Ways to the DevOps hiring process optimization through CALMS paradigma? Much of DevOps recruitement happens to follow along the lines of keyword matching, which leads in my opinion to solely technology focus.

Now, DevOps is about so much more than just technology, and DevOps Engineer is not just a better system administrator with some coding skills.

Senior DevOps role/profile means to me also offering seniority in many other foundations and practices beyond infrastructure and software engineering skills like Lean, Measurement and being open and communicative (who asks DevOps hires for their communication skills, honestly?!)

So, can a job ad / interview be more efficient in some way - for example, by applying questioning CALMS categories as well? - Leading to questions like "now, how do you apply lean principles? How were cultural aspects addressed in your recent DevOps projects?" 

Further elaboration:


Culture (e.g. strategies for conflict management and attitude to failures, own and others')
Automation (here you ask about Puppet/Docker etc skills)
Lean (foundations of Lean? Waste types?)
Measurement (ask for tools like JMeter but go also to things like sampling, data modeling..)
Sharing (obviously knowledge management and according tools)


UPDATE - so why wouldn't employers/recruiters structure the interview by CALMS as shown below (additionally, the "automation" section could be formulated along the DevOps toolchain model (document link, readonly)?



Side note - so culture for example is actually not just a soft skill anymore, for DevOps it is one of the core skills - like all the others in this domain.
This is a brilliant idea, also because of Daniel Kahneman who showed that if you split a single score into 5 weighed scores and add numerical criteria and bounds to those, you will significantly reduce bias. You could design not just the resume scoring, but the entire hiring process, with phone screens, onsite interviews, everything in this way. It would significantly reduce the inherent bias of the interviewers. We have actually started to do something similar for all hiring.

Obviously, inside each area, your should add weight to what is important to the company for the position, but you are hiring a well-rounded engineer and you want someone who will propose major changes to how your organization operates, you are not simply hiring someone for specific skills to work in a limited area. Many people simply see this role as a higher paid Release and Build Engineer and if that is the case, that is what you should hire and advertise for.

For a DevOps hire, I would suggest replacing the Lean with Learning. It is originally CAMS and even though some extend it to CALMS to include Lean, that is somewhat restricting as DevOps is based on so much more than just Lean. It is also Deming's ideas about Special and Common Cause Variation and System Thinking, Nash's Equilibrium (if each optimizes for themselves, the result could be suboptimal, compared to when everyone includes the interest of the group), Shewhart's Statistical Process Control, Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, Taleb's Anti-Fragility and so many more. 

This would also allow you to include participation in conferences in Learning and presentations at conferences or meetups as Sharing. In a position where you are not always a part of a team or your company might not be big enough to have your peers as your co-workers, it is even so much more important to establish and maintain out of workplace relationships and learning opportunities. We generally grouped those two under Culture.

I would personally put under Culture the soft skills required to be effective in improving processes at your organization. CMMI, Kanban, Work in Progress limits, Agile practices, etc.

JIRA seems more like Sharing tool and Git is more closely related to Automation.