Building strong teams and hiring the right people is one of the most important tasks of a manager. The biggest questions are how do you identify the right candidates and what should you look out for?
What I learned over time is that technical skills are by far NOT the most important factor. Yes, expertise is important, but if the mindset, attitude, and cultural fit are not a given the best expert can be more of a detractor than a good addition to the team.
I bet everyone who either inherited a team or had to fill positions in the past experienced challenges with experts that are technically strong but cause more issues than benefits.
To avoid such hires we will look into the questions:
- What to look out for in candidates aside from the technical profiles?
- How to structure your interview process for the best results?
- How to find the right candidates?
What to look out for in candidates aside from the technical profiles?
Before you post any position you should be very clear on what you expect from a future candidate.
Ask yourself questions like:
- What role should the candidate perform in the team?
- Do you need someone that can also handle politics between teams?
- Will the tasks be very clear cut or do you need someone that sees what needs to be done beyond their scope?
- What team culture do you want to have?
- How does the candidate need to communicate to fit the team?
- Is it important that the team member is very proactive and social (meaning approaches others without being asked to)?
It is very important that you have a clear picture of the candidate in mind including the soft skills or mindset that is required to be successful.
In general, what I learned is that the mindset and cultural fit of a candidate is at least as important if not more than the technical profile. In today’s complex world it is very unlikely that you will find someone that comes in and knows all the details already. At least in IT, you will have company-specific systems and deployments and it will take time to get the full knowledge despite good technical skills (we calculate with 6-12 months onboarding time internally).
A candidate that is eager to learn communicates well, asks questions, and is pro-active will be able to build up the expertise way faster than a very strong technical expert that is not bothering to ask anyone or stepping over his/her shadow. Additionally, such open-minded individuals typically create a good team climate. They can of course also be on the quieter side and don’t have to be extroverts, it is more about their ability to collaborate and approach others.
For all hires, I look at below 5 core tenants that are non-negotiable for me. Maybe a candidate is weaker in one or two, that might be still ok as long as you can coach them, but in general, I do not compromise on those core tenants:
- Mindset: How is the candidate perceiving work, his/her role, and the way he/she interacts with team members, up or down the chain of command? How are problems handled? How does the candidate deal with conflicts or problems?
- Cultural fit: How does the candidate communicate? How are questions asked and answers given? Is the candidate open-minded or heavily opinionated? Does the candidate show red flags that indicate an ego-driven individual?
- Good to work with / Approachable: How does the person react when approached by others? How does the candidate react when the topic is slightly outside his responsibility or the ownership is unclear? Are topics brushed off? Is the candidate trying to be helpful?
- Willingness to learn and get into it: In today’s environment there is so much complexity and you need to always keep an open mind. Even after 16 years in the same field, I learn something new every day. Candidates need to be willing to learn new things and keep an open mind. If someone thinks they know everything you should sort them out immediately.
- Discipline & work ethic: In a job and in life there are always tasks we do not like to do. It is important that the new employees have proper discipline and work ethic and do not shirk away from the menial things of a job.
For positions with high responsibility or lead roles, it might be required to look out for additional characteristics. Again think hard about what you want a candidate to do and how you want them to act and interact in your environment. Below you find a list of characteristics that I pick and choose depending on the role and will watch out for during the interview cycle.
- Efficiency: Produce significant output with minimal wasted effort
- Honesty/Integrity: Earns trust and maintains confidence. Speaks plainly and truthfully
- Organization and planning: Focuses on key priorities and is able to plan and organize
- Aggressiveness: Moves quickly and takes a stand without being abrasive
- Follow-through: Lives up to verbal and written agreements
- Intelligence & Analytical skill: Takes up new information fast and understands them. Is able to derive the right conclusions from data.
- Attention to detail
- Persistence: Willingness to go the distance to get something done
- Proactivity: act without being told what to do. Brings in new ideas.
- Flexibility/adaptability: Adjusts quickly to changing priorities and conditions. Copes well with complexity and change.
- Calm under pressure: Stable performance under stress.
- Enthusiasm: Passion and excitement over work. Can do attitude.
- Communications: Speaks and writes clearly. Not too much and not too little.
- Teamwork: Reaches out to peers and cooperates well with team members on all levels.
- Persuasion: Ability to convince others to support an idea.
Now validating if a candidate has the required soft skills or this kind of non-tangible characteristics is difficult. There is no 100% foolproof way, however, I found the below process and interview structure working quite well for me and I hope it will be useful for you too.
How to structure your interview process for the best results?
First of all, create a good and clear job description where you outline what you are looking for.
It should consist of:
- Description of the team and company (add cultural values if you can)
- Description of the job, expected tasks and behavior
- List of pre-requisites and skills that are expected
- Optional: If you do not have a recruiter, add a line with a small test like: If you read this send us your application with the Job Title and the addition COOL1234 in the subject line. This will help to weed out candidates that just blindly apply as you can discard any application that does not contain your test in the message.
Let’s now discuss how to structure the interview rounds so that identify the best person for the job.
What worked pretty well for me is the following flow (I will go into the details below the overview):
Preparation:
- Include team members
- Discuss the job description and criteria that you will use to select candidates with the experts supporting the hiring process
- Create scorecards and compare notes afterwards
Interview process:
- Screen applications and discard those with CVs that do not fit
- Short initial fit round – max 30 minutes – phone call (by hiring manager or delegate)
- Expert interview – done by one or two high performing technical experts
- Cross team, opposite sex or second team member interview
- HR / Manager interview
- Compare notes invite for follow up if tie or hire identified candidate
Now let’s dig into the details on how and why to do it.
Preparation phase:
What worked exceptionally well is to include my existing team members in the interview process, especially the high-performing ones and the team members showing the desired values.
This has two important effects:
- Acceptance of the new person is immediately good as the team members are part of the decision process
- Good performers usually want to work with experts and people on a similar level and will identify the strongest technical candidates as well as identifying often potential red flags on the cultural side in the first interview rounds
Before the interviews are conducted I will sit down with the supporting cast and discuss the job profile, tasks and expectations of the role. Then we discuss how to best measure this. Depending on the role we then either create a scorecard that we later compare or everyone sends out minutes after the interviews they conducted for later comparison.
In some cases, in the past, we also defined a standardized set of questions for the technical interview so that the same skills are checked.
Interview phase:
In general, I would always recommend conducting more than one interview to gain enough exposure to the candidate and see how she/he behaves on different days and in different situations.
My recommended structure is to go for 3-4 interviews with different focus areas:
- Short initial fit round – max 30 minutes – phone call (by hiring manager) – In case pre-screening through recruiting
- Expert interview – done by one or two high performing technical experts
- Cross team, opposite sex or second team member interview
- HR / Manager interview
The first call/meeting can be optional if you have a recruiting department that already pre-selects candidates according to your criteria. Is this not the case I would recommend conducting this pre-screening round yourself by short initial calls with the potential candidates. Since you might get many, keep it short and crisp. Here you just try to get a feeling if the candidate has any potential at all or if you can remove them from the pile.
The expert interview will be conducted by your chosen team members. This meeting typically takes an hour or longer where the experts are vetting the technical capabilities of the applicant.
Once the expert round has been passed successfully I try to validate if the candidate communicates & behaves well with diverse characters (female/male, different ethnicity, etc.). In case I have no one in my team that fits I will ask one of my peers to support here. The main purpose of this call is to see if the person interacts properly with different colleagues. Depending on where you hire this can be more critical than in other countries. However, I always recommend this step.
Lastly, I will conduct the HR / Manager interview by myself where I will give an overview about the team, re-iterate expected tasks and vet the cultural fit & soft skills. This is quite challenging but over time I identified a couple of red flags that I look out for such as:
- Does not mention past failures
- Exaggerates his or her answers
- Takes credit for the work of others
- Speaks poorly of past bosses
- Cannot explain job moves
- Seems more interested in compensation and benefits than in the job itself
- Tries too hard to look like an expert
- Is self-absorbed
Now that all interviews are conducted, I will sit down with the team members and discuss the candidates. The best-fitting candidate will receive an offer and in some cases a follow-up call in case of questions from their or my end.
Where to find the right candidates?
Now that you know who you want and how to identify them let’s talk about where to find the candidates.
Depending on the company brand, size, budget, and localization you have different options. Here are some examples:
- Network & referrals (most effective if you have a good network of performers)
- Hiring agencies
- Job Postings in online portals
- Presenting and introducing your company at universities or business schools(especially around half a year before end of terms)
- Job fares
- Online posting on your company page (the better known your brand the more inbound leads you will receive)
The one option that I would like to highlight as the most efficient and reliable one to build strong talent is through your network or referrals! A referral is someone that gets recommended to you by someone that you have in your team or other parts of your network. However, you should not blindly hire any referred candidate. Things you still need to consider are fit for the position, who referred it (I only consider recommendations from colleagues and employees that I consider strong/top performers).
The other options I am not going to dive into as I believe they are self-explanatory. If you want to get tips around those let me know in the comments.
There are a few things I would like to emphasize:
- Your main priority has to be to find the best talent for your team. You alone will not save the world, with weak performers nothing will move. Make it your priority! I once heard a saying which I really like: After 2 years every leader has the team she/he deserves… It is all on you!
- Build a continuous pipeline. Think about how you want to evolve the team and also about potential replacements (maybe someone leaves or get’s sick). If you have conversations, get to know people, or receive referrals build your own database of potential candidates. I do this continuously and can fill roughly 50-70 % of my positions really fast with strong performers as I constantly keep an eye on it.
- Help your peers and overall company to build great team. Someone applies that is really strong or you know a great candidate that does not fit to your position but would be a great addition to the company or another unit? Then recommend the person or establish the contact. This has two effects: You strengthen your relationship with your peers. Your peers are also likely to refer candidates to you!
Those are the things that I do to find good talent and fill positions. Do you have good tips, interesting ideas, or great ways to find the right talent? Let me know about it!