39 Questions to Hire a Scrum Master
Hi guys! My name is Irina Skrypnik, and I am a Scrum Master at ManyChat. I lead Agile at the company level.
Here at ManyChat, organizational and business processes are constantly changing. Scrum Masters have a direct impact on those changes. Every quarter, they, together with the management, set the structure of the product group to achieve business goals. They also launch new systems, areas, and teams.
Last year, I interviewed about 40 potential Scrum Masters, and only one of them joined the team. I know how hard it is to find a person who has the necessary knowledge, relevant experience, and right-thinking strategies to effectively make business changes.
In this article, I’ll focus on my approach to hiring new Scrum Masters. What are the main requirements? What questions can help you understand if a person meets those requirements? We also created a list of these questions on Notion for your convenience.
This article is for you if you are:
- An HR specialist or manager and you interview Scrum Masters
- A Scrum Master who wants to be prepared for an interview
Usually, hiring at ManyChat has three stages: a technical interview, a culture fit interview, and a meeting with the Scrum Masters Team. Today, we’ll talk about the first of these.
Why I’ve decided to share my experience
One day I received a Facebook message from a candidate we had interviewed a couple of months previous.
I had previously interviewed candidates from those companies, and they obviously borrowed my questions. I think it’s because the questions have value. And what’s the best thing to do when you have something of potential value? Share it, of course!
Key criteria for Scrum Masters:
- Extended knowledge and experience
- Thinking strategies
- Mature attitude;
- Willingness to take responsibility
To be honest, a 30- to 60-minute interview is hardly enough time to make sure a candidate meets all three criteria. This is why I often do a blitz interview. Here are a couple of rules I always follow:
- I ask the candidate to give short answers. Usually, two to three sentences are enough to answer a question. It helps us see if they can highlight the key answers without going into too much detail.
- I ask two to three questions to check every criterion.
- I pay close attention to what looks like the biggest risk: knowledge, experience, or systems thinking gaps. This is where additional questions are usually required.
- I try to compare the person’s actual knowledge level with their own evaluation of their skills. I’m unlikely to invite a person to the second interview if she or he gives themself a perfect score on systems thinking, but when I ask them about an existing systemic problem in the company, they would share a recent conflict in their team or that they set the Sprint goals not using the SMART method.
- I always give feedback and my recommendations after the interview, regardless of my decision.
Questions to check the criteria
Extent of knowledge and experience. Let’s start with knowledge. It’s number one in terms of its obviousness and number three in terms of its value. Getting knowledge is easy: there are training sessions, meetups, books, mentoring, and community. Lack of knowledge needs feedback, but it is never a reason for rejection.
Things I always ask about include:
- Empirical process control
- Understanding why a business needs Scrum
- How Scrum elements relate to the business needs
- Multiple-team Scrum without reference to specific frameworks
- Scaling based on Scrum guide only
- Lean thinking
- Theoretical basement of the self-organization
Questions to check knowledge depth
To check how deep a candidate’s knowledge is, I ask them to imagine meeting an entrepreneur at a conference. The entrepreneur asks them:
1. Why does a business need Scrum?
2. If we use Scrum, what company structure will be the right one for us? How many products, PO, PBL, teams, or increments do we need?
3. Who forms the teams and how?
4. How long should Sprints be? Why?
5. Why do we need Sprints at all?
6. What’s the correlation between Sprints and releases?
7. We don’t invite users to Sprint Review. What do you think about that?
8. How does Scrum help businesses stay adaptable, fast, and provide value to the users?
9. If Scrum were reduced to one element, what would it be?
Questions to check the extent of experience
Now let’s turn to the extent of experience. I actually think this is more important. How many professionals can you name who know a lot, but never take action? One of the most popular questions from my coaching clients is “How to start doing something?”
Sometimes a Scrum Master can tell you about the right books and courses, but they have no practical experience. I believe that a Scrum Master’s experience is their real value. By the way, courage is a very important quality for a Scrum Master.
10. What is your current role as a Scrum Master?
11. What levels have you worked at: individual work, with a team, on several teams, on a product, or within an organization?
12. What meaningful achievements did your team and company meet as a result of your work?
13. What are some results of your work you’re really proud of?
14. Share an example where you broke a Scrum rule or value. What are the lessons you learned?
15. What is the structure of your current company? How many PO, PBL and teams do you have? Could any team sign up for any PBL element? Who’s PO? What’s in PBL? Give a couple of examples.
16. What changes within the company you were involved with?
17. What is the level of self-organization in your team? What were your specific actions that helped improve it?
18. What are three to four improvements your team made recently?
19. How do you work with technical debt?
20. Why did your company go for Scrum?
21. What were the biggest benefits of using Scrum?
22. What were your biggest failures?
23. What’s a systematic problem you’ve found? How did you resolve it? What was your role in it?
Questions to identify thinking strategies
Thinking strategies. This is the key criterion. The right thinking strategies help a person act efficiently without causing harm in a given situation. Since in ManyChat new issues appear faster than Scrum Masters will ever be able to discuss them, systems thinking, critical thinking, and lean thinking are the cornerstones of a Scrum Master’s performance. Self-awareness comes hand in hand with them. I always ask a candidate where they studied and how they would evaluate their knowledge on a scale of 1 to 10 in the following categories: Scrum theory and practice, facilitation, coaching, and systems thinking.
24. What is the biggest gap between the Scrum guide and Scrum implementation in your company?
25. What existing systemic problems do you see in your company?
26. What would be an example of local optimization in your company? How were you involved in it?
27. What Scrum competencies are your strongest? Which ones do you plan to develop in the next six months? Why?
28. What do you get paid for as a Scrum Master?
29. Share a case where a Scrum rule was systematically broken in your company, but you weren’t able to change it. What got in your way?
30. Who is a role model as a Scrum Master for you? It could be anyone from real life, books, or movies.
Emotional intellect. Willingness to take responsibility
Whatever happens to us is never good or bad. What matters is how we interpret it based on our experience or needs at the moment. Emotions are a response to our interpretation. This is why Scrum Masters need to know how to evaluate events based on facts instead of emotions. It’s easier for Scrum Masters who have experience as professional coaches, as they’ve learned to be impartial.
Questions to evaluate emotional intelligence and level of responsibility
31. How do you motivate your team?
32. Have you heard about the responsibility process by Christopher Avery? If yes, how would you evaluate your level, your team’s level, and your company’s level?
33. Share examples where you would/wouldn’t take responsibility. Why did/didn’t you?
34. What saps your motivation or mood to work?
35. What decisions have you made that you are proud of?
36. What is your level of energy now?
37. How do you restore your drive? What drains your energy the most?
38. Who supports you: a coach, a therapist, a mentor, a supervisor, a buddy, a group mastermind, or the outside community?
39. What are you looking for in this job?
Bottom line
To find the right Scrum Master, make sure you have a list of specific criteria they need to meet. Then you can move on to questions and tasks that would help you test whether they do.
Remember, asking the right questions is only half of finding the right candidate. The other half is impartial thinking, overcoming cognitive bias, and your ability to analyze the answers. All of it is a skill, which means you can develop it through practice and feedback.
I hope these questions help you to find the right people.
