Interviewing, and Quantity Time

1. Interviewing is hard. You don’t need me to tell you that, but it bears repeating regardless — the stakes are high, and the repercussions from making a bad choice can be enormous. Oh, the negative impact can seem smaller as your team size grows, but that is an illusion — the loss of productivity across the entire team can easily swamp the (illusory) benefits of making a bad choice. (•)
   There are an (higher order of) infinity of articles around how to go about interviewing people, including some seriously weird s**t. I won’t get into any of that here, but will cover some of the main things I look for when interviewing. Mind you, most of these focus — intentionally — on soft skills. In most cases, these tend to be the dominant factor in the success or failure of projects (and this only increases with the number of people on the project)

   

   /via http://explosm.net/comics/2717/

    1. Chemistry (aka: “Values Fit”): One of the most important things in prospects is whether they share your core values. (And yeah, if you don’t know what your core values are, this might be a good time to figure them out!). For example, if you prize humility, then someone who talks about themselves all the time may not be the best choice. OTOH, if you’re looking for smartasses…
2. 2. Originality: How much of what they say is based on their own ideas, versus canned answers from previous experience/companies? Note that the “correct” balance here is based upon what you are looking for . If your problem space is well defined, then you might needs someone with specific topical expertise. OTOH, if you are moving into uncharted territory, you might need creative and original thinkers.
3. 3. Thought Process: How do they actually go about solving problems? Do they even have a process? You’d be surprised — or not — at how often the response is some variation of “I google it”. The key here is to look for anysigns of structured thinking — frankly, that’s a huge enough win, with anything above that being gravy!
4. 4. Questioning Nature: Solving problems requires that one have sufficient information to make a decision, and the way you get that information is by asking questions. This is a bit of a variation of Thought Process above, with the focus here being on the intellectual curiosity of the prospect. What you are trying to do is find out how much, and how often, they question things — the status quo, the way data is gathered, the way decisions are made, the way questions/objections are phrased, everything. Once again, the correct balance here depends on your Values, regardless, it is something that must be in sync.
5. 5. Saying No: It can be very hard to say “No”, especially when you’re new to an organization. Whats more, “No” doesn’t always come out as “No”. The specific incantation can range from “Are you sure?” through “I’m not sure I have the time” to “F**K NO”. It is incumbent upon you to make sure that not only is the prospect able to say “No”, but that you can recognize the language they use to say it.

What pretty much everything in the above list is getting at is — “Is this somebody you can trust?”. Can the people on the team — and the prospect! — reach a place of psychological safety, where they can express themselves, work together, and rely on each other, all without repercussions?

This, really, is the hardest part of hiring, the ability to get to this place of trust. An approach that I have taken is that of Quantity Time, which, as it sounds like, consists of spending as much time as possible with the prospect. Ideally, this is in a more “social” environment than a conference room — go have a looong lunch, spend a sunny afternoon outside a cafe with a cup of coffee, grab a late afternoon drink (••), oh, there are many different ways to spend the time.

The thing is, with Quantity Time, you get to see people as their guard comes down. This can also be a remarkably effective way of weeding people out — if they can’t spend an hour at the restaurant without being rude to the wait-staff, well, what does that tell you?
What you’re trying to do is get to know the real person behind the mask. Putting them in an uncomfortable/threatening place, in a situation where they already have barriers up, well, it’s not really going to help, is it? Towards that, pay attention to cultural differences, personal space, and so forth — I find that being in an open-space with people around helps tremendously.

To do this well, you should pull together a list of questions/topics beforehand, open-ended questions designed to guide the conversation (and a conversation this needs to be, not a sequence of Q&A monologues!) and help elucidate the prospect’s Values, Thought Processes, Originality and so forth.
For example, a simple “What kind of instrumentation were you using on your last project?” could lead to a discussion about their choices, and issues that were uncovered based on these. This could tie into a conversation about how that feature (bug?) ended up in the system in the first place, the (in?)ability to speak up, lessons learned, etc. In short, a question about instrumentation ends up being a discussion about personal values 

Having each interviewer go through this can be time consuming, but the results can be very worth it!

(•) I’m not getting into the “Mercenary” approach to hiring — that’s an entirely different situation…

(••) Just the one drink, mind you. Alcohol clobbers judgement, and that’s not good for anybody in an interview!