jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #92 on 17 Sep 2021 and has tags Hiring: Other, Hiring: Interviewing and Evaluating
Why the best way to hire is incredibly boring - Laszlo Bock, humu
Again - management isn’t complicated, it doesn’t require profound insights into the human condition or the right personality type - it consists of nothing more than the discipline of attending to the details.
Bock despairs of the “one weird interview question” genre of articles that promises to give you that profound insight into a candidate without having to do any real work.
But hiring doesn’t work like that. When hiring a human being to do a job for the team and grow the team, you need to find out if they can do the job, and if they’ll grow the team in a way that the team would benefit from. As Bock points out, the way to do that is exactly what you’d expect:
It’s boring, it’s mundane, it’s a lot of work, and there isn’t another good general option.
We recently went through and have nearly completed hiring a technical project manager (I can’t even tell you how excited I am by that prospect), so this is all fresh in my mind. This is our first TPjM hire, so we spent a lot of time putting together interview materials to determine what we needed, what a new team member would need to do to demonstrate success in the role, what the criteria are, and then how to get that “work sample” - in this case, a “project planning meeting” interview. in addition to the behavioural questions interview (where we provided the questions ahead of time, along with the scenario). It was a lot of work, it greatly clarified within the team what we needed, it greatly clarified for the candidate what they were proposing getting into, and it basically sets up the goals for the first six months of the candidate. It improves our, and their, chances of success.
The one place I’d disagree with Bock is about averaging scores. You don’t want to hire someone that, on average, the team wants to work with.
You absolutely have to weigh all the input, and use that to inform your decision. But I’d suggest two things.
First, any well-justified objection to a candidate based on the agreed-upon criteria should be pretty darn close to disqualifying. Second, the “decision” can’t be made by an artificially dispassionate scoring system, as comfortable as that would be. The decision has to ultimately be your responsibility, the hiring manger - for the very simple reason that if it goes horribly wrong and they have to be fired, that responsibility will fall on you and no one else.
