If you manage people, at some point, you’re going to deal with titles and job descriptions. Here are my perceptions about the constraints on titles:
Make sure the titles for developers, testers, writers, anyone who performs project construction are parallel. That is, don’t have junior testers unless you also have junior developers.
Make sure the titles are politically correct. People have to be able to work in the organization, and your title scheme has to help people do their jobs. I’m particularly allergic to people who perform management work being called “leads.” Leads are not managers. Managers may lead in the sense of leadership, but if people are supervising other people’s work, they’re managers. Make them managers.
I wrote What Does Your Title Say about Your Job? when I was particularly frustrated with testing titles. I had just completed a consulting engagement to unmire a project. The root cause was misalignment between job expectations and job deliverables.When you’re generating titles, first think about each person specifically, instead of your group in toto. You’ll find that people who you thought were working at the same level are not. Now, think about who each person works with, and at what level that person works. Then think about the essential technical and non-technical skills, using the four dimensions of technical skill. In a job description, I then add the non-essential non-technical and technical skills.Perform the job analysis for each person in your group and see where they land. (In my tutorial next week at Star West, I’m testing an assessment tool I’ve used to see if it’s useful for other people too. If it is, I’ll post it here.) Now test where each person lands against your gut. If your gut and your data agree about where you’ve placed people, your job analysis and description are correct. If they disagree, you haven’t complete the job analysis. Go back and figure out what you’re missing.Once the book is published, I’ll ask the publisher if I can post the job analysis template. (Right now, the answer is no, I already asked.)
Here’s a list of the top ten questions interviewers ask. (How do they know??) I really like the way these questions are framed in behavior-description style.I have a nit to pick with question 2: What did you like best and least about your previous job? I don’t think that’s a question about administrative and management skills — unless a manager answers the question that way. It is a technique to discover what the person thinks they enjoy (and possibly excels at) in their previous job.One interviewer asked me that question once, and what I wanted to say was I liked the work best and my manager the least. I knew that wasn’t a good answer, so I said that I really enjoyed the work and distracted the interviewer with several stories of the work. Luckily, the interviewer wasn’t too savvy, so he never asked me what I liked the least :-)This is a great question to practice those stories.Interviewers, make sure you listen to what’s not said in answer to this question. Candidates, think about the pieces of your job and your interactions with others. Then decide how you want to answer this question.
At the last Software Management conference, one senior manager said that he always did a “dirt-bag” phone screen. He asked his administrative assistant to call the candidate with a bunch of reasonable questions and make sure the candidate treated her nicely. She asked questions such as basic skill questions, when the candidate was available for an interview, things she could evaluate. He figured that since the employees all had to work with his admin, he wasn’t going to hire anyone who treated the admin like dirt.
In my experience, the higher up the management chain you travel, the less you can act like someone who doesn’t care about the way other people experience them. Not if you want to actually accomplish anything in your job. Having a non-peer perform an initial phone screen can be helpful, if you want to ensure a collegial atmosphere.
Maybe this will help the execs realize that HR is a crucial function in the organization and that staffing it with benefits people just isn’t enough. Well, maybe not :-).
In my Interview Candidates One-on-One post, Christian explained how he’d done some pair interviewing. The lead interviewer and the safety-net is one technique for pair interviewing. When two people, obviously a lead and a safety-net interview me, I tend to talk just to the lead and not to the other person. I don’t think I’m alone in that, so I prefer a pair interview of more equality (unless this is part of a colleague’s interview training).When I create a pair interview with a colleague, first we define the areas we’re going to cover. We each develop several behavior-description questions for each area. (I frequently do this alone, because I use the pair interviewing as training.) We compare notes and see if we have overlapping questions. If so, we refine the questions (generally together). If we’re going to also perform an audition, we define the audition and try it out on someone other than ourselves. Laurent suggested an audition: Design your own hiring interview. That’s a great management audition, but unless technical people are going to be interviewing for a living, I don’t think it will tell you enough about how a person works.Once we know the questions, we generally interleave our questions. Person 1 asks question 1. Person 2 asks question 2 and we continue alternating. If something arises that piques the non-questioner’s interest, that person can continue on that track.When I pair interview like this, I’ve noticed that we have a deeper conversation and the interview sometimes takes turns we hadn’t anticipated. As long as both people take their time with the questions and allow the candidate time to think, this kind of pair interview technique can work well.If you try it, let me know if you had positive results too.
A colleague described his interviewing setup this way: “We work in a high-pressure environment. So when we interview, we sit 4 or 5 people across the table from the candidate, and throw questions at the candidate. If they can live through the interview, we hire them. The only problem is, we can’t keep people past a couple of years.”Well, that’s one technique to make sure you hire only people who enjoy a fast-paced, no-time-to-think, competitive, antagonistic environment. Unfortunately, the software organizations I know require people who can think and collaborate together, as quickly as possible. My colleague is losing people because their interview technique discriminates against the very people they need.If you want to know if a person can work in a fast-paced environment, ask behavior-description questions about how they’ve worked in the past. If you want to know how the candidate thinks under pressure, develop an audition, or even better, an open audition. If you want to know how a candidate works with other people, ask about their work relationships, pair work, or create an audition to see the candidate at work with people. You’ll hear better answers if you interview one-on-one.If you work in pairs or in small groups, then yes, make the interview situation as close to a typical work situation as possible, using pairs or maybe triads to interview. But if you’re going to use more than one person to interview, extend the interview time for each pair to more than one hour, and make sure the pair discusses in advance how they will proceed in the interview. Which tangents will they take? How will they know? Pair interviewing is difficult, but not impossible.Group interviewing is not the same as pair interviewing. Don’t do it. Especially don’t throw questions at a candidate sitting across the table from a pack of interviewers. You’ll turn off qualified candidates and let the candidates of unknown qualifications through.
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