I recently spoke with a hiring manager who was unhappy about a candidate’s references, “All the references are for jobs 10 years ago. And he’s had 4 jobs in the last 5 years. Why aren’t there references from those jobs?”If you’re a hiring manager, you’ll notice many candidates were either unemployed or had multiple jobs in the last 5 years. As they’ve moved around, their managers and peers have moved around too. It’s entirely possible that people are no longer in the field or that your candidate can’t find new references anymore.If you’re faced with references that can’t provide useful information about a candidate because their experience with the candidate is not recent, consider these options:
Ask for more recent references. The candidate may not have remember to send you the most recent references. Or your job may be similar to something the candidate did a while ago and thought you’d prefer these references.
Ask the candidate to perform an audition if you haven’t already.
Ask the candidate why he or she has no recent references. The answer may surprise you. I’ve heard “I’ve been working at a (particular) retail store. Since that job is nothing like this one, I didn’t think you’d want a reference from there.” I’ve also heard “I have no respect for these people and I thought you wouldn’t either. Why would I ask an ex-manager for a reference when he was stupid?”
Normally, when a candidate tells me a previous manager was stupid, red flags go up. I asked this candidate why he thought the manager was stupid. His answer, “He ignored what people wanted to do and assigned us to work we didn’t have expertise to perform. He thought nothing of assigning us to 6 projects at a time and then berating us in public for not finishing the work. …” This manager was, at the least, misguided. I can see why the candidate didn’t want him for a reference. Throw in a couple of years of looking for work along with some temporary work, and you can see why candidates might not have recent references.Before you give up on this candidate, decide if it’s worth your time to hire the candidate on probation, or as a temp-to-perm employee. Experienced technical people can provide your organization a maturity and perseverance some of the less seasoned people may not have. Take the old references as part of the picture of the candidate. Assess the total risk to hiring the candidate. Don’t just flip off candidates because they have old references.Candidates, if you have old references, find newer ones. Nip this objection in the bud.
A reader asked about interviewing interviewers: “it might be interesting if the person being interviewed were allowed to ask some technical questions of the interviewer.” Yes, you can absolutely ask question of your interviewers. And the best question might not be the stump-the-interviewer questions (in the same way that the stump-the-candidate questions aren’t the best for candidates). Here’s how I go about thinking about the questions I want to ask my interviewers.Think about your job now. What do you love, what do you want to do differently in another job? Those are both ripe areas for determining the questions. Say you’re working with a group of very sharp people and you want to make sure you continue to do so. You could ask “Are the technical staff smart here?” but that wouldn’t provide a good answer (it’s a closed question). Instead, ask something like, “How do people make technical decisions? How do people review each other’s work? How do people solve technical problems?” All of these are open-ended questions that beg the interviewer to explain with examples (behavior-description questions).I find that more often I’m looking for cultural fit rather than technical fit, but if technical fit is your concern, think about the last three challenges you encountered in your work. Ask three technical interviewers about their last challenge and how they solved it. “Now that I’ve told you about my challenge, I’m curious about the kinds of things you’ve encountered here. Can you take 5 minutes and tell me about your last challenge and how you solved it?”I don’t recommend the stump-the-candidate or stump-the-interviewer questions at all. My rule of thumb: If you can look it up in a book, it’s a bad interview question.
If you’re a hiring manager and you haven’t started using a blog to help people find you, consider it. Right now, there are still tons of great technical people looking for jobs, but it’s hard to find just the right candidates. And, I’ve been reading articles in the popular press that say we’ll have a shortage of technical people as soon as 2006. (No, I can’t remember where I read it, and I’m not sure I believe it. If I find the article, I’ll post a link to it.)Take a look at Blogs: A New Frontier in Online Recruiting by Susan Ladika. Ladika mentions my colleagues at Bostonworks.com, and a quotation from yours truly.
I exchanged email with a graduate student recently, who’s just starting to think about what she wants to do when she graduates. Since she’s about a year away from graduation, this is a great time to start thinking. She originally thought she might want to work with teams who maintain software systems. I commented that I didn’t think new development was all that different from maintenance for software. We briefly discussed different kinds of work, and she’s off thinking about the job she wants to create for herself.The same titles mean different things in different companies. If you want to be senior principal widget-builder, that’s great — but what does that really mean? Could that be the same thing as a consulting widget-builder? Could it be a widget-builder master (as opposed to apprentice)? Could it be a staff widget-builder? You can’t know what a title means until you learn the roles and responsibilities behind the title. So whatever you do, don’t let titles limit your possibilities when you look for jobs.
I’ve also been writing intermittently on the Job and HR blogs. I don’t cross-reference the blog postings here, so look for different posts there. I haven’t been writing a lot in those blogs due to my work schedule, but that seems to be working out.