A resume presents a picture of a candidate’s job history, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Candidates present their work in the best possible light, and may mention projects and technologies where they had little involvement. Resumes that aren’t organized chronologically can make it difficult to see the progression of the candidate’s career. Because of these issues, it’s important to ask good questions during an interview to get a deeper understanding of the candidate’s work history. These questions will help:

Walk me through your positions and how your career has developed.

This question gives the candidate a chance to clarify the sequence of their jobs and explain how they’ve developed new skills through each new job.

What accomplishment are you most proud of?

This question lets candidates tell you what they are best at. The technologies they mention are likely to be the ones they’re most skilled at; follow-up questions can help confirm that.

Why is there a gap between jobs?

As long as the answer isn’t that the candidate was in prison, the most important factor is that the candidate seems to have a prepared response. Candidates should expect they’ll be questioned about gaps in their resume, so if they stumble over an answer, it indicates a lack of preparation that might extend to their performance on the job.

The skills and experience a candidate brings to the job are important indicators of how qualified they are to perform the task, and you’ll want to consider them seriously when you make your hiring decisions. You’ll also want to consider factors like the candidate’s personality and their enthusiasm. If two candidates are equally qualified, consider hiring the more enthusiastic candidate. If two candidates are not equally qualified, but the difference in qualifications is slight, you should also consider hiring the more enthusiastic candidate. Here’s why:

• Enthusiastic candidates are more likely to pursue training and improvement. People who are excited about the work they’re doing want to get better at it. These candidates will invest time in training and learning, both on the job and on their own time, letting them develop new skills that bring more value to their work.

• Enthusiastic candidates will do better work. When you don’t like what you’re doing, you don’t put much effort into it; you aim for the minimally acceptable level of quality. Enthusiastic candidates who enjoy what they’re doing take pride in their work and want it to be exceptional, so you can expect they’ll put more effort into it. You can also expect an enthusiastic employee to go above and beyond in other ways, looking for ways to contribute outside the strict boundary of their official role.

There are two approaches you can take to getting the most out of your employees: You can criticize work that needs improvement, or you can praise work that was done well. Actually, managing effectively requires both.

Avoid Unconstructive Criticism

Negative feedback can’t always be avoided, and criticism has value when it’s done constructively. This means placing the criticism in context and making sure an action is being criticized, not the person. Constructive criticism should be specific and related to a particular situation. There should be suggestions on how to improve, but you should collaborate with the employee to come up with a plan.

If done well, constructive criticism will leave an employee feeling like you’ve partnered with them to help them improve, and they’ll see the value of the improvements to the business and to themselves.

The Benefit of Praise

Offering praise makes employees feel good and boosts morale and self-esteem, which in turn boosts motivation and commitment to their work. Public recognition of an employee’s good work makes a clear statement about the employee’s value to the organization.

Coping with holes in your staff is challenging. It’s easy to wish for a new hire who’ll come in, do a good job, and stay there so you never need to fill that role again. But to benefit the company most, you should be looking for employees who’ll stay a while and then make a move—not move on, but move up. That means hiring with growth potential in mind. When seeking employees who’ll excel over time, look for the following characteristics.

Core competency. The candidate has to do a solid job in the position they start out with, no question. Without baseline technical skills, they won’t get the job done. They also won’t earn the respect of their teammates and colleagues in other departments, which is critical for more senior jobs that require more interpersonal and leadership skills.

Interest in the industry. Moving up the ladder often means moving away from a hands-on technical role and gaining more knowledge about the business side of the work. Candidates who express an interest in the business problems being solved as well as the technology used in the solution will be more successful in filling other roles.

Desire to grow. No matter how much potential you see in an employee, it doesn’t matter unless they want grow into new opportunities. Look for candidates who are enthusiastic about the ways the current position will let them learn and grow. Especially look for candidates who are open to growing in new directions—not just learning the latest version of a technology, but learning entirely new subject matter.

Sometime in the future, robots may replace all workers, even IT workers. When that time comes, employee personality won’t matter. If a robot worker doesn’t fit in, you’ll just have them reprogrammed. Until that time comes, though, employees are people, not robots. Personalities can’t simply be reprogrammed, and an employee whose personality doesn’t fit in can have a surprisingly large impact on the rest of the team.

Conflict With Employees and Job Responsibilities

There can be a personality conflict between employees and their bosses, between employees and their co-workers, and even between employees and their customers. All of these conflicts make it difficult to work together to achieve the goal of a project. Conflicts with customers can even result in a company’s losing business.

Even if an employee’s personality doesn’t cause conflict with others in the workplace, it can get in the way of performing the job. For example, a very introverted worker wouldn’t be a suitable fit for a position that requires lots of public interaction, even if they are experts in every technical skill the job needs.

Assess Personality Before Hiring the Candidate

Dallas is ranked number two in the technology job market. Technology employers and job seekers in the Dallas area will find the search for employees and employers in 2016 impacted by national and local trends that are both positive and negative.

Trends Indicate More Competition for Top Employees

One survey placed both Dallas and Plano among the top 25 cities for job seekers, with Plano actually topping the list. While that’s good news for job hunters that means employers may need to work harder to convince candidates to accept their offers. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that hourly wages for computer systems analyst in Dallas-Fort Worth are currently slightly below the United States average for these workers, though surveys by other firms report salaries that are higher than average for the most in-demand technical skills.

A contrary trend is due to Dallas’ dependency on oil and energy firms; the current low prices for oil may reduce job growth in Texas, according to the Dallas Fed. Although the energy slowdown started in 2015, the effects will continue to be felt through 2016 and even into 2017.

IT projects are collaborative efforts. There usually isn’t a solo programmer sitting alone in a room, cranking out code. Even if there is a single programmer, getting an application from concept to deployment requires other people to perform testing, packaging, and support.

When the tech workers are remote from each other or from the product owner defining the project requirements, coordinating and collaborating becomes more challenging and effective management of a team is even more critical. Use these tips to ensure that your remote IT workers are able to succeed despite being separated from the rest of the organization.

1. Make sure local and remote employees communicate about the project. Include the remote team in team meetings through videoconferencing and conference calls. Solicit input from the people on the phone as well as the people in the room. Use other collaboration tools to encourage team members to communicate no matter where they’re located.

2. Make sure remote employees know what their responsibilities are. Because there’s less opportunity to intervene with a remote team, it’s important that they know from the beginning what they’re expected to do and how they’re expected to respond to problems they encounter, particularly if they’re in a different time zone from the rest of the team.

When you review job candidates, their employment history isn’t the only thing you should look at. Their activities outside work give you insight into their interests and motivations. When those outside activities include open source projects, you should view that as a strong positive factor. Here’s why:

• Contributing to an open source project shows a candidate has strong motivation and is self-directed. There’s no requirement for a candidate to work on an open source project, so their participation is entirely voluntary. And once they’ve signed up, their work is entirely self-directed; there’s no specific work assignment and no project manager assigning a deadline.

• Shows a candidate keeps current technically. If they’re working on a widely used open source project, they’re also implementing leading-edge technology. Most open source projects focus on packaging new software techniques to make them easy for wider use.

• Working on open source projects require strong communication skills. Open source projects are highly collaborative; they’re also highly distributed. The workers aren’t in a common location and communicate almost entirely through collaboration tools.

Like it or not, employees have lives outside the office. Eventually, their lives will pull them away from the office—whether to focus on family or because their career ambitions can’t be achieved with their current employer. So every business needs a plan for coping with employee resignations. Some parts of the process are common whatever the employee’s responsibilities, but there are also some steps specific to IT workers.

Finalize the logistics of the employee’s resignation. Agree on the employee’s last day of work. Two weeks is traditional and still standard, but some departing employees may have the flexibility to offer you a longer notice period if their project is at a critical point. Agree on who will announce the departure to the rest of the team; the way the news is shared can impact the morale of the employees who remain.

Plan to transition work. Identify everything the employee is working on. This can include work assigned and tracked in tools like JIRA, but almost every employee has informal responsibilities that aren’t tracked in project management tools. Decide which tasks will be completed before their last day of work and which need to be handed off to other employees. Make sure employees are cross-trained.

For most IT workers, avoiding distractions at work is impossible. It’s inherent in the way the workplace is designed with low-walled cubicles that mean there’s no such thing as a confidential conversation. You probably can’t do much about the office layout, but there are things you can do to reduce these other four common office distractions and help your team stay focused and productive.

Massive Email Blasts

Keeping everyone informed is important, but massive email blasts that cc: everyone on a project are more distracting than useful. Target your emails to only those who need to respond to them. If there’s valuable information you want to make sure doesn’t get lost, use a collaboration tool and either save a document or create a discussion thread that will be archived and searchable for future reference. That way, the knowledge is saved and accessible, but it doesn’t clutter up email inboxes and require everyone to figure out whether they need to respond, decide whether they should save the message, and create a filing system to keep things organized.

Ban Smartphones From Meetings

Keep meetings on track by banning smartphones from the conference room. This lets everyone focus on conducting the business of the meeting, rather than reading unrelated emails or stepping outside to take personal calls. You can minimize the withdrawal symptoms by having a concise agenda to keep the meeting brief. Make sure that having a meeting is the most effective way to achieve your goal. And start meetings on time, even if you’re missing some attendees; otherwise, you’re wasting everyone else’s time.