Finding a great candidate
Your future employee is out there looking. Here’s how to find them and make sure they’re just what you are looking for.
— Andrea
Congratulations and you’d better buckle your seatbelt! If you have a position to fill or a team to build, you are doing the scariest and most important part of being a manager. It’s all about finding good people. From the job announcement to comparing resumes to the interviews, how can you make sure you’ve got a candidate that has the right qualifications, will gel with your team, and will be happy at your company?
Hiring really does feel like finding a needle in a haystack.
The Job Announcement
It starts with putting together a really good job announcement. There are a few different scenarios where a manager has an opportunity to hire. You may be:
Filling a role someone has left
Opening a new position
Creating an entire team
Knowing the role you’re trying to fill and what you need on the team is important. If you’ve recently had someone leave and are hiring upon their departure, perhaps you want to find someone to strictly fill their shoes. In that case, you can polish up an old job description and you’re off to the races. If you have a brand new opening (or a few), you may need to be more creative. Ask yourself what abilities your current team is light on. What would your dream candidate look like? What skills do you want on your new team? What is your budget? Perhaps you know you need a top-notch Java developer, but you could really use some database knowledge on the team. This could be an excellent secondary skill to look for on resumes or a tie-breaker if you like more than one good candidate after the interviews.
A good job description should give a sense of the company and atmosphere you work in with a short intro. Your candidates want to be excited about coming to work at your company. I myself appreciate when the requirements for the job are listed in a way where I can visualize the day-to-day. People want to see themselves doing the job and find it appealing as a good match for their skills.
“5+ years of experience in back end application development of data driven applications (Java)” is fine, but your req would be better if you also tell your candidate you expect them to “Write efficient, maintainable Java code based on technical guidelines, design documents and industry best practices to product requirements/acceptance criteria and be able to troubleshoot code in the Java methods and APIs”.
REsumes are piling up. Especially in this age of acronym soup, how do you distinguish technical aptitude?
Resume Reviewing
The job posting has been out for awhile on LinkedIn, your local recruiting sites, and you’ve sent it around your networking group. You may have a recruiter at your company doing the legwork and the pre-screenings. Resumes are piling up. How do you wade through them to distinguish great candidates from the rest? Especially in this age of Acronym Soup on technical CVs, being able to determine the skill level of your potential hires is harder than ever.
Here are a few things I like to look for:
What kind of businesses have they worked at in the past? If you are a fast-paced start-up and they’ve worked for large corporations or the government, the pace of work may not be a good fit.
Do they have a history of jumping around? This may not be a red flag for you, but to many this is an indicator of a restless employee or someone trying to climb the salary ladder quickly. At the very least, you’ll want to ask about this if this candidate gets an interview.
Do they have the experience level you are looking for? Check yourself here — do you really require 5+ years or are you just looking for a great developer? Perhaps a recent graduate who did an impressive internship is actually a great fit for your role. Someone who has recently been in school is usually very open to learning about your company and can bring with them fresh insights and modern practices. Also, don’t limit your potential candidate pool by requiring a degree. There are a ton of talented self-taught people out there, and arguably, these folks could be way better employees because they had to work hard for what they know.
Do they have the skills you’re looking for? In tech, nothing is more annoying than the acronym soup! Try to look past the lists of abbreviations of what they claim to know. If they describe the kind of projects they have worked on and it’s related, you may have a good candidate.
Planning the Interview Panel(s)
Every company handles their interviewing process differently. However your company does it, the goal is the same: you need to determine if the person you are talking to is the right fit for your company and your team. Once you hire them, they could be on your payroll for a long, long time, so it is important to get it right!
Lean on your peers and coworkers to help on your interview panels. Everyone brings with them a different point of view and will have a different working relationship with this employee, so use that to your advantage. Gather a diverse cross-section of management and this role’s peers to be on interview panels. My current preference is a series of three 30-45 minute panels with 2-3 people each talking to your candidate. I know some companies plan more meetings. Some companies have one big panel in a longer meeting.
The Interview
You don’t have a lot of time to figure out if this interviewee is your ideal candidate. When I am interviewing a candidate, here’s my Top 5:
Can they explain their projects, progress, and problems to me in a way I can understand?
Do they have the technical aptitude to fill the role?
What will they do if they get ‘stuck’?
Are they a good fit for the team?
Would I want to work with this person?
Can your candidate explain their projects, progress, and problems?
As the manager, this is my number one must-have in an interview candidate. Our entire relationship is going to depend on the success of this type of communication. If this employee has an issue and needs my help, I better be able to understand the problem. In the interview, I get the candidate talking about a recent project they’ve worked on. I ask them to tell me what the project was, why it was interesting/important/exciting and their part in it. If I can’t get a good grasp of what they were trying to communicate, good luck to us having good manager/employee communication. Tip for interviewees: Amazon preaches about the STAR method of answering questions and they are not wrong in how good this method is for conveying information.
Does your candidate have the technical aptitude to fill the role?
If you are a software development manager, you may not be the best person to determine this very important qualification. I am not embarrassed to admit I’ve been in management for long enough that my software development skills are surpassed by my talented employees. I humbly rely on the technical expertise of this role’s peers for technical positions. I trust they’ll tell me who they’d want to work with and if they’re up to snuff.
Some companies have a take-home test that candidates must complete in their own time before they even get an interview. If your company doesn’t follow this practice, come up with some questions that can be answered in real-time that will make sure your candidate has the chops they claim to have.
What will the candidate do if they get ‘stuck’?
While third on my list, I can’t over emphasize how important it is to get a sense of this during your interview process. The ability to troubleshoot, ask questions, and work past a problem is paramount to success for a software developer and many other jobs. Just as you don’t want your software engineers spinning out on a tough bug, you also don’t want your graphic designer spending two weeks going in the wrong direction with their design task.
There are teachable skills and there are non-teachable skills. If your candidate can show that they are willing to ask questions and learn, the sky's the limit for where they can go in many positions.
Is this candidate a good fit for your team?
Let me be clear. When I say ‘good fit for the team’, I do not mean you should hire the candidate that’s a young men who is into rugby because you have a position on a team full of young men who are into rugby. I’ve heard ‘good fit’ be an excuse for why some companies are a diversity/inclusion nightmare, and I think this is baloney.
A ‘good fit’, in my experience, is often creating the perfect combination of working style, capabilities, personality, and attitude on your team. Hire not for the culture you have right now but the culture you want to create. A team full of people who stress out does not need another high strung person. It could mean bringing in someone who is a quiet leader to a boisterous, inexperienced team. Or hiring a fun personality for a team that could use perking up.
Do you want to work with this person?
Number five on my list, this is really what the interview process boils down to for me. Will I want to work with this person for what could be years? How does everyone else on your interview panel feel? Compare notes. They may have noticed something you missed or have a different perspective on something the candidate did or talked about. Have each interviewer give a thumbs up or down. If someone you selected for your panel says they would not want to work with a candidate or think they are not the right person for the job, listen!
Hiring is one of the most daunting and important parts of being a manager. There are plenty of good candidates out there. Attracting them with a well-written job description and knowing what you want as you are doing your screening will lead to the right person for your open position. Let us know if you have any questions about how to hire the best candidates.