1. How to hire a Scrum Master?
A short presentation by Sanjeev Varshney

2. Interviewer's Homework
 What kind of Scrum Master you are looking for?
• Anything specific about domain, type of work like development / support etc.
 What are your Scrum Team Coordinates?
• Is team remote, distributed or local?
 Full time Vs Part Time
• Are you looking for a full time dedicated Scrum Master?
 How big is your scrum team?
• 6, 8, 10 or 12 Developers
 Are you going to consider ‘Certification’?
• Ideally, the two-day certification by itself means nothing (please, don’t hire a Scrum Master because he is certified),
but it’s very usual for good Scrum Masters I’ve known to have engaged some certification class in the past.
 Are you expecting candidate to be proficient in any particular tool or know any technology?
• It is kind good to have technical background or basic understanding. It is important for candidate to know at least
Agile vocabulary and terms.
 How many teams you want new Scrum Master to handle?
• 1, 2 or 3

3. Interviewer's Knowledge and Expertise
 Who is / are going to be interviewer?
• Usually a Agile Coach and Lead Developer who is part of same team who also knows “in and out” of agile process.
• Also if possible let the team interview him or her
• What is the level of expertise interviewer has?
 Interviewer’s knowledge about what’s the role of the Scrum Master
• How long interviewer have been doing Agile work and how many successful agile development work he or she has
done.
 Get rid of misconceptions about Scrum Master Responsibilities.
 Need to come up with an assessment of your team and decide what kind of Scrum Master you are
looking for.
 Distinguish between Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Project Manager Etc.
• Sometime you may find someone who had played various roles but there are lot fake resume and candidates out
there.

4. Agile and Scrum Master Understanding and passion
 Agile and Scrum Master:
 This person understands the roots, values, principles and essence of Agile Software Development. Knows about
Lean, eliminating waste, focusing on value delivery, small batch production, frequent delivery of working software,
adapting to change… He or she is never comfortable with the “Status Quo” and is always looking for the next
improvement. He or she has a lot of different ways to run a retrospective. He or she knows about Agile technical
practices and tools and how to introduce them to the team, including pair programming, test/acceptance
test/behavior driven development, continuous integration, collective code ownership, coding standards…
 Servant Leader
 Scrum motto of “inspect and adapt”
 Meanwhile turned into a quasi-religiously followed set of principles, as taught in any official Scrum
certification training, this question is less trivial than it sounds.
 Always hire for mindset.
 While you can easily teach skills, training someone unsuitable in the right mindset will be futile most of the time.

5. Personality
 Personality is a critical hiring factor for a Scrum Master
 Humble - A big names on the Agile world usually make great consultants or part-time coaches, but when
it comes to hiring a full-time Scrum Master is a good thing to look for a humble person.
 Reads a lot: especially about Agile & Software Development. This includes blogs, books, twitter
 In fact, many great Scrum Masters are very active in the Agile community. You could ask what
conferences, open spaces or community events this person has attended over the last year, for example.
 Human: this person is a good human being. His empathy is high and knows how to deal with conflict and
sell ideas to management and clients. He is a superb and enthusiastic communicator, a great story teller.
He cares about motivation and knows how to motivate his team. He is a loving and compassionate
person, but 100% uncompromising when it comes to personal improvement and self-development.
 Likes to play. Great Scrum Masters know how to enjoy a retrospective and put their team to play and
have a great time while learning and improving. The “we are serious guys and this is called work” guys
seldom make good Scrum Masters.
 Take notes on a notebook. A paper one. And likes to draw, although he may not be that good at drawing.

6. Hands On – Let him or her run
 Let him conduct a short retrospective (over one single topic, for example)
• Notice his interaction with team
 Ask him to make an Agile Assessment of your organization through some interviews with project
managers and developers
• Ask him to show end to end process for his past experience
 Take him to a Kanban / Scrum dashboard and ask him for some possible improvements
• Ask him to explain what all data is there and how it is going to help product owner
 Ask about possible agile metrics
• For defects, Story Points planned etc.
 Ask about backlog refinement process
• How BA, PO, SM work together?
 Tell him to run Daily Stand-up
• Notice about his reaction on side conversations or irrelevant discussions

7. Thanks!!
Any Comment, question, feedback …… Welcome!