41. Peer Preview

The organization involves peers of the candidate in the hiring process.

In most organizations today, the ultimate decision to offer a candidate a technical position lies clearly with management. Managers hire, and managers fire; no doubt about it. But in some organizations, the decision of whether to offer positions to technical people rests—in part—with those who will be their colleagues. This peer preview has only one outcome: When managers let the technical staff have a say, everyone—candidate, staff, and manager—comes out ahead.

The early stages of the hiring process are pretty much unchanged: There is an initial screening of the candidate’s credentials, most often by the front-line manager. The manager may ask a senior technical staff member to review the résumés and divide them into Next-Step and No-Thanks piles. The manager may have preliminary telephone conversations with the candidates who look best on paper, to determine which of them to invite for an in-person interview. The invited candidates are told to expect to spend anywhere from three to six hours meeting the team. When colleagues participate in the hiring process, the interview day is typically a long one.

After an invited candidate arrives and is greeted by the manager, the candidate begins the first in a series of interviews with individual team members, with meetings lasting from thirty to ninety minutes.

Although peer-preview interviewers seek the same kind of information about the candidate, each goes about the quest in a different way. Obviously, everyone wants to assess the candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. And so, depending on the type of position to be filled, the group as a whole may ask the candidate to write some code or to build a test set. But each interviewer will also assess the candidate as a person, asking himself: “Can I work with this person?” “Will he fit into our team?” “Will he make our team stronger or weaker?”

In addition, individual interviewers evaluate the candidate based on their own role on the team. If, for example, the candidate is a developer, an interviewer who is a tester will ask different questions, and look for different traits, than will a fellow developer.

Each interviewer also assesses the candidate based on his own past experiences, asking himself questions like these: “Does this person exhibit the skills and problem-solving styles that I have come to value most?” “To what extent does this person remind me of past teammates with whom I have worked well, or with whom I have not been able to succeed?” “Is this person as good as he seems or is he a fake?” The diversity of backgrounds among interviewers enables the team to screen prospective members from a variety of perspectives and values.

After an interviewer hands the candidate off to a peer, he confers with the manager—in person, by e-mail, by telephone—about his impressions and opinions of the candidate. Each staffer gets to cast an if-it-were-only-up-to-me-would-I-hire-this-person vote.

If all has gone well in the interviews, the candidate is brought back to the manager, who by now has been briefed by the interviewers. The manager is now in position to conduct his own interview and then to inform the candidate if an offer will be forthcoming. The manager might find cause not to make an offer to a candidate whom the other interviewers found acceptable, but it makes no sense to hire a candidate if a significant portion of the team has given thumbs down.

When the team has a real say in the hiring process, everyone wins:

• The existing team members win because the day the new hire walks through the door, many of them have already met him, and in effect, have endorsed him; those that the staff could not accept never cross the threshold.

• The candidate wins because he is in a better position to decide whether he wants to join this team. He gets to meet his prospective peers, not just the boss. He can ask about real life on the job. He can smell the corporate culture.

• The manager wins because he can rely on his team for a technical evaluation of the candidate rather than surmise it on his own. He also knows that the team has to some extent already accepted the new guy and has a stake in his success.

• Finally, the team as a whole wins because team members learn from each other as they go through the peer-preview process. When reading others’ evaluations of the candidate, team members discover questions and criteria that they can apply to future candidates. And the manager learns more about how his own team members think.

Speaking of managers, peer previews are equally useful for hiring team leaders. Why not ask some members of the team to interview those who might become their boss?

Whether the candidate is a developer, a tester, or a manager, finding a really good person is never easy, but always important. It’s a team project.

“Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else hits.”

—Casey Stengel