Image Credit: James 2
There are a lot of parts of being a manager that are tough. One of the most challenging is when it comes time for us to hire someone to join our team. The world is filled with a lot of people and there will probably be many who want to get a job at your company working on your team. As a manager, it’s going to be your job to use your manager skills to sort through all of the candidates in order to find the best match. This is not an easy thing to do. However, there are three key secrets that you need to keep in mind when you are looking for that next new hire.
Have The Candidate Talk With Their Boss
The last thing that a manager wants to do is to hire somebody who ends up not working out. The reasons that someone may end up not liking their new job can be many, but what you’d like to be able to do is to uncover any issues during the interview process. If you can accomplish this, then either you can decide to not hire them or they can decide that this is not the job for them. Either way you both win.
What you are going to want to do as a manager is to use your manager training to provide the person that you are interviewing an opportunity to meet with the person that they will be working most closely with. The goal here is to discover if there is going to be a cultural fit. As a manager you can accomplish two things by doing this. The first is that you give the candidate a chance to meet the person that they will be spending the most time with. At the same time you give the member of your team who will be working with the new person a chance to meet them. In the end, you need both parties to be accepting of each other if this is going to work out.
A Cultural Fit Is More Important Than A Resume
When we are trying to determine if somebody is going to be a good fit for our team, it can be very difficult to determine this before we meet them. A resume can only provide you with so much information about the person. This is why taking the time to have a phone interview with everyone who has applied for the job no matter what their resume looks like is a good idea. What you want to do is to discover who the person behind the resume is.
Ultimately you are looking for somebody who is going to be a good fit for your team. What this means is that they are going to have to be able to work within your culture. Just hiring somebody because of what is on their resume is a mistake – they may end up being a bad fit. If the person does not match with your core values, it is going to turn out badly for everyone. Hiring someone involves training and onboarding both of which can cost a great deal of money. The last thing that you want to do is to make a poor decision in who you hire. Make sure that they are a good match before you extend an offer.
Doubt Means No
After you have taken the time to meet with the candidate and you have had the members of your team meet with them, now the real work begins. You have to bring everyone who has a stake in this hire together to have a discussion — almost like a team building exercise. With a little luck you will have had them write down notes during their discussion with the candidate so that they can remember what their impressions were. Even better is if you have provided everyone with a standard set of questions before they interviewed the candidate so that everyone has answers to the same set of questions.
When you are talking about the person who has applied for the job with your team, what you are going to want to be looking for are any push backs that you can find. What you’d like to discover is that everyone is excited about having this person join the team. If instead you discover that one or more members of your team has some reservations, then you are going to have to not select this person. If you can get a full buy-in from your team, then there is much less of a chance that you are going to have to end up replacing this person later on. You need to learn to trust the judgement of your team.
What All Of This Means For You
Any manager knows that their success is based on what their team can accomplish. What this means for them is that they want to have the best team possible so that they can do more, do it quicker, and do it better. That’s why when it comes time to hire a new member of their team this needs to be recognized as being a critical manager task. In order to do this correctly, a manager needs to know the three secrets to making a good hiring decision.
Communication is the key to any successful hire. During the hiring process a manager should make sure that the candidate has a chance to talk with the person that they will be working the most closely with. At the same time, the member of your team that will be working with the new person should talk with them during the interview process. Your goal is to find out what each of them think about the other. When we are trying to determine if we should hire someone, we need to be careful to not make our decision based on their resume. Instead, we need to take the time to determine if they would be a good cultural fit with our team. Finally, when you bring your team together to talk about the candidate that they met with, understand that if anyone has any reservations then your answer has to be no. You need 100% buy-in before you extend an offer.
Hiring new people is something that can shape the way that your team operates for years to come. As a manager you need to make sure that you take the time to perform this important task correctly. You are going to have to evaluate all of the candidates and make sure that they would be a good fit for your team. Involve your team in this process so that they can take some ownership of the final results. If you can accomplish all of this, then you’ll be able to make good hiring decisions and your team will be able to make you look good.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™
Question For You: How many rounds of interviews do you think that it takes to really know someone?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Anyone who follows basketball knows who Michael Jordon was. He was one of the truly great players. Season after season he lead his team to success. It turns out that one of the reasons that his team was so successful was not just because of Michael’s incredible basketball talent, but also because of his leadership style. Is there something that managers can learn from Michael’s manager skills?