Abstract -------- Here I present STEP, a practical tool to methodically assess CV and roles in order to both recruit and to find employment in the Information Technology field. It's been used in practically to recruit and advise with accurate results. Skills are categorised into four areas: strategic, technical, evangelism and project management/people skills. To each of these areas an experience level (low, medium and high) is associated. These criteria are applied to both the role and the prospective candidate, statement by statement allowing the aggregated scores to be directly compared. Overview -------- It's increasingly difficult to vet prospective employees due to the ever complexity of the technology market and its burgeoning list of skills and experience. The IT industry has attracted a surfeit of people from all walks of life and experience, many who do not have specific IT training but have rather used their innate personal skills to carve a career, usually as project managers and consultants. Whilst good project managers/consultants are worth their salt, those with vicarious technical skills and experience only serve to clutter the job market and make the recruitment process for software engineering professionals significantly more difficult. Traditional Assessment Methods ------------------------------ Traditional methodologies for role/candidate matching staff such as certification testing assess only the candidates ability in passing tests, rather than how good a fit they are for a specific role. This has led to many "book" based engineers who lack the experience to engineer solutions. The traditional incumbent authored tests concentrate too much on the writers specific skills and are marked subjectively to be of any genuine use in the recruitment process. Personal interviews are subject to personal issues and are seldom objective. To address these issues, STEP analysis provides a methodology to assess both the role and the application and thus can identify matches before the human process starts. It is easy to understand and apply and provides genuine organisational benefit. How to perform a STEP analysis ------------------------------ Categorise ---------- 1 - Start with the role profile (or job description if you're job hunting) - tag each requirement with one of the following categories and the desired expertise level sought: - Strategic Design/implmentation of cross department/divisional/enterprise/global community initiatives which require achitecture, product knowledge, scalabiliy, resilience, standards etc etc. - Technical Any hands on use of technology: modelling, programming, infra engineering, network design etc. - Evangalism Pushing an idea into the organisation/community, whiteboarding, presenting etc - Project/People Project management/people skills - managing staff and deliverables, dealing with ambiguity and conflict etc. Expertise Level --------------- Assess whether the level of expertise demonstrated was Low - Medium - High 2 - Aggregate p all the occurences until you get one figure for the role profile: S m-l P l T m-h W l Above is an example for a programmer 3 - Apply the same criteria to the candidate's cv - go through each paragraph/bullet point and allocate a category/level. Aggregate for each position and finally aggregate the positions to compare with the role. This will give you an idea whether the candidate approximates to the role. Our experience was that it gave a pretty accurate mapping between candidate and role for the two roles we experimented with. It also provides a useful insight into one's own cv.