A reader emailed me and asked, “how do I interview a manager who will be my superior?”The short answer is the same way you interview peers. However, your feelings about your position or your potential boss’ position (or even someone “higher” than one level above you) will certainly influence how you feel and how you interview.First, recognize that an interview is not about power. It’s about starting the introduction process between you and a candidate. Let’s say that you’re a developer and you’re interviewing a project manager. What kinds of questions might you want to ask that project manager? Here are some questions that don’t arise from power, but do arise from the getting-to-know you position:
“How did you start your last project?” if you want to know how much planning/organizing this PM did before starting.
“In your most recent project, have you had trouble with people asking for more features in the same amount of time?” (If the PM hasn’t had this experience and you have this all the time, that’s a huge red flag.) “How did you deal with it?” That answer should be a great jumping off point to more conversation.
“Have you finished a project recently? What did you do to finish it?” I like to hear about release criteria, retrospectives, a celebration, but maybe your PM has other ideas. Again, this is a jumping off point for more conversation.
The key with interviewing managers is to work on making the conversation collegial, and even in terms of power. If the candidate tries to pull rank, you can be pretty sure the candidate will do that at work, not just in the interview.Candidates are people, even if they are manager candidates.
I don’t normally market a job or “sell” a candidate during an interview. I have found that by asking great interview questions, and having everyone on the interviewing team ask great interview questions, I don’t need to sell. One of my clients is convinced that they need to sell during the interview.If you too, think you need to sell the candidate on the job or the company, first you have to know what’s attractive to the candidate. That means you need to know more about why the candidate is leaving/considering leaving his current job.I sometimes start with a question like this, “Why are you leaving your current job?” You might hear a good answer, but more likely not. Too often, people are reluctant to say they want more responsibility or more money or a different product. More often, I’ll start with a question about previous job changes, “Tell me why you went to the company you’re working at now. What attracted you to that position?” Now I have some information about why the candidate went there. Now, I might be able to ask the why are you leaving question, but I’m more likely to ask about previous moves.Once I know what’s attracted a candidate before, I can say something about that in this interview–if it’s true. (Never lie or even just stretch the truth in an interview.)When I changed jobs back when I was working inside organizations, I changed jobs when I was no longer having fun learning new things, or if the company was about to go under. So, what attracted me was the ability to learn new things, and know my paycheck was relatively safe. As an interviewer, I can use that knowledge and talk about learning new things and the financial outlook for the organization.So the way to market the job during the interview is to learn about the candidate–especially why that candidate is looking for a new job. Do that with behavior-description questions and maybe an audition, and now you’ll have enough ammunition to sell the job in the interview. If you need to.
So you’ve got a job description that offers an opportunity, not a job. You’ve come to terms with how you see the value of the job. Now it’s time to start looking for people–candidates–to help fill that job.One way to make a job highly attractive is if you, the hiring manager, actively participates in the recruiting. There are several ways you can actively participate:
Write the ad for the job so it sounds like you.
Spruce up the ad on your company’s web site so it sounds attractive.
Make sure you’ve let everyone in your group know you’re looking. Your employee referral system might be your best ally here.
Attend professional group meetings where your candidates are likely to be.
Perform phone screens for every resume you think is a “yes” or even a “maybe” if you’re having trouble finding candidates.
Attend job fairs.
The more active you are in the recruiting, the more likely you are to find someone quickly who will find the job attractive–because you’re involved.
Part of making a job attractive is to market it well. But you can’t market it if you don’t respect it. So the first part in marketing is to come to terms with how you feel about the job.Are you hiring someone to do something you consider “grunt” work? That’s a hard job to respect. And, it tends to lead people to sheepwalking. If you’re hiring someone to do grunt work, why? Sure, it’s work that needs to be done, but if you think about it as grunt work, that’s going to come across to your candidates.Instead of considering the work “grunt” work, reconsider if you even need a person to do this work. Or, think of how you can explain how the work enhances the work of others in the organization. Here’s an example of how two companies dealt with this with an HR administrator job. Company1 decided to buy one of those large systems that allow their employees to administer all their work. They hired someone who could teach the system, deal with the vendor and the IT staff. Of course, that person ended up having to help people enter their information, but that’s a different problem :-(. Company2 hired an administrator, to free up the people who were supposed to do other work. This administrator could have felt like a servant, but they hired a delightful woman who took pride in saving the technical staff from the “chaff of their jobs–they got to work on the wheat.” Company2’s administrator dealt with the vendor, and made them make her job easier, so she could keep doing “chaff.”Two different approaches to the same job. Each approach allowed the administrator autonomy and a way to look at the strategic parts of the job. Not bad for an administrative position, right?Once you configure the position so you can respect, it’s a lot easier to market it. Sourcing (what recruiters do) is a form of marketing. There are a ton of marketing techniques, and I’ll address that in the next post.
The first step in making a job attractive is to create a job that’s an opportunity for someone, not just a job (Adler). An opportunity allows people to grow in some dimension, not just do the same-old, same-old. That means you need to develop a hiring strategy, and do a job analysis so you can see what problems you need solved and the kind of person who can help solve them.Let me make that a bit more concrete. Say you’re hiring a Tier 3 support person. A Tier 3 support person is a developer who likes developing small things with close-to-immediate gratification. The great Tier 3 people don’t think that they do maintenance; they think they do small development.If you call a Tier 3 support job “support” or “maintenance” you are offering a job. If you call it something like “small, short development projects to existing products” you are offering an opportunity–especially if you structure the job so this person works with the other developers, not just with support.I’m assuming you’re not just writing a job description like this, but that you will structure the job like this. (Never lie in a job description.) When you structure the role so that the person bridges the gap between hardcore development and hardcore support, you have a great opportunity that will attract exactly the people you want.
According to my colleagues inside organizations, we are officially in a buyerseller’s market for technical jobs. They are reporting it’s difficult to find people, and they want to know how to make the jobs attractive.I don’t claim to know a lot about sales (just enough to keep myself in business!), but here’s the one thing I do know: you can’t sell something you don’t believe in. That means that the job you’re looking to fill has to “offer an opportunity” (that’s an Adler quote) to someone; that you respect the job to market it well, and that you respect your organization enough to market the organization (you, your team, and your organization) well.When I’m done with the series, I’ll post the links here.
Jason Yip’s Hire squirrels instead of turkeys has a link to a discussion of Harvard’s hiring of Faust as the new president. Looks like Harvard got smart and thought about cultural fit, and those critical influencing and negotiation skills. (See my other post A Perfect Example of Insufficient Cultural Fit.)On the other hand, read Seth Godin’s Sheepwalking, where he describes people putting in time at their jobs, instead of being creative and solving problems.The first part of a smart hiring decision is to know what non-technical qualities, preferences, and skills you need. That’s why you need to think about the deliverables and activities the employee will perform on the job. (That’s why I put so much emphasis on the job analysis.) Technical skills are easy to train. Finding people who can solve problems and do the hard work you need them to do–that’s hard. And that’s what’s necessary for a smart hiring decision.
Interviews and how they are set up reflect on the hiring manager and the organization’s culture. If you want to read about some particularly bad interviews, take a look at Jerry Weinberg’s most recent article on the AYE site, Getting Some Good Out Of Bad Interviewing. It’s hard to believe, but every situation in this article is real.