How An IT Manager Should Prepare To Conduct An Interview

You should always keep your clothes on when conducting a job interview
You should always keep your clothes on when conducting a job interview

Image Credit

Those pesky job interviews – management always seems to put them on your to-do list just when you have a million other things to do. Yes, they are important, I mean after all who you hire will shape your IT team for years to come. However, when you are pressed for time, what’s the best way for an IT manager to go about preparing for one of these things?

What’s The Job All About?

If you think about it, you really can’t hope to conduct a successful job interview if you don’t have a good understanding of just exactly what tasks the company is looking to have performed. That means that you’ve got some homework to do.

The first thing that you’re going to want to do is to review the job profile. The result of your doing this should be that you are able to create a list of the key responsibilities and tasks that the person who is filling the role will have to perform.

As we all know, being a member of an IT dream team requires a number of different skill sets. This means that you need to come up with a list of any training that would be required in order to perform this job. Additionally you are going to want to understand if there are any experiences or personal attributes that would allow the person who is applying for the job be more successful.

How To Explore What The Candidate Has To Offer

Every interview consists of you asking the candidate a series of questions. It’s going to be how they answer these questions and what they say that will lead you to making a decision about your willingness to allow them to join your IT team. This means that you’re going to need to come up with a way to record not only the questions that you’ve asked them, but also their answers.

The first step is for you to take the time before the interview and identify each of the areas that you are going to want to explore with them. These areas should be related to what the candidate will be expected to do for the company.

You are going to want to create several questions that you’ll ask the candidate about each of these areas. Make sure that you take the time during the interview to record their response to each question. You’d be amazed at how little you’ll be able to remember once the interview is done.

Finally, once the interview is over and the candidate has left, you need to rank them. It’s best to do this as close to the actual interview time as possible so that your memory is freshest. Rank each candidate according to how they did in each of key areas. You’ll use these rankings to compare candidates when all of the interviews have been concluded.

What All Of This Means For You

As the global economy starts to improve, companies are once again starting to interview candidates to join their IT teams. You’ll probably be called on to conduct some of these interviews and that means that you are going to have to show some leadership and prepare to do it.

When you are preparing to conduct the interview, you’re going to have to make sure that you have a full understanding of just what the job requires. Once you know this, you’ll need to create specific questions in order to explore what the candidate has to offer.

Selecting the right candidate to join your IT team is perhaps the most important part of being an IT manager. The person that you select may be a part of your team for many years. Take the time to do it correctly, and you’ll have an IT team that you can be proud of.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think a good job interview should last?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

This hiring of new members for your IT team can be very difficult to do at times even though it is one of the critical IT manager skills. The problem comes up when you’ve interviewed a group of qualified candidates. Now comes the hard part: how do you choose the right one for your team?