Interview for Competency and Mindset

I can’t believe you hired that guy, Dick! He can’t do anything, and he doesn’t understand anything.

I was a senior consultant at a boutique consulting company. We had Fortune 100 clients across the US for whom we made bespoke sales force automation and executive information systems. I came into the office after being on-site for a week and was met by the above opening line.

To this day, I swear I never interviewed this candidate. I had zero memory of it then and now. Surely, I would have caught the fact that he was not a good hire.

His resume looked great, but it was all a lie.

He was incompetent at software development. We’d give him a fairly simple task. He’d go into his office, shut the door, and eight hours later, nothing would be coded.

He was incompetent at business life. He was given the task of booking flights and hotels for himself and a colleague to do a site visit. He had kept both airline tickets himself. He then showed up at the airport ten minutes before the doors closed, driving our colleague insane with worry. Then, it turns out he had booked a single room for the two of them to share.

He was incompetent with computers. He broke the cable to an expensive computer monitor because he could not plug it into the computer correctly. This was at a time when the cables were hard-wired to the monitor, so ruining the cable ruined the entire $800 investment.

After we fired him, I vowed this would never happen again. Everyone we hired after that said I was the interviewer who made them sweat. I developed a set of questions on SQL (the standard database query language) that showed me how much you really knew about it. Similarly, I had questions about the programming languages we used.

If I were in a certain mood, I would hand the interviewee a copy of their resume and ask them to cross out what technologies they had not used in more than two years, so I would not waste time drilling them on things they no longer understood.

Before, I had interviewed solely for fit - do I like this person, can I work with them? Now, I was looking for competency - could they actually do what they had claimed they could on the resume?

Later in my career, I was promoted to be a manager of software engineers in a company that was rapidly expanding. Over 18 months, we hired 50+ people and interviewed thrice that many. The first two interviews were each a coding exercise. We were looking for three things - can you code at all, can you code in our paradigm, and - most importantly - how do you think your way thru a problem.

The OOPS

This was when I began to learn about the fatal mistake most interviewers make. It’s understandable, really.

We like to hire ourself. We want to hire someone who looks like us, talks like us, and thinks like us. Unfortunately, that means we hire people with the same blind spots, the same weaknesses, the same inadequacies.

We miss out on hiring the person who might see that bug before it is shipped because we value the familiar over hiring for the ability to think.

We miss out on hiring the person who looks at the problem from the other side. The person with a minority viewpoint who can explain what a set of potential customers might want.

We miss out on terrific new ideas, terrific new viewpoints, terrific new tools.

Just because we want to justify ourselves by cloning ourselves.

The Lesson

It’s safe, it’s comfortable, it’s a team killer - maybe even a company killer. You will stagnate. You’ll miss out. Don’t hire yourself. Hire the weirdo who likes to do it differently. Seek out the person who makes you uncomfortable, who makes you reflect. Hire the person who challenges your mindset. Keep your options open.

And, don’t just read the resume. Figure out - can they think?