CJ: All right, well live
Duke: Sweet.
We're back.
CJ: again.
Duke: We really gotta get back to our old cadence.
CJ: man, duke, I swear good to get together and do these
things and life sometimes, man.
Duke: Man, we're grownups.
I'm not apologizing.
CJ: No.
No, exactly right.
I mean, stuff happens, right?
, That's just the way it works,
Duke: Yeah, it's crazy.
Life happens.
, Didn't we do an episode on that once,
CJ: I think we did.
Duke: times and seasons
CJ: Yep.
And about being un unapologetic about it too.
Yeah.
Duke: Yeah.
You can't be all on all the time for everyone.
CJ: No, it is, definitely a, challenge.
And So let's just get into it.
Okay.
Duke: All right folks, we love you.
We're so glad to be back.
what are we talking about today, Corey?
CJ: All right, duke, today we are talking about, what did we call this?
Duke: Well, it all started, I've been asked a couple times in the last
month about how to interview top tier ServiceNow talent, and we know there's
a range, But certain organizations want like a very, very senior resource
but the twist here is how do you do that When you yourself are not a top
tier ServiceNow execution resource, maybe you're just managing the team.
Maybe you're the political owner of it, but you don't know you know
how to build on it or whatnot.
So how do you get the best ServiceNow talent that you can with as little
knowledge of ServiceNow as possible?
I don't know how we're gonna get that into a tiny little title.
CJ: Huh?
Yeah, no doubt.
Shrink that.
It's gonna be like a Bitly title,
you know, this is a question I get asked.
Um.
Not often, but not, rarely either.
you know, how do you find the best ServiceNow talent, especially
when you aren't necessarily the best service now talent.
what should a non-expert in ServiceNow be looking to do
Duke: Because I think in tech Even if we're not the tech person in tech,
maybe we're like the managerial, the director, whatever, we have this,
baseline assumption that I have to ask tech questions to figure out if
somebody's a real legit player or not.
And you do like and you do, right?
But there's other characteristics about them that make them a great talent.
It's not just their technical expertise, right?
Like how many episodes do we have about being politically savvy and being.
CJ: Yeah.
Duke: like figuring out all the different elements of success that have nothing to
do with your technical prowess, right?
And so how do you get that person as well as making sure that
they actually know their stuff?
And so we've done some studying and some thinking, and so we are gonna
bring you three characteristics.
That you can look for and test for.
We're gonna teach you how to apply those characteristics to the questions that
you ask, and then we're gonna talk a little bit about logistics of formally
testing people as opposed to like just asking questions back and forth.
And gosh, I hope we have enough time to do it all.
CJ: Yeah.
or, we are going to play, you're gonna play this episode back at two x
Duke: Right.
Yeah.
It'd just be an extra long one.
so let's talk about the characteristics.
I came up with this model called the trifecta.
And we all know that for Apex, ServiceNow Town, these are people I want as
either principal consultants or my ma.
Like that would be the partner ecosystem in the, customer ecosystem.
This would be like your product lead or your main architect or, your main dev.
But it's gonna be the key, key foundational person on the team.
Now what are the table stakes?
What's the one thing I have to have as table stakes?
CJ: that, that's a good question, duke, like when you're thinking about
hiring someone, what's the first thing you think that person needs to have?
the first thing I think about is capability.
Duke: Yeah, can a person even do the work?
Right.
There's no sense testing beyond that unless they've
been in the trenches, you know?
And so you have to test for capability.
And I know, I know you're probably thinking, but I, but Duke.
Like you just told us that you can test for this without having the capability
promise you we're gonna get there.
Promise you just hold on.
CJ: Absolutely.
Duke: capability is absolutely the number one thing to get in the door.
Okay?
But that doesn't make you an Apex resource because we can rent rather cheaply.
Capability from, the lowest price providers on the face of the earth, right?
Even they have capable resources, strong technical resources, so, so
we're missing two parts of the trifecta.
CJ: Yeah.
'cause capability is not enough, we're not talking about, you know,
creating an API, we're talking about hiring a person, right?
So my next thing would be communication, And you got someone who's capable.
Now, can they actually communicate with you?
Can they communicate with your stakeholders?
Right?
Can they communicate that capability are they folks who can have a conversation
and work through The problem statement, In a way that's collaborative and
explainable and understandable.
Duke: Now what we did was put a lot of serious thought , into how
do you assess communication skill without just going by your gut.
CJ: Right.
Duke: You know what I mean?
there's some people you just enjoy talking to more.
Right?
You know what I mean?
Like
CJ: Yeah.
Yeah.
So those
Duke: tell you're like that per, that this person's a good communicator
versus this person's a bad communicator.
You can usually tell.
CJ: right.
Duke: But, but maybe it would help if we understood more points within that.
what skills fall under the skill of communication.
And I'll lead off with the first one, , is just validating, understanding.
how many times Corey, have we been in front of people?
Like, we, we need to tell somebody you have to do this technical work, right?
And it's like, yes, yes sir.
Yes.
We can get that done.
Yes.
CJ: Yep.
Duke: You know, it's just consultant provider speak for, we'll figure it out.
We hope
they might not even understand what we ask them to do, but sometimes
it's just the answer is yes.
You don't tell your, boss.
No.
So validating understanding would be somebody who, when
you're asking questions, they might not necessarily say yes.
No, they repeat back for clarification.
In the repeat back, you can hear the notes of the things you asked them for.
So validation of understanding is 0.1
under communication.
CJ: Yeah, and just one additional thing to that too, right?
Like you wanna make sure that the person, when they're repeating it
back to you, or , rephrasing it into their own words or their own
perspective, , it doesn't help anyone if they just say the exact same thing
to you that you've already said to them.
Duke: We can train in AI for that.
CJ: Yeah, exactly right.
Like, you want them to put their lens on it, right?
Like just have everything that you just said flow through their lens so that
you understand that they understood.
Duke: It just reminded me of like when the ais were first coming out for image
generation and you're like, I want a picture of a Middle Eastern man.
He must be Middle Eastern.
He cannot have blue eyes, and all the AI's like blue eyes.
CJ: Yeah, the, the, the old school AI was just like, we will give you a human and
we'll, we will put on these additional attributes and we hope you like it.
Duke: All right.
Validated understanding.
What's the next one, Corey?
CJ: narrative articulation, can the person you that you're speaking
to explain the benefits, right?
The risks, the rewards, the roadblocks, the , the value, the problem statement,
can they actually talk you through?
whatever the thing is, right?
The thing could be the question that you asked, right?
Like, you might have set up an example scenario and can
they talk you through that?
Or the thing might be you're asking them, to come to the table with a,
story about what X, Y, Z, How do they, how do they communicate that to you?
Right?
and is it understandable?
Duke: We've all been in a room where we're with senior kind of business stakeholders
who don't know anything about building ServiceNow, and there's some technical
resource explaining to the Nth level of what technically is wrong with the
thing and why we're not gonna hit the deadline and what you're looking for.
Someone there, like when we say narrative articulation, it's kinda like
understanding who your audience is and being able to abstract to that level.
CJ: Absolutely.
Yeah.
Know your audience.
That's a, that one's so key, if you're sitting in a room talking to
the owners of the platform, right?
You probably don't wanna be super in, in the weed on the tech stuff.
Duke: No.
CJ: And vice versa.
If you're in a room full of developers, they probably wanna understand the nuts
and bolts of how you built that business role or that script and include, right?
So go a little deeper.
Duke: It is kinda like that.
There's a YouTube channel that I liked for a while where.
They get some profound expert in something like astrophysics and they'll
like explain black holes in five levels.
And so it's like the first start off with like some kid in kindergarten
CJ: Yes.
Duke: and then all the way up to like a physics grad student.
but yeah, it is that, that's the kind of thing, being able to read the room,
read the audience, understand what this particular conversation needs is,
what we mean by narrative articulation.
CJ: Absolutely.
Duke: So this is two pillars of communications, validates
understanding narrative articulation.
The third is persuasion.
you know, that magic that some people have where, they can
convince people to see it their way.
CJ: no, I call that the art of, telling people, no, I'm
making them love me for it.
Duke: I call it the art of Bs, but not, not because, not because
they're speaking bs, not because they're speaking Bs because it's
just, it's so hard to quantify.
CJ: Absolutely.
It is very hard to quantify persuasion, right?
, This isn't the Star Wars universe, right?
There's no Jedi mind tricks.
These are not the joys you're looking for, you do actually
have to have a conversation.
But I think it, this one's like a next level skill, honestly, right?
Because you gotta have the base in place first before you can even evaluate,
or even u utilize persuasion, right?
Like so on both ends, right?
Duke: and it comes in different flavors, right, too.
Like some people got it because, they're incredibly good looking and
they're super confident and super magnetic and they were born that way
and you just can't help it, right?
It's nature.
CJ: Absolutely.
Duke: And then other people are just very, very good at, you know, it's like the
people that always have the good point.
You know,
CJ: Yes.
Duke: are we ready to rock?
No, we can't go that way.
Why not?
Because of this.
Uh, that's a good point.
CJ: Right.
Yes.
Nobody likes that guy, by the way, but he saves some lives.
Duke: Oh boy.
Yeah, so persuasion, it comes in different flavors.
You don't have to be like the incredibly super good looking,
ultra charismatic person.
It can come in your ability to make a case as well.
And then what's the last one, Corey?
The fourth pillar of communication.
CJ: Interrogation.
Can the person that you're talking to go deeper on the subject,
Without you feeding it to them?
Can you come with a, I won't say surface level, but a setup, right?
A decent setup for, you know, the conversation and or the problem statement.
And can that person take that?
Then dive deeper and come out with more detail and more understanding and add
things to the situation that weren't there previously, but are still relevant.
Duke: This is where I feel like the BA role, when they're a good ba, they
have this interrogation skill down pat.
CJ: Yeah, I.
Duke: Because this is the skill you use, when somebody says,
deploy ITSM, what's the goal?
Right.
The, the goal is to deploy ITSM.
Okay.
Why do you wanna, like, why do you wanna deploy ITSM?
What's like, why do you literally wanna spend a quarter
million dollars doing this?
What's the, you see what I mean?
Like, it's breaking it down from the statement of I want.
to, something that we can actually have legitimate requirements out of.
CJ: Yeah.
And it's super important, Because it matters to the project often, like why
you're actually doing the project, because there are gonna be some situations where
you're gonna have to make decisions on the fly because not everything gets
figured out in the, preparation room, So how do you make that decision on the fly?
Or do you just wait and , potentially delay the project, right?
Because you're waiting to get an answer back from a stakeholder,
and that might take a week.
Duke: Or how many times is this gonna be wrong until we get it right?
Because nobody really drilled down,
CJ: Yep.
And so we're six or seven levels deep, but nobody understands why.
Duke: Mm-hmm.
CJ: Yep,
Duke: Or, or we're like narrowing down on V one of this app, but
nobody really understands what it does for the customers.
CJ: yep.
Duke: We just got a whole bunch of technical stuff.
So interrogation is the art of extraction of information.
Okay?
So those are the four pillars of communication.
And the two pillars of the trifecta are capability and communication.
And the last pillar is my favorite.
If you have somebody who is fully capable, maximally capable, and maximally
communicative, what is the one thing.
That differentiates that candidate from the perfect trifecta
candidate, and the word is agency.
Can the candidate self determine what needs to be done and take the action
without any kind of managerial catalyst?
Okay.
If someone is highly skilled, and capable, and they're highly communicative.
but they need to be told what problems to solve, Then they're,
just shy of the apex trifecta.
But if they have high agency, this means they're already gone
out and hunting their own game.
They need as little as your influence and energy as possible in order
for them to make drop the coin.
In order for them to make a maximal impact for your organization.
So you get the three of those pillars, capability, communication and agency,
and now you have the trifecta resource.
And we are excellent pattern recognition machines like we go through this
process when we are evaluating contractors to do work on our house.
When we're buying cars, when we're doing anything really significant, we
want to know is this person that I'm standing across from, the real deal.
And we've done that, since we were living in capes, you know,
CJ: Yeah,
Duke: trust the fact that you can spot this.
But I think a lot of people just need to know that these are the properties
that exist and what to look for.
one person asked me, they said, well, what if I asked them,
what's the hardest thing you did?
And they say, write a script.
Include what do we do then?
Well, they certainly haven't demonstrated any kind of narrative
articulation in communication, and they haven't provided you any agency.
So you're getting your answer from the person
CJ: absolutely,
Duke: they're showing you right.
So if you're in a position where you're like, gosh, I felt that was lacking,
or I wish they would've told me more, or I'm having trouble extracting
this information outta the person.
You're lacking the communication in the agency aspect.
CJ: Man, let me tell you.
That's so true, duke.
, The person who has this level of agency that you wanna see is a person
that you can ask a bad question and that person can take that bad
question and turn that into a way to progress the conversation to the next.
Level.
They don't have to know exactly what you were trying to get at, but they can
still take that information and put some thought behind it and say, well, were
you trying to, or were you asking me?
Or, this is the way I perceive that question.
And then go from there.
, If you don't have that level of agency, you get an answer.
Like, you know, so what's the most exciting thing you've done?
I built the script include.
Okay.
Well, most of us , know that a script include is a container,
So it is not necessarily a thing.
And so if you're gonna tell me the most exciting thing you did was build
a a container for code, then you need to tell me why that's important.
Duke: And not even technically important, but what happened?
CJ: Exactly like what turned this boring thing, exciting.
Duke: We're still in a world where, okay, maybe I know what
characteristics to listen for, but there also needs some coaching about,
I call them hard to fake questions.
Or questions where you require more than just a definition.
If somebody was like exquisite, like memory recall, really good reading, and
just like went over tons and tons of ServiceNow material, they could probably
do a convincing definitional interview,
CJ: Yep.
Duke: Without even really having demonstrated experience.
So here's some categories of hard to fake questions.
So number one is define and contrast.
This is what is the difference between X and Y and Y?
Does it matter?
CJ: because typically you don't want like a yes or no, answer to a question, right?
Duke: Yes or no?
Answers are the.
CJ: Right.
Like if you get into a spot where you're conducting a conversation,
with a a potential hire, , and all of a sudden the only thing
you're getting back are yes or nos.
You have went down the wrong route at some point, , you found yourself
in a place where you didn't expect to be in this, in this interview.
And that alone.
Can sometimes be enough, To say, yeah.
Wrong person,
Duke: They got a, they got a 50 50 chance of being right, even if they don't know.
CJ: Yes.
Duke: So definitely no yes or no answers.
But if you ask them a define and contrast, this requires both
definitional and contextual knowledge.
CJ: Absolutely.
Duke: Like what's the difference between, I don't know, a UI
policy and a script include?
CJ: Yeah.
And why does it matter?
Yeah, or, and
Duke: No, wait.
Oh wait.
Ah.
A UI policy and a client script.
CJ: yeah, I was gonna say, or I say UI put policy in the data policy, right?
Like, you know,
same difference.
Duke: good one.
Good one.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a good one.
That's a good
CJ: You know, slowly, I mean, 'cause you can use both of those in most
cases, but there are some cases where you only want the data policy,
Duke: Yep.
And you know what the paradox is?
You know what the paradox is?
If you know nothing about ServiceNow, you can ask 'em a question like that.
What's the difference between a UI policy and a data policy?
Even if you don't know the answer, if you feel convinced by them, you might
have the resource you're looking for.
CJ: Yeah,
' Duke: cause we can see it, right?
there's a difference in somebody's presence, in their voice, even if
you can't quite see them, right?
can tell when somebody's giving you the definition versus giving
you the hard fought experience.
CJ: Yeah, it's just gonna be additional context to it, right?
Because when you, I mean, Google, right?
Like what's the difference between a UI policy and a data policy?
You'll get a fairly decent answer.
You won't get a fairly decent answer that passes an interview like this,
you'll get a definitional answer.
You
Duke: it's kind of an uncanny valley of it,
CJ: Yeah, absolutely.
you want a contextual answer.
Right.
The difference is that you, a data policy, prohibits, these things at the, database,
okay, and why would I want to do that?
Right?
Like, 'cause that's, to me it's like, okay, so you know the
definition, why would I wanna pick that versus a UI policy, right?
Like, give that context too.
Context is king and key.
the next one, duke, is extremely important as well, right?
Wisdom from experience.
Those are the situations where you're asking someone, Hey.
Tell me about an experience when Dot, dot, dot, whatever.
Dot, dot dot might be.
Duke: and this will, definitively show if they're good communicators or not.
CJ: Absolutely.
Duke: Right?
CJ: now you, 'cause you're asking them to tell your story,
Duke: from your own life?
Right?
CJ: Yes.
Duke: Which, which supposedly has been spent doing hard things up to
now, because now you're applying for a really serious senior position.
So you had to have been in a trench fight or two, so.
If they struggle here, you're dealing with maybe somebody who's lower
on that communication spectrum.
there's a few things we want you to test for here.
So get them to tell multiple stories.
I ask 'em about technical and political situations, tell me about the, best
app deployment you ever had, right?
Tell me about the most sensitive political situation you are in.
Did you win and lose?
Win or lose and how?
CJ: Right.
Duke: Because it's real life y'all.
Um, getting the most technically capable resources doesn't mean you win.
CJ: Sometimes just knowing how to do the thing isn't enough, You need
somebody who can convince the people who hold the power to allow the thing
to be done And that's important.
and look, the level that we're talking about.
these things we're not at a, what is a business rule level, the person
that you're hiring is going to be interacting with some level of
leadership, even if it's just the leadership of the platform itself.
, The person that you're interviewing is going to have some communication
with leadership, and so it's important, that that person can speak
to both technical and political, situations and, hard things in those
situations and how they handled them.
Right?
I don't wanna know just about successes.
I ain't learn.
I I've never learned anything when I've succeeded at.
I'll just be honest, right?
, All of my heartfelt lessons have come when I failed and fell on
my face and it's like, oh man.
that's what a hole is.
Don't step in that.
Duke: Yep.
Once bitten, twice, shy, all that stuff, right?
Um,
CJ: So if you ask me to like tell you a story about where I screwed up, or
if you ask me to tell you a story about something that resonates with me, I'm
going to go straight to the screw ups.
all the stuff that I did well is just not, not exciting.
Duke: You don't wanna hire a bodyguard that's never been punched in the face.
You know,
CJ: yes.
Duke: like you might have all the technique in the entire world, But
CJ: Yep.
Duke: Who, who said it?
Everybody's got a plan until you get punched in the face.
CJ: Mike Tyson and I actually went and looked it up.
He actually did say it.
So that was not an internet meme.
That's
Duke: Yeah, that sounds like some serious Mike Tyson wisdom too.
but it's true.
there are people with good technical chops who have never stood in the fire
of, a room full of angry stakeholders.
CJ: Yeah.
Duke: Or a stakeholder who like, I want mine now too.
And not realizing that it's not them versus you, it's them versus their peers
who also want their stuff prioritized.
So anyways, uh, be sure to ask about both victory and defeat.
Be sure to ask both technical and political, and you can ask a wide variety.
You can just pick out features, like tell me about an experience
you've had with the catalog.
With Portal.
With script include, but also higher level stuff.
What's the best thing you ever deployed in ServiceNow?
CJ: Yeah.
How did you manage to get budget, for, that new app, right, that
was, that you felt was gonna save your team,, 20% productivity?
Duke: Alright.
There's a third category that we came up with for hard to fake questions,,
we call it utility and consequence.
. This would be a little bit lower down the totem pole than tell me
about a custom app or whatever.
But this would be like, tell me about a time you used a record producer.
There you go.
Tell me about a time you like but you see the difference there.
It's like, what is a record producer versus tell me about a
time you used a record producer.
It one is a lot harder to answer and.
Possibly shows, some agency shows some communication ability.
Like you might not even know what a record producer is, but if they
give you a convincing answer, like maybe they teach you something and
you got your good communicator.
, CJ: That last piece that's really good, you might not know and
maybe they teach you something.
I think in almost every situation, the person that you wanna hire as an
outcome of this process you should walk away from the interview thinking.
Damn.
I know more now than when I went in thanks to talking to that person.
If you don't get that immediate warm and fuzzy, I'm not gonna say
that's not the person, but it's not a clear cut sign that it's the person.
I should be able to walk out of the situation and think, man, I
didn't know you could actually do that with scripted rest APIs.
Huh.
That's pretty interesting.
Duke: You know what, there's a fourth category of hard to fake questions.
I just didn't even like snap to until now.
CJ: What
Duke: The fourth, the fourth category is opinion questions.
CJ: Ooh, yes.
Duke: not what is what isn't.
Or did you, ever deploy ITSM?
Like, Hey Robert, , have you ever deployed ITSM?
Yes, a bunch of times.
What's your least favorite part of ITSM as on the platform?
CJ: Yeah.
Duke: Now, you don't have to tell ServiceNow that you're
asking these questions, but
CJ: Exactly.
Duke: you can discover a lot by asking somebody, like what would they improve if
they could rebuild this part of the app?
CJ: Or what's your least favorite part of the deployment process for ITSM?
Duke: Oh yeah,
CJ: Right.
Because there are some parts of this process that you will
have to go through, right?
Like you can't have A-I-T-S-M without having either some kind of category tree.
I know.
Ask you about category trees, but, or some kind of function in CMDB,
you gotta have something there to take up that, categorization aspect,
which is that, important or not?
Right?
Like, you know, things like that, so, oh.
Duke: You can also ask it in the opposite direction, like, what's your favorite
feature on ServiceNow, or favorite feature of, whatever area you're in,
like CSM or facilities or, what's your favorite outcome that you've provided?
With that, but , it takes a certain level of experience
to be opinionated on products,
CJ: Yes.
Thank you.
That's great.
That's exactly it, you can't have an opinion unless you've actually been in
a fire long enough to have an opinion.
What's your favorite part of the platform, duke?
I.
Duke: probably flow designer.
CJ: Yeah.
That doesn't surprise me.
Duke: And it wasn't always, there was a time where if somebody said, what does
ServiceNow have to work on the most?
I would've said, flow designer.
But they have a great PM over that and he is taken it so far I, I love it.
And I know there's a lot of raw devs who are like, well, it's just, faster.
If I code it and I can, get that at some level.
But to me, the spirit, the beating heart of ServiceNow has been how much
can we build with minimizing the amount of development talent that you need?
Whizzbang developer can get this done in an hour with raw code, but
then they go to the next job or whatever, and somebody who's not
a whizzbang developer inherits it.
They can't even read it.
You know, like,
CJ: Yeah.
Yeah,
Duke: anyway, we could do the whole , flow designer versus not
Flow designer as a separate episode.
But Flow Designer is probably one of my favorite things.
'cause it's, it's kind of universally applicable, like every module can use it.
CJ: I
Duke: Every skill level of person can do it.
There's just a lot of clever stuff in there too, like I just love using it.
What about you?
CJ: Two things, one is the integration, set module, So think transform mapping,
external data sources, that sort of thing.
I like pulling data in , from various sources.
And then normalizing it and then using it in my Service Now processes and apps.
that one is probably my favorite one because of what you can do with the
data during the normalization or the transform process, there's so many
different ways to script it or key certain things to happen based on
data that you're importing, right?
It's just a, it's almost like a blue sky, and that's what I like about it.
, The second one would be a app that is now unfortunately retired, but would
have been my number one if it wasn't.
And that's data certification, like data cer.
when I tried to add it, , it was like, yeah, no, that's gone,
Duke: Oh, I love data search.
Oh, man.
CJ: dude.
Duke: I gotta be careful when I.
CJ: so I love data certification and the reason I love it, is because like.
Service Now has a tendency of building apps and then
putting guardrails around them.
It's like, oh yeah, data certification.
You can only use it on a task table, Uhuh.
Actually you can't, you can use it anywhere, right?
It's just a, it's a little filter in a business rule or
something somewhere, right?
You just comment at a little piece of code and boom, all of a sudden data start
can run on every table in the instance.
Shh, don't tell anyone.
but, but then you can do certain things with that.
being able to certify anything opens the door to keeping everything
running correctly, and that's the reason that I love it so much.
Right.
Because there's so many objects and ServiceNow that where ownership of
the object matters and over ownership of the OB object drifts over time.
How do you keep up with that?
Duke: And everybody talks like governance, governance, governance.
Right.
But how do you, but how do you Governance?
CJ: Right, right.
And manual audits are expensive, if you've already trued up this
certain class of objects, right?
And you've got ownership for everything, you don't wanna have
to do that again in two years.
Duke: Uh, we're gonna have to record two episodes in a row, aren't we?
CJ: We might have to.
Duke: Alright, so the original plan was we'd actually go through a list of
specific questions, but I think we gotta skip to one other thing we really, really,
really, really gotta do for this episode.
So, , wherever you see this, leave a like, leave a comment that you wanna see
the next question, episode, and we'll do an episode entirely based on questions.
And we'll all link 'em back to the trifecta for testing for
Capability Communication and Agency.
So just leave us a comment.
but the last thing we wanted to address was virtually testing people, ? Because
even with what we've covered so far, there are people who are that good at talking
that they can just get past your defenses and you could like them, or you can
just imagine that they're demonstrating capability, but you don't know for sure.
And so you want to actually get these people on an app and testing stuff.
I was recently asked to suggest some virtual tools where you log
in together and there's an IDE there and all this kind of stuff.
And because I suggest those isn't dawned on me like, why don't you
just use a ServiceNow PDI for that?
You don't want to test their raw JavaScript.
You want to test their JavaScript in the context of ServiceNow, right?
Or even if it's not scripting per se, like maybe you wanna do troubleshooting
or maybe you want them to talk about SLAs from the SLA form or something.
But it's better just to have an app that you could just screen share.
we're gonna talk a little bit about the logistics of that.
And the first point is, it must, must, must, must, must, must be a PDI,
CJ: Yes, absolutely.
That's just baseline, right?
You want folks to be able to show you in service now how they
can do things in service now.
Duke: But you don't want to do it from your own instance in particular
because they don't work for you.
Your data's on that instance, right?
And they're gonna see it.
So you're gonna have people's contact information or possibly data about
real incidents that actually happened and just, it can't be a copy.
Even an old, old, old copy of your instance.
It must be a PDI.
There's no way around it.
Yeah, I know.
You got your own custom apps, your own way of doing things.
You're gonna have to find a way to test them without it.
'cause you don't want 'em seeing.
You can have admin access or some kind of like heightened access
to do stuff on the, , platform.
So just like be a security mindset, put it on a fresh instance.
, You can test people's capabilities without seeing your stuff specifically.
CJ: I mean, you can always Stage a PDI you can have your update
sets and your app application repositories, so on and so forth.
Stage the thing up and, then let people jump on it , and do the thing.
the second thing I'd say though is that if you are in this situation
where you're saying, okay, get into PDI and show me what you got.
You also have to allow folks to use everything that they would
use if they had the job, And what I mean is, can they Google?
Yes, they should absolutely be able to Google, what browser can they use?
Right?
Whichever one that they want or whichever one that your company allows,
are you gonna allow them to use ai?
Yeah, you should allow them to use AI if your company allows AI to be used.
these are all things that, that you want to get.
You want to have the interview, as close as possible to someone's,
real life work and experience, and also their current comfort
level, Because are they competent?
Not, are they comfortable in this setting?
Duke: it's so artificial to put somebody in a vacuum chamber,
and say, go develop this thing.
Really talk to anybody, honestly, in the ServiceNow ecosystem.
And it's like, man, I got one window up for ServiceNow community.
I got one window up for the ServiceNow discord I've got.
Chat GPT up on one computer.
Like I work in ServiceNow.
We have our own internal AI tools.
I got that up.
and organizations, they are like, use the ai, let the AI help you
do this, and like AI coworkers and AI copilots and blah, blah blah.
And then it's like you go in for an interview, it's like, okay, no.
Get in the vacuum chamber,
CJ: Right?
Duke: no outside information from nothing.
And just do this all from recall.
CJ: Yes, it is like, no,
Duke: When everybody knows nobody works like that in the entire world,
CJ: Absolutely.
nobody does it, and so don't do an interview that way.
It's, it is dumb.
And, it won't allow you to get the best, the best candidate.
Duke: So yeah, just let 'em, let 'em be.
Let 'em use whatever resources they want.
You might learn something.
CJ: Absolutely.
All right.
What we got next, duke?
I.
Duke: Come up with the build scenarios that you want.
This is gonna require that you have somebody else with some technical
expertise if you're not that person.
but I would suggest some build scenarios, like have them build a
record producer, have them build maybe a simple catalog item.
Have them build a simple flow with less common concepts.
CJ: I like it.
I like it.
Especially the less common concept part.
Duke: yeah, like maybe do it on a schedule or do it on an inbound
email or so, you know what I mean?
Like,
CJ: Or how do I have the, flow.
pause until a certain thing happens and then pick up again.
Duke: yeah.
Or have them, demonstrate, Two of the methods that they think
are cool from glide record that aren't, ad query or query
CJ: Yeah.
Duke: and just see what they bring you, right?
CJ: I have gotten some really interesting answers from, candidates over the years.
none that I can think of off the top of my head, but some that I definitely
went and took notes of and went and looked up after the interview.
Like, oh crap, I didn't know what we could do this.
I,
Duke: My favorite eyebrow raising moment with that was somebody
who did dot underscore next.
CJ: Ooh, yeah, you know, duke, I just asked you about that one recently.
Duke: Yeah.
And dot underscore.
Next is if you have a table that actually has a field called Next.
It will stop, glide record from performing properly.
And so you'll, you say if do underscore next factors for tables
that might have the word next in it,
CJ: Nice.
Yeah.
Duke: or you ever, I have a person who's like, I need to do a glide record,
but they're not using Glide record.
They're doing glide query instead.
Like that's always an, it's like, okay, all right.
you sit at the teacher's desk.
I'm gonna sit Yes.
CJ: Yep.
Learned something new today.
Duke: Okay.
Another one I would go for have things ready that you want them to build on
the fly or explain on the fly actually, that maybe may, maybe a three tiers.
So something you want them to build, something you want them to explain.
But have it built already.
Like explain this flow to me.
Explain this script.
Include, explain this client script.
CJ: Yes.
Duke: And they don't have to like code, but if they can read it
right, it is still capability.
And
then the last one, go
CJ: I love that.
I mean, so think about it, instead of explain, here's a scripting clue.
write some comments for me.
Right.
Tell me, this is a scripting clue.
There's no code comments.
gimme the code comments on what this does,
Duke: Yep.
and then the last one would be to, to literally build failing cases.
CJ: Yeah.
Duke: A good one would be build any flow that's rigged to fail.
There's a bunch of different ways you could do that.
CJ: Oh
Duke: But you're specifically looking for somebody who's just
gonna like, open up the studio and run it and watch the data happen.
Right.
they should be able to go to the debugging tool and just show you like,
CJ: Yeah, this is where it crashed.
And this is why.
Duke: But so many people are so caught up on like, can they JavaScript,
you know, but that's not the be all end all technical capability.
CJ: I got an interesting story about this, when I was, applying for a job
in it, a long time ago, they had to come in and gave me like a test, right?
had to take this computer and do stuff with it, Got everything right except for
one thing, which was the network card, couldn't get the network card connected.
Reason I couldn't get the network card connected Duke is because they have put
transparent tape over the interface, pens.
So and put it back in the
slot.
Yes.
So there was,
Duke: a test
CJ: they did that as a test and it was,
they, they had Right, that was a warning that I should have taken.
I did not take it.
And,
and I stayed at that job for three months.
But,
Duke: That would mean dude.
CJ: Dude, like tape over the freaking interface and
plugged it back into the slide.
Like, you gotta be kidding me.
And I walk in there, dude, like I'm hot stuff I, I, I, I in my
sleep and I could not get this thing connected to the network.
Man.
I was so frazzled.
Duke: Wow.
CJ: Yeah.
don't do that though.
Duke: No, for sure.
Don't be mean about it.
You can go a long way, even with simple stuff, especially.
If you've got somebody who's got the good communication and high agency.
'cause maybe they're gonna volunteer something like, yeah, okay, I
found out what's wrong, but maybe you could avoid this entirely by
writing the flow designer this way.
CJ: Yes.
Duke: Or hey, this isn't a great case for flow designer.
Maybe you'd consider a business rule.
Like they're coming up with their own things to advise you on, on
top of what you asked 'em to do.
And that's all part of finding that prime resource.
CJ: Absolutely.
When they look at your thing and be like, why'd you do it this way?
, That's the person.
Duke: last but certainly not least on how to test people
on A PDI is that all of these.
build, explain, fail test cases.
please just put them in update sets when you build them, and then
export those update sets, or X mls if it's raw data that you need.
because , you might want to interview like three, four people in a day and
you want to just be able to blow away the instance and then just , whoop,
pop those things right back on.
And so put them in update sets so that you only have to chew your food once.
CJ: I like that.
Yeah.
You only wanna chew the food once,
Duke: Yeah.
We aren't Aries up in here, man.
You're,
CJ: Oh man, that, that is like a visceral, image in my head right now.
Duke: yeah, and it works.
What time are we at?
CJ: Oh man.
Dude, we've been going for a minute.
think we're probably at at a point where we should stop going for a minute.
Duke: Okay, so we've been on this for 48 minutes.
Hopefully you found something valuable in there.
And again, let's leave us a comment if you want us to do a whole dedicated episode
on specific questions we would ask in various scenarios from interviewing.
excellent devs, architects, implementers of various processes.
but we need your help.
We need your interactions on the posts.
Let us know.
CJ: definitely let us know and, we'll make that happen.
Duke, I got a great idea for this.
I'll tell you after we press end on the recording
still.