Before everything we need to understand who a Scrum Master is? A Scrum Master ensures that throughout a project a proper Scrum process is followed. Now, you might ask what Scrum is. Scrum is a framework that helps the team to work on a complex project by approaching and solving the problems adaptively. In simple words, a Scrum Master makes the team much more efficient, raises the performance of the team members, motivates the team for the best possible outcome. Therefore, having a good Scrum Master is important for an organization.
However, it’s not always easy to find a good Scrum Master, it can be tricky. You need to think and follow a certain process to find a good Scrum Master. But, it’s okay, we got you! Read this article further and by the end of it, you would be ready to find a perfect Scrum Master for your organization.
First of all, we need to understand that a good Scrum Master understands that their main responsibility is to get the work done by their team but, unlike the traditional Project Managers, Scrum Master does not command the team on how something has to be done. They are just responsible for getting the work done and not how to do it.
Some of the procedures that you would need to follow to find a good Scrum Master for your organization.
- Planning: This involves finding out how many Scrum Masters your organization needs. Also, you would need to explore the pros and cons of hiring them from within or outside.
- Posting for the Scrum Master position: You would need to post for the opening of the Scrum Master position with a job description and few other needed details. Be quick and clever in your approach so that you won’t miss any great candidate.
- Screening and interviewing: You would need to conduct phone interviews and in-person interviews to select the best candidate. Further, in the article, you would come across some of the questions that you can ask your candidate while interviewing them.
Here are some of the factors that you need to keep in mind while hiring a Scrum Master:
- Personality: A Scrum Master’s job is to make sure that the work is done by their team; they will have to motivate their team and bring the best out of them. Therefore it is very necessary that the Scrum Master that you hire possess some people-handling skills and also has knowledge of the Scrum methodologies. It is not like hiring a Developer where you have certain sets of skills based on what you can judge and hire. While hiring a Scrum Master you would need to be more focused on the personality traits rather than the programming skills.
- Technical: With certain personality traits a Scrum Master should also understand technicalities in their respective fields. They should be good with technology and patterns to understand S
- Certified: Certified Scrum Master training is always a plus point for a Scrum Master; they are more informed about the Scrum framework. You can look for candidates who have attended and certified from Scrum Alliance by taking the Certified Scrum Master Training from registered training providers.
Things to keep in mind while interviewing a Scrum Master:
- The knowledge about Scrum framework.
- A good fit for the organization or the team.
- Their previous work experiences
- Behavioral traits needed for a Scrum Master
- Real-life experiences.
Some of the questions that can be asked while interviewing a candidate:
- What are the metrics that you would track during Sprint?
- What do you know about the risk management of a project?
- Tell me about some of the techniques for running retrospective meetings?
- What are the best techniques to create DoD, DoR?
- What do you know about the Sprint Review meeting and what are its structures?
- Do you know about some other Agile frameworks?
- What does INVEST stand for?
- Tell about the ‘self-organizing’ concept in Scrum.
- As a Scrum Master what size of projects have you worked on in the past?
- Why are you interested in the position of Scrum Master?
- What kind of tools did you use in your previous projects?
- Do you have any kind of training on Scrum?
- Why do you want this job?
- What kind of projects would you like to work on?
- What are the challenges you think you can face as a Scrum Master?
- Give them some real-life situations and ask questions based on that.
A Scrum Master with proper experience and certification such as CSM Certification is the best choice for the roles. We hope that with the above guide you can hire the best Scrum Master for yourself.
