depending on how your organisation is structured perhaps this division doesn't need to be so concrete - if your role as a recruiter is just to ferry candidates through a predefined process then I don't think you have to concern yourself with a broader strategic view. However, I would argue that "Recruiter" and "HR Professional" are different skill sets - I don't possess the skills (or the patience) to work in HR, I know I couldn't do it, it's more pastoral care and empathy than I can invoke! HR Professionals work from strong and firm foundations based on policies laid down in advance, whilst recruiting benefits from having an agreed process as a platform on which to extrapolate. We need a goal and some hurdles but what's important is the individual candidate experience. Even if a candidate is rejected or told to try again later no one in their right mind wants that person to tell all his friends what a terrible time they had. I tailor the process to suit the candidate - interviewers are chosen with care, they might be peers, direct reports or part of the same team - I don't just use whoever happens to walk past the interview room!
Recruiting should never be a "one size fits all" approach, and with a tangled web of policies and proceedures with which to conform to it can become this. I'm very lucky in my role, I get to try new things all the time, I don’t have constraints on who I can hire based on country or nationality, I am "free" to recruit for talent. It can take a long time - the visa process for a Japanese/Brazilian coming to the UK is a path less trodden - but ultimately I think it's worth it.
So the point of this torrential rant? If you're hiring a recruiter make sure they want to be there! Test for ability to stay motivated, flexibility and personal drive. If you're applying for a position assess if you're valued as a person or are you meat for the grinding wheels of draconian HR dogma - let this inform your interactions with the company - a great recruiter working in a small team may be fallible some of the time but the process will fee more personal and less of a shunting from one gate to the next. Above all if you mention even in passing that it's your company's "...people that make the difference..." be prepared to invest time and energy ensuring that your Recruiters "get it", realise that this is your first human impression beyond a job advert and make it count!
Monday, 28 April 2008
Recruiting for "Agile"
For many recruiters reviewing a resume is a simple task. It's binary. The buzzword bingo they play is matched by the increasingly infuriating practice of loading CV's with massive lists of all the technologies that the candidates has ever used, looked at or heard that someone else was using in a nearby room. It's an antipattern created somewhere between naive recruiting practices and savvy developers to circumvent keyword searching and the buzzword bingo. In ThoughtWorks recruiting "Agile" experience is something I'm wary of.
The problem with this thinking is that "Agile" in this form does not exist. Recruiters looking in this way will miss out on the majority of great candidates. Agile is a conceptual framework not a language or a certificate for your wall, though I'm sure they're available. Working within the binary world of "has Agile/does not have Agile" would alienate and turn away some of the brightest and gifted developers I've seen. If a candidate has a dearth of experience in a public sector organisation it's more unlikely they will have encountered the all-singing all-dancing index card waving "Agile" we know and love - but then should we discount them? In looking at a resume or talking to a candidate I'm always looking for evidence of skills beyond that of "Tester" or "Developer".
Too often experiences of the technical practices of XP are mistaken for the behaviors we should be looking for. To people who have not been exposed to "Agile" thinking I take the time to explain what "Agile" means to ThoughtWorks. What tools and techniques they are likely to see and be a part of. I then try to ask a practical question based on their interpretation of those techniques, do they see a benefit? Do they feel there is benefit in the closer communication between the team? and between the team and the customer? I may then go on to ask what they would like to see in a development process? What would they do to improve the processes they have been involved in historically? I'm trying to ascertain how they feel about software development in general do they have that passion?
If they can demonstrate times where they are committed to delivering useful software to their customer, they are flexible enough to change software late in the process, have a will to work in a self organising team and above all want to work in close collaboration with the business and their team members - well, how much more "Agile" can you get? Ramming what is essentially a concept into a prepackaged-gift wrapped box will only rob an organisation of it's ability to recognise talent. Whether you have been a developer in a waterfall, RAD, RUP, SCRUM or some other methodology there is no reason to allow yourself to be over looked. Recruiters should be looking for potential not just clones of their current staff.
In his keynote opening QCon 2007, Kent Beck talked about the future of software development. He talked about the need to improve skills that are essential to excel in an agile development environment: Social and Technical Skills. He said social skills are more important than technical skills and suggested that Developers of the future will need to learn to listen more effectively. With the rise of a more tech-savvy business Developers will lose their "wizard" status and will need to turn to "Appreciative Attitude" and "Emotional Intelligence" as the important traits in being part of an Agile team. It's interesting to see where this goes, if Beck is proven to be right Developers used to gaining an edge by buying the book and cramming overnight will instead have to work on their interpersonal skills - look for the early adopters in the Self Help and Psychology sections of a Borders near you...
The problem with this thinking is that "Agile" in this form does not exist. Recruiters looking in this way will miss out on the majority of great candidates. Agile is a conceptual framework not a language or a certificate for your wall, though I'm sure they're available. Working within the binary world of "has Agile/does not have Agile" would alienate and turn away some of the brightest and gifted developers I've seen. If a candidate has a dearth of experience in a public sector organisation it's more unlikely they will have encountered the all-singing all-dancing index card waving "Agile" we know and love - but then should we discount them? In looking at a resume or talking to a candidate I'm always looking for evidence of skills beyond that of "Tester" or "Developer".
Too often experiences of the technical practices of XP are mistaken for the behaviors we should be looking for. To people who have not been exposed to "Agile" thinking I take the time to explain what "Agile" means to ThoughtWorks. What tools and techniques they are likely to see and be a part of. I then try to ask a practical question based on their interpretation of those techniques, do they see a benefit? Do they feel there is benefit in the closer communication between the team? and between the team and the customer? I may then go on to ask what they would like to see in a development process? What would they do to improve the processes they have been involved in historically? I'm trying to ascertain how they feel about software development in general do they have that passion?
If they can demonstrate times where they are committed to delivering useful software to their customer, they are flexible enough to change software late in the process, have a will to work in a self organising team and above all want to work in close collaboration with the business and their team members - well, how much more "Agile" can you get? Ramming what is essentially a concept into a prepackaged-gift wrapped box will only rob an organisation of it's ability to recognise talent. Whether you have been a developer in a waterfall, RAD, RUP, SCRUM or some other methodology there is no reason to allow yourself to be over looked. Recruiters should be looking for potential not just clones of their current staff.
In his keynote opening QCon 2007, Kent Beck talked about the future of software development. He talked about the need to improve skills that are essential to excel in an agile development environment: Social and Technical Skills. He said social skills are more important than technical skills and suggested that Developers of the future will need to learn to listen more effectively. With the rise of a more tech-savvy business Developers will lose their "wizard" status and will need to turn to "Appreciative Attitude" and "Emotional Intelligence" as the important traits in being part of an Agile team. It's interesting to see where this goes, if Beck is proven to be right Developers used to gaining an edge by buying the book and cramming overnight will instead have to work on their interpersonal skills - look for the early adopters in the Self Help and Psychology sections of a Borders near you...
A Question of Culture
As an in-house recruiter there are a number of ways to win over a prospective candidate. A widely adopted and often reneged upon practise is that of throwing money at the person. Said person, pleased with new found affluent status joins your company only to later find he is yet another code monkey in a cubicle. What price spending eight hours a day treading the same worn carpet, surrounded by people you hate?
However, there is another way. When buying a car/PC/home/inflatable friend, skilled salesmen won't sell you "features" they will sell you "benefits". What's the difference? The fact a car is a convertible is a feature of that particular model the salesman will turn this into a benefit "I can see you now driving a long by the beach, top down, wind in your hair, Kylie blaring out..." that's a benefit to you as a person (maybe not the Kylie) - if the salesman has hit on some of your motivators you're more likely to be taken with his shiny new car. So what "benefits" can a recruiter call on?
In my estimation the biggest value that a Recruiter can add is to emphasise and demonstrate the Culture of the company in which they work. Getting a cultural match with a candidate is a sure fire way to hit plenty of those key motivators that made them apply in the first place... of course Recruiter's will need to have confidence in the company they are recruiting for and the company itself will need to be aware of it's cultural representation. This is where most internal recruitment falls down, if recruitment is a function of HR they are to a certain extent sheltered from the realities of working "at the coal face" - in some organisations its seems that the recruiters have never met a technical team besides the occasional email or diary entry. If not through the recruiter how can a candidate find out about the "culture" of an organisation? Whether that is a mediated culture - what they want you to see, or grass-roots opinion - what really goes on.
There are a number of ways ranging from very low effort to more robust research. At the very least a candidate should have read the website of the company they've applied to. It's always the first question I ask - if you haven't looked at the ThoughtWork's website I will reschedule the call. Personally I wouldn't apply to a company without first Googling them. It might just be my hypercritical untrusting nature but I'm never one to believe exactly what everyone says - everyone takes a position right? If Google shows up court depositions of financial irregularities or news stories of Developers being chained to radiators and forced to code in VB, then that 10 second Google search has paid dividends. Is it possible to go further though? Should candidates have a route to gaining deeper access to understand a company? I say yes, and the best way to do this is to talk to the employees. If you're not able to, the company doesn't allow blogging, the employees have no outlet to the rest of the world or simply that no one in the company really wants to be a part of the world at large I'd start to question the organisation.
I'm really fortunate that ThoughtWorks encourages blogging and attendance at conferences - for good or bad, most people I meet are able to take a position on the corporate culture at ThoughtWorks. My role as a recruiter is to check this against reality. There is a myth I'd like to shoot down at this point though - when you join ThoughtWorks in all likelihood you will not be sat between Martin Fowler and Ola Bini, working on a Rails app, while finishing your 3rd book and adjusting your Hadi Teherani Gold plated chair... We're a company like any other and that means a load of diverse people with an equally diverse load of opinions. If you're thinking of joining ThoughtWorks feel free to Google us and find out what people are saying.
However, there is another way. When buying a car/PC/home/inflatable friend, skilled salesmen won't sell you "features" they will sell you "benefits". What's the difference? The fact a car is a convertible is a feature of that particular model the salesman will turn this into a benefit "I can see you now driving a long by the beach, top down, wind in your hair, Kylie blaring out..." that's a benefit to you as a person (maybe not the Kylie) - if the salesman has hit on some of your motivators you're more likely to be taken with his shiny new car. So what "benefits" can a recruiter call on?
In my estimation the biggest value that a Recruiter can add is to emphasise and demonstrate the Culture of the company in which they work. Getting a cultural match with a candidate is a sure fire way to hit plenty of those key motivators that made them apply in the first place... of course Recruiter's will need to have confidence in the company they are recruiting for and the company itself will need to be aware of it's cultural representation. This is where most internal recruitment falls down, if recruitment is a function of HR they are to a certain extent sheltered from the realities of working "at the coal face" - in some organisations its seems that the recruiters have never met a technical team besides the occasional email or diary entry. If not through the recruiter how can a candidate find out about the "culture" of an organisation? Whether that is a mediated culture - what they want you to see, or grass-roots opinion - what really goes on.
There are a number of ways ranging from very low effort to more robust research. At the very least a candidate should have read the website of the company they've applied to. It's always the first question I ask - if you haven't looked at the ThoughtWork's website I will reschedule the call. Personally I wouldn't apply to a company without first Googling them. It might just be my hypercritical untrusting nature but I'm never one to believe exactly what everyone says - everyone takes a position right? If Google shows up court depositions of financial irregularities or news stories of Developers being chained to radiators and forced to code in VB, then that 10 second Google search has paid dividends. Is it possible to go further though? Should candidates have a route to gaining deeper access to understand a company? I say yes, and the best way to do this is to talk to the employees. If you're not able to, the company doesn't allow blogging, the employees have no outlet to the rest of the world or simply that no one in the company really wants to be a part of the world at large I'd start to question the organisation.
I'm really fortunate that ThoughtWorks encourages blogging and attendance at conferences - for good or bad, most people I meet are able to take a position on the corporate culture at ThoughtWorks. My role as a recruiter is to check this against reality. There is a myth I'd like to shoot down at this point though - when you join ThoughtWorks in all likelihood you will not be sat between Martin Fowler and Ola Bini, working on a Rails app, while finishing your 3rd book and adjusting your Hadi Teherani Gold plated chair... We're a company like any other and that means a load of diverse people with an equally diverse load of opinions. If you're thinking of joining ThoughtWorks feel free to Google us and find out what people are saying.
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