Dear HR and recruiters looking for "Agile" profiles. You are wrong, but it's alright. Here is some help for you.

Dear recruiters and Head Hunters,

I received many job offers from you recently, they concerned Scrum Master positions, Product Owner... All of them, without exception being everything but what the title says. So I find myself wondering... You are looking for a Scrum Master or Product Owner but the offer shows a totally different profile! And this is not your fault, it is due to the misunderstanding and obvious lack of knowledge of your company or client if you are Head Hunter.

I would like to help you and explain some things about these jobs and how you can change things and make your company or clients understand how wrong they are. Then how to do things right, so that they can actually start to change for the better and hire the right people.

1. Agile is a paradigm, a mindset, a way to approach the world with a different angle. It would require me some hours to introduce you to it but I will go to the point. As it stands, it is not possible to be Agile in the middle of a company and service that is clearly not Agile. Any Agile professional will know if your offer is a trap just by reading it. So if someone accept a deeply wrong "Agile" job offer, you can be sure it is not the right person at all ! It is the person the company wants, but not the person they need. Note that when there is a Project Manager or "Project" word involve, you may be in presence of Fake Agile. Agile is about Product, not Projects. And Project Managers have very little if no role at all to play. If you hear Project Manager or Management, let the alarm ring in your head !

Be careful, sending a candidate in the wrong place, for the wrong job, with the wrong expectations and the wrong environment is the best way to increase turnover and unhappiness of both your company/client and its new recruit. People who want to be agile have lot of hopes. Many are not even knowledgeable about the proposed position/role. They expect training and help but use pompous titles and presomptuous skillsets to get positions. They have to trick the system in order to get a job, that's the way things go, so don't let tricks hurt their own future. Acting in fairness and trust is crucial to help these candidates get a real glimpse of what is the role they are hoping to get and to help them build their future positively.

2. A Scrum Master is not just someone who knows "SCRUM". Certifications are a way to check about theoritical knowledge only for Scrum framework, but anyone can have it. Even school students, period! A Scrum Master is a deep role that requires many skills to be actually useful : Risk Management, personnal coaching, psychology, process reengineering... Someone who knows the method and nothing else is at best a nice friend for the team, at worst, a pure cost and an impediment. Especially in companies without any knowledge to leverage their skills.

Beware, you hire a Scrum Masters not only for its hard skills... But soft skills. And long story short, it requires a pretty high criticism ability and depht of thoughts. There are some ways to test it, I could introduce you further on that matter if you want.

3. A Product Owner is not someone in a service who will play a middle role and write User Stories because it replaces specifications. Same thing as for a Scrum Master with just method skill, this is a very negative and costly position in these conditions.

A Product Owner is a person who "Owns" a Product. And as such can take any decision regarding that product, from its idea to conception, making and life cycle management, marketing, change management, etc. It is a highly qualified role who cannot be subject to command and control hierarchy. It requires enough business agility in the organization to exist and enough skills and business mastery to be reliable. This is not an easy person to find neither !

4. An Agile coach is many things but: not a (team) manager, probably not a permanent face in the landscape of a team, certainly not "just" a trainer and not a Scrum dedicated man.

An agile Coach is here to help Agility grow and takes adequate actions to make things happen. He trains people on the matter of Agility, he adjusts methods and reduces processes as much as possible. An Agile coach is not just a Scrum Expert! In companies highly influenced by Six Sigma processes, the Agile coach will litteraly cross the border and reduce the Six Sigma influence wherever possible to allow Agility to grow. He steps in to help business adopt agility and provides strong support to the transformation leader if there is any.

If you want a scale of skills, Agile coach needs Scrum master hard and soft skills (provided hard skills if Scrum is actually used...) + Product owner hard and soft skills (without business knowledge), + years of succesful experience at agile roles (not just with the title) + strong training abilities + other things.

5. In Thailand, Agile people and profiles are... Extremely rare. If not nearly nowhere to be found and limited to very specific companies who could be counted on the fingers of a hand. Take SCB Abacus for example. In order to find Agile minded and skilled people, they were to bring professionals back from abroad, with international mindset and high skills acquired in foreign universities and companies! And I better tell you, their salary is probably much higher than what your company or clients will propose, but even more are theirs skills and outcomes!

So what to do? Hire unskilled people and let them carry on titles? Of course not. Thai government urges for re-skilling and you as recruiters are the first in line to make it happen. Few people are able to train and help skill grow. I would advice you to strongly consider proposing mentoring and education to any Agile profile hired by your clients. Training takes time and can be expensive, but the return on investment is so high that it is not reasonable to hesitate.

You and they will certainly have to go for foreigners (or farangs ;) ) to get the right skills. You may have to help your client accept that Thai culture is not an excuse in the current economic war. That they are losing because of that. That making people grow and re-skill takes time... Years... And they need to perform like tigers to be able to do so. Getting the right people with the actual skills to be able to teach others is key for your and their success... Educate your company and clients whenever possible.

6. Agility is your own business! It is hard to understand agility. Who could tell you that Millenial turnover and agility are related in many ways? Do you know that Agility success requires deep organizational changes and most often a general HR and organization transformation? Do you know that when people use Agile everywhere for anything but the reality, they use it to blame their bad results and as such, prevent companies from changing? "Agile do not work", no, their understanding (or misunderstanding) of Agile do not work. Agile works, they don't. Don't forget that people don't know what they don't know, including executives. And if you were to have a quick question and answer with the people who look for agile profiles or who talk about agile, you would see how true this sentence is!

Do you know that process Reegineering and Agility are related in everyway? And agility covers even HR, governance, management, organization and executive leadership?

If you read carefully (congratulations !) I have not even talked about "IT". Yes Agility is about IT as much as it is for any other department. It was IT at start because it was made by IT people who wanted to develop software. But Agility in 2018 refers to everything because everything is interconnected and related.

Agility is a big part of your future as HR or recruiters. Many agile people will be required to sustain the development of highly efficient companies who will emerge as leaders. Protecting agility and providing education to your clients and organizations is litteraly preserving your market and workforce. It is right if you don't know. Just ask for explainations. Ask for help. It is hard to find reliable experts on that matter, but any of us will gladly help, share knowledge and even come with you to help your clients understand.

I hope that my insights will be useful for some of you and that it will help you cope with these alien roles that appear more and more.

If you have any question, observation, constructive feedback, please feel free to comment, to ask or to send me a pm, I would be happy to answer or help you.

I wish you a happy profile matching!