The Core Interview Team

There are two key groups that need to be paraded by your candidate, and the first one should be obvious, but it’s often screwed up. Everyone on the team needs to interview every candidate. I’m going to repeat myself since Dave the Curmudgeon Engineer keeps telling you that he’s not interested in interviewing, but he’s got to be on the list. Every time.

Interviewing is a team sport and failing to get everyone’s perspective regarding a candidate is not only a lost opportunity in terms of gathering some random piece of perspective, but it also sends an implied message to the team when Dave gets excused. The message is, “Dave’s opinion doesn’t matter.” Now combine that message with the question you should be asking yourself, “Why doesn’t Dave care about the people he might be working with?” and you’ve got more than enough reason to insist that everyone on the team interviews candidates.

The other key interview group is trickier. This is your go-to set of interviewers that you trust. They are your bellwethers, and when they give a candidate a thumbs down, it’s over.

Your bellwether team is where you gather the most perspective. The coworker interviews are going to find some informational gems, and their opinions will greatly affect your decision to hire, but bellwethers are your constant. When they tell you, “This guy is going to change the face of your team,” you believe them because they are rarely wrong.

There are three key bellwethers I have for each interview.

Technical

In software development, this is the most obvious skill that needs to be assessed, but it’s also the one that is done the worst. Engineers are great at being technical, but they aren’t great at being social. This means that there’s a good chance the best engineer on the team might be the worst technical interviewer because he’s uncomfortable dealing with human beings. This means that when you send him in to figure out whether your candidate knows anything about database normalization, he’s going to be more nervous than the candidate about asking a hard technical question.

Find a technical bully.

Yes, there are lots of valuable things to learn about communication style, vision, and personality, but if you’re an engineering manager and you can’t assess technical ability, you’re screwed. You’re going to be hiring smooth-talking QA guys who don’t know how to code. Whoops.

Finding your technical bellwether is easy. Who technically scared the hell out of you when you interviewed? If you’re a manager and didn’t get asked technical questions, go wandering around other engineering groups and find the bully. He’s there. He knows his stuff and has no issue with figuring out whether your candidate does as well.

Cultural

Your second bellwether is cultural . They’ve got two aspects of the candidate that they need to assess. First, cultural fit within the team, and second, cultural fit within the company. This gets into the fuzzy world of understanding personalities and that means it’s going to be easier to find your technical bellwether than your cultural one because technical ability is quantifiable. “Yes, this guy is a C++ god.” The next question is, “OK, so he’s a god; is he going to piss off the rest of the team by being godlike?”

A cultural fit is a team fit. Ideally, your team is a functioning unit right now and your next hire should support that function rather than detract from it.

Your cultural bellwether is the person on the team who is going to tell you, “This guy is going to add, not detract.” Who you’re looking for in your bellwether is the person who best represents the soul of the team. This is the person who can figure out your candidate.

Vision (Strategic or Tactical?)

Your last bellwether vets vision. Their job is to figure out the trajectory of the candidate. Are they up and coming? Do they want to change the world? Have they carved out a safe little corner of technology that is all theirs? I don’t know who you need on your team, but you do, and you need to know whether the person you’re hiring is strategic or tactical.

A strategic hire is someone who is going to push their agenda, their opinion. They are actively engaged in what they are doing, networking with others who do it, and they’ll tell anyone, at length, about how they’re going to do it. Strategic hires are going to piss people off because of the annoying intensity of their agenda.

A tactical hire is a person who is filling a well-defined need. “We need a database guy.” Like strategics, tacticals know their stuff, but that’s all that they know. Also, they’re not that interested in pushing an agenda. They just want to get their work done in relative silence.

I’m making no judgment regarding whether strategic or tactical is a better hire for you because I don’t have a clue who you’re hiring. What’s important is to understand what type of vision you need for your hire, and, more importantly, who the right person is to interview for this ability. My preference is that the manager is the person who is the bellwether for vision because that’s their job for the group. It’s not just that you know what the team needs, it’s that vision defines career path and you need to know, as early as possible, what it’s going to take to keep a future hire engaged. A strategic isn’t going to be with your team long because you simply don’t move fast enough, whereas a tactical is going to be happy as long as you keep the work relevant and constant.

Team Consensus

Once the team and the bellwethers have interviewed your candidate, it’s time to gather everyone together and hear what they think. This is another time when eager managers try to save time by having the interviewers send their feedback via mail or grab an opinion in the hallway.

Wrong. You always have an interview feedback meeting. The ultimate choice to hire is the hiring manager’s, but everyone who takes the time to interview the candidate has a vote, and while they walk out of the interview with an opinion, they haven’t really voted until they’ve heard everyone’s feedback. Watch what happens. Gather everyone together and go around the table. For each person who gives their feedback, take notes and notice, as each person talks, how folks who already talked continue to add more information, and, sometimes, even change their opinion. What you’re seeing happen in this meeting is consensus building. Opinions are being shaped by information, but the group is also coming to a collective decision. This is why every team member needs to be on the interview schedule. While it’s your decision to hire, you’d be a fool not to follow the lead set by the team.

Be a Fool

There are times when you need to be a fool, and this is when the right hire intentionally isn’t a fit for the team. This is another area where your bellwethers may prove more useful than the team’s opinion. At my prior gig, we had a curmudgeon architect who, while talented, was creating an aura of negativity in the group. It was the curmudgeon’s opinion spilling over on the rest of team, and after two years, it needed an adjustment.

Looking for fresh blood and new perspective, I began recruiting from local universities. My cultural bellwether was one of the first engineers I’d hired, but for this position I went to another engineering manager I admired and asked, “Who is the best person to interview for the culture of your team?”

“That’d be Frank.”

Frank became my cultural bellwether because I wanted to change the culture of the team. As we brought college hires through the interview process, the feedback meetings weren’t surprising. “He’s too young! He doesn’t know about this technology! We’ve got too much to do to bring this green person up to speed.” This was the existing engineering team taking its content and cultural cues from the senior curmudgeon, and it wasn’t surprising that Frank’s feedback consistently contradicted the rest of the team. “He’s bright. Good fit for the culture and I want to work with this kid.”

You’re thinking that contradicting the team’s consensus opinion on a hiring decision is a downside to the group feedback meeting. It’s not. While you need to take special care to explain your decision to each person on the team, you can use the team’s consistent negative feedback as part of your reasoning and part of your explanation.

“You remember that feedback? You remember the yelling? Yeah, I’m tired of the yelling, aren’t you?”

Still Delusional

We’re still deluding ourselves. Even with three of the best bellwethers you can find, hiring anyone is a huge risk. The idea that you can successfully profile a candidate in a phone screen and two rounds of interviews is absurd. All you are getting is a taste. I know you asked them, “How do you deal with stressful situations?” but the fact is you won’t actually know who they are until some real stress shows up.

You need to hire. You need to be able to grow your team and that means taking a risk on these people who are a little more than a résumé and some good conversation. While I believe a solid set of bellwether and team interviews is the best means of gathering in-person data about a candidate, don’t stop there. Go read their weblog. Find out if they’ve contributed to open source. Read their posts to mailing lists. In-person interviews are going to give you a glimpse of a person, but anything you can do to complete the picture won’t only give you a better perspective, it will reduce the risk that you’re hiring a stranger.