I don’t normally think much about how teams recruit pro athletes. But this quote from John Powers’ article “Mistake-Free Football” from the Boston Globe 1/27/04 says volumes:
If the Patriots have relatively few disciplinary cases, it may be that they’re screened out before draft day. [...]“Three things we look for in the people we hire for all of our businesses. Character and integrity, work ethic, and brains. You can buy the third, but not the first two.” (The quote is from Bob Kraft in Powers’ article.)
I suspect the scouts eliminate the people without the requisite functional skills, because they watch players perform at regular games (no additional auditions needed!). But notice the emphasis on character and integrity and work ethic. Those personal qualities and preferences make the difference between team members who coast along and team members who bring a passion to their work.Warren Buffett said something similar (from Thoughts of Chairman Buffett), “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”Is there any position in your organization in which integrity or character is not crucial?
Candidates: before you send another resume or cover letter, read Joel Spolsky’s Getting Your Resume Read. Hiring managers, note that Joel uses the same three-pile sorting that I suggest in Tips for Reviewing Resumes. I like the pair review that Joel performs with another manager — if both reviewers add the resume to the “yes” pile, that candidate really is worth the time for a phone screen.If you’re a candidate, ask several people to review your resume. Use a spell- and grammar-checker. Your resume and cover letter could be the most important document of your career.
At last week’s Boston SPIN meeting (the hiring roundtable), a candidate said that he had trouble remembering which resume he’d sent to which company. The good news is that he’s customizing his cover letters and resumes. The bad news is he sounds disorganized when a hiring manager or (internal) recruiter calls for a phone screen.I was going to suggest to candidates that they keep a spreadsheet and copies of their cover letters and resumes. (Hey, it’s just paper. You can recycle it later.) I was going to suggest a file folder for each company, organized by company name. But, I think there’s an even better way.Take a look at JobFiler and see if an online organization is an even better idea for you.I briefly looked at the candidate part. I haven’t looked at the employer part. Roberta Dulay started the site as a way to manage her own job search. It looks quite useful.Whether you use JobFiler or your own system, use something. It’s ok to say to a hiring manager, “Hang on just a sec while I get your folder, so I can refresh my memory about the job you advertised.” It’s not ok for a hiring manager to hear, “Um, who did you say you were again? Did I send you a resume?”You organize your work. Looking for a job is work too. Organize that work in a way that makes sense to you — but organize it.
John Kador, who’s written a number of books about interviewing and a new one coming out, has an article about brainteaser and riddle interviews on Darwin. Kador gives pointers on how to answer the questions, and if you’re a candidate, you should read his suggestions. They will help you in the interview.I have a problem with the belief that these questions are useful for determining anything useful about a candidate. Brainteasers discriminate for people who like word problems. Do your technical staff need to be excellent at word problems? Since there’s a lot more to work than word problems, my answer is no.What your candidates need is the ability detect problems and access to enough techniques to solve them. When inexperienced interviewers (or inexperienced managers) use brainteasers, they expect one right answer (even when there is no right answer). Well, guess what. In almost every organization I’ve worked, we never had one right answer. We had choices to make about possible right answers, and the best people were those who managed the ambiguities of work while continuing to work towards a right answer. Even though many brainteaser questions purport to be listening for thought processes (the way interviewers listen to hypothetical question answers), my experience is that too many interviewers think the questions deserve one and only answer. What a bogus way to discriminate against candidates.If you really want to know about a candidate’s thought and problem-solving processes, ask the candidate to perform an audition. Take your product, explain a bit about a part of it, and ask a developer to design an add-on. Let the developer work for a while, and then come back and have the developer explain what he or she was thinking. What made the developer choose that design? What could go wrong with the design? If you already thought of this and rejected it, explain that to the developer. Does the developer have other options up his or her sleeve?When you ask a candidate to audition like this, you’re asking the candidate to perform work in a close-to-real work context. An audition helps you understand how the candidate approaches solving problems.Here are some possible audition-kinds of questions, in addition to the design question above:Context: Workflow application. Explain the application to your candidate. Your manager says speed up the application. What do you do? Interviewers: listen for some of these techniques: elicit requirements (the whys around speeding up and how things need to work), interim deliverables, selling speed/changes to customers, and specific design issues the candidate has seen before.Context: Transaction processing with web front end. Explain application to the candidate. How would you test this? Interviewers: listen for evaluation of risk, how to tear apart the problem, combinatorial testing to deal with proliferation of browsers.Context: Real-time embedded control system. Explain application to the candidate. You have a problem with intermittent crashes. How do you find the problem and fix it? Interviewers, listen for: gathering all data that already exists, reading the code, inspecting the code, partitioning the code with output to gather data.Since these are your applications, you’ll know more about what to listen for. These are real applications and real problems. Suitable candidates can answer these questions. Unsuitable candidates can’t.If you’re a hiring manager or part of an interview team to hire candidates, think about the, qualities, preferences, and skills you require in a candidate. Then create an audition, test it on yourselves to verify it’s a good audition, and then use it as part of the way you evaluate candidates.Forget the brainteasers. They only make the interviewer and the company look stupid.
I was a reference for a senior manager yesterday. At first, the reference started to ask me, “What do you think are so-and-so’s weaknesses?” I hate that question, because it all depends on the context. And I’m smart enough to turn that question around so a weakness doesn’t sound like a weakness. Grr. But then, the reference asked me, “What do you think it will take for so-and-so to succeed here?”Ah, asking about what it would take to succeed is a great question. (If you’re a candidate, ask yourself: What would it take for me to succeed at a company?) Now I have a question I can answer, and we can discuss the issues. I could say, “So-and-so needs an organization that hasn’t already made up its mind about everything. They don’t need to be totally flexible, but they need to know that there are multiple ways to make the projects happen.” That’s not a weakness; it’s a statement of how much adaptability the organization needs, and how little so-and-so needs to make the projects successful.So, when you check references, make sure you ask the question, “What would it take for this candidate to be successful here?” You’ll hear much more valuable information than asking about weaknesses.
David, a reader, recently asked for tips about reviewing resumes. Here they are:
Read the resume from the top to the bottom. Don’t start somewhere else. Candidates try to grab you with the cover letter or resume. Let them.
If there’s an objective, read it. But don’t believe it. Seriously, how many objectives say, “challenging position in (your functional or project area).” If the objective doesn’t match your job, such as a candidate looking for a management position instead of your individual contributor position, take note. Read on for the experience, so you can see if you and the candidate are in synch about how you would characterize the position. If there isn’t an objective, continue.
Start with the most recent experience first. (If you’re a candidate, please ditch the functional experience resume. You can have a cover sheet with functional experience, but that’s not a resume. Hiring managers want to see experience in reverse chronological order. Give them what they want.)
Look for similarities in product type, corporate culture, and how much the person has learned/stretched in their jobs. If you’re doing embedded work, and the candidate has only had experience in transaction processing, you’re right to wonder if they could learn about your product type. If you work in a small company and the candidate has had 20 years of experience in a large company, note that for your phone screen (assuming you want to call based on the experience.) Whatever you do, don’t get hung up on:
Duration of experience at any one job. Everyone’s job-hopped the last few years. Don’t hold it against the candidate.
Experience that’s not precisely what you do. Someone who’s worked with comparable products or in comparable industries may have a lot to offer — possibly more than someone from your competitor
Hobbies or other personal information. This stuff isn’t relevant to the job and should not be part of how you select candidates.
Education. A degree does not mean someone learned what they need to be successful in your open position. A degree means someone had the perseverance and the money to stick through 4 years of college. That’s all. It doesn’t mean they learned anything they can use on your job. Don’t be wowed by the schools someone has listed on their resume. Some of the big names use graduate students to teach many undergraduate courses. If a degree means something to you (because your clients want to know about degrees), well, ok. But for most hiring managers, degrees are not a useful differentiator when reviewing resumes.
I sometimes look at tools experience, mostly to see how varied the person’s background is. Someone who’s learned an object-oriented language and a procedural language, and two different-vendor operating systems, and has used them all effectively has the skills to learn whatever language and OS I’m hiring for. If you should have hired two months ago and have no money for training, then you may decide to pass on these people, but you’re probably making a big mistake. In every position where I’ve hired, I had more trouble finding the people who would fit into the organization, not people who couldn’t learn the technology.
As you read, focus on the candidate’s experience, not tools or skills they claim to have (certifications, education, courses, etc.) Lou Adler said this very well in “Hire With Your Head,” but I can’t find the precise quote right now. My take on this is to look at the Four Dimensions of Technical Skills and determine what’s most important to you. It’s probably not tools/technology.As you read, sort the resumes into three piles: Yes, Maybe, No. The Yes people you’ll phone screen tonight or tomorrow. The No resumes you return to HR or have someone else acknowledge and let them know you’re not interested. Acknowledge the Maybes and let them know you might phone screen them.If you’ve analyzed the job and developed a job description, you’ll probably be able to spend no more than a minute or two on each resume. If you’re a fast reader, even less.
I read somewhere in the past week that candidates should be willing to work for a couple of weeks or up to a month as a contractor to show potential employers how great they are. (I thought this was in the Boston Globe, but I can no longer find the article, nor the pointer to the article.) Extended auditions are useful and you need to manage them carefully.If you do hire someone as a contractor, or if you work for an organization who starts all employees on probation (and really means it), then be prepared to assign work, monitor status weekly, and provide feedback immediately if something’s not going well. Sounds like a lot of work — just like a regular employee.When you bring someone on as contract-to-permanent, you are hiring an employee, you’re just framing the offer in a way that makes it easy to fire that person. That means you want to negotiate a fair offer. You want to offer the person work that the person would perform as an employee (so you can see how well the person works with the rest of your team and how well they work). You need to check status regularly and provide at least weekly feedback — just as you would do with a new employee.So some of you are saying, “But JR, you believe that managers should spend the most time with their best people.” Yes, I do. And when you hire someone new and you think that person will be with you for a long time, you choose to coach that new person into success in your organization.Extended auditions, such as contract-to-permanent positions, are auditions for the candidate and for you as a hiring manager. If you take advantage of the contractor, or if you don’t provide feedback, or if you don’t monitor the work status, you are failing your audition as a manager. If you offer contract work, plan how you will manage the work. And plan how you will manage the feedback to the contractor, feedback from your interview team, and making the final offer to the candidate, once they “pass” the extended audition.
I didn’t see NBC’s show “The Apprentice,” but I did hear about it on the news this morning. (Live through a few weeks of “work” with Donald Trump and then he’ll hire you for a job.) Seems as if the first hurdle the contestants had to overcome was selling lemonade in New York.What a great idea for an audition for people who need to negotiate and sell in the eventual job. Selling lemonade (or some other inexpensive commodity) in the middle of huge city during the fall should be a slam-dunk for people who want to sell and are good at selling. This would be a bad audition for technical people — until they reach a management level where they do need to sell others in the organization on their ideas.When you’re thinking about auditions, what’s the simplest thing you can think of, that lets people show you what they can accomplish? That’s a great audition. Like selling lemonade if you want to be a real estate mogul.
I normally recommend against Panel Interviews for most technical positions. However, I’ve recently worked with a group whose panel interviews were quite successful. The positions were for a senior technical leader and a manager, so the candidates needed to be able to present and discuss issues to several people at once as part of their positions.Before the panel interview, the hiring manager performed an extensive phone screen. Once the candidate was invited in, the hiring manager worked with the interview team. The interview team organized into three groups of three people for each panel. Each group had three areas to ask about in one-hour long interviews. The hiring manager was first, the three panels were next. One of the panels had responsibility for lunch, so they added another half-hour to the interview. The HR rep was last to interview the candidate.Each panel defined their questions and practiced their questions. They decided who would take the lead and who would follow up with other questions. Each panel estimated they spent about an hour in preparation before any interviews. In addition, they each of them spent about 10-15 minutes reviewing resumes from candidates before the interview and chatting about who would ask what in each specific interview.The candidates recently started, so I don’t know yet about how well each person is working out. But the organization seems happy with their success with panel interviews.Here’s what made these panel interview successful:
The positions are senior positions, where people are comfortable being in a position of speaking/presenting to multiple people. These are not junior positions or inexperienced candidates.
The phone screen was necessary to make sure the in-person interview didn’t waste the interviewers’ time.
The panel teams prepared their questions and practiced their questions and interviewing style.
The panel interviews were longer than the individual interviews.
So, I’m ready to revise my stand on panel interviews. I still don’t think they’re appropriate for every position, but if the position is senior, and if the interview team prepares and practices, they can be a useful tool in your interview toolbox.
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