Hiring is still a very long process

Computer World
Judith Trotsky

Many IT managers nowadays need ask potential hires only two questions:

What do you know?

When can you start?

Still, in spite of record-low unemployment rates and record-high demand for IT personnel, that quickie conversation isn't in effect everywhere. At some corporations, hiring is still a complex and extensive process using a variety of techniques to select individuals who will be as right for the culture of the company as for the job itself.

At Capital One Financial Corp., for example, a candidate's development potential is as important as his ability to fill the current position. With an IT staff that has grown from 400 to 2,000 in four years, "we often look not only at what the person can do now, but what [he] can do in the next job," says IT recruiting director Jim Kutz, himself a hands-on IT manager just a few months ago.

Among the complex and interlocking methods used by the Falls Church, Va.-based credit card company are a series of behavioral interviews. These are a key part of the process, Kutz says.

What Is a Behavioral Interview?

John Madigan, IT human resources vice president at The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. in Hartford, Conn., explains that a behavioral job interview is designed to reveal a pattern of behavior.

"We actually ask what you did in specific situations," Madigan says. "Concrete examples will demonstrate a person's preferred way of dealing with those situations and give you a better idea of that person and how they're likely to act on the job."

Madigan offers several examples of behavioral interview questions that might be asked of IT professionals with different levels of experience. For a lower-level employee, he might probe for competency and for teamwork skills: "Tell me about the last time you were asked to help out on a project that you weren't directly assigned to." As follow-up questions, he suggests, "What was the project and what was your workload at the time? What did you do? How successful was your assistance, what impact did it have? Did you seek feedback on your assistance, and if so, what was it?"

For interviewers who are trying to assess a higher-level IT professional's ability to lead a team, he suggests questions along these lines:

"Tell me about a time when you were most successful in leading a group or team toward accomplishing an important goal." Then as follow-up questions, "What was the goal and who defined it? When did this happen? How were the steps leading to the goal defined? What was your role in implementing the process? How close did you come to meeting the goal?"

How Do You Do It?

Behavioral interviews should be a key part of every employer's hiring process, says Norman L. Scott, a senior vice president at Denver Associates Inc., a recruiting firm in New York. "What a person knows technically is secondary to who they are . . . and how they conduct themselves," says Scott. "Genius isn't all that counts. If the candidate is temperamental, can't listen and doesn't elicit the kind of behavior that makes people comfortable enough to work with him every day, he shouldn't be hired."

Defining your company and what the job requires are the first two steps, according to Jill Ellingson, assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University in Columbus. She says questions that IT job interrviewers should ask themselves include:

"Is our culture disciplinarian? Is it autocratic? Autonomous?" And "Does our management team think employees should be an integral part of the decision-making process, or do we think employees should be at arm's length?"

Behavioral interview questions are good for all types of IT positions since they ask the candidate to describe his accomplishments and the work he has actually done. Of course, if the candidate describes ways he has used particular technical skills, it's difficult to ascertain his level of proficiency without further behavioral probing. Though not impossible, it's harder to get that type of information than it is to use behavioral interview techniques to assess "softer" skills like communication, negotiation and consulting abilities.

Once the company culture is defined, the next step is to identify the characteristics and competencies required. And then, explains Madigan, you'd want to ask behavioral-oriented questions that address those competencies.

For example, a candidate for a job in research-and-development management might be asked how he handled an unstructured project where there were no clear guidelines. The answer he gives would reveal his ability to deal with the ambiguity such a supervisory position often involves.

At The Hartford, the human resources department has compiled questions designed to elicit specific types of information and has posted those questions online internally. Managers can print out the questions for each competency they need. There are also specific online interview guides for positions that regularly need to be filled.

Capital One's Kutz describes his behavioral interviews as a series of who, what, when, where and how questions, such as: "Describe a project where you had to collaborate with others. How do you work in developing people? What steps would you take in trying to solve a problem like this?"

"Behavioral interview questions are very open-ended and deal a lot with, How did you do that? What exactly did you do? Why did you do it that way?" says Kutz. "We're really looking at how they think."

To be complete and accurate, behavioral interviews should be combined with other techniques. At Capital One, the daylong selection process follows two telephone preinterviews that probe behavior and technical knowledge. Survivors of this initial cut are invited in for a series of one-on-one meetings as well as personality, technical and business-problem tests.

"We really want to hire the best people," says Kutz. "By the time the process is over, the candidate will have conversations with five to seven people involved in the hiring decision. . . . We've got a lot of different views. It results in our hiring a better candidate."

Testing the Candidate

The profile for IT personnel is very much like the profile for marathon runners, says Douglas N. Jackson, president of Sigma Assessment Systems Inc., a personality test publisher in Port Huron, Mich. Above all else, IT work requires endurance, especially in the programming field.

Technology jobs also require logical, sequential thinking. However, too much of a good thing also can be true, asserts test creator Kathy Kolbe, CEO of Kolbe Corp. in Phoenix. The key to success for an IT team is to have a mix of people with the right instincts for the jobs they have and the right balance in terms of their approaches to problem solving.

While the criteria are complicated, Kolbe says she finds that people's instinctive approaches fall within the following general "action modes":

Fact Finding: precise, data-driven individuals who are able to see patterns and organize systems.

Quick Starting: people who have the ability to deal with the unknown and innovate.

Following Through: employees who excel at planning, designing and programming.

Implementing: individuals who are skilled in the use of tools and in hands-on, 3-D problem solving.

Kolbe says Quick Start behavior is a way of dealing with change. Interestingly, she notes that this is the instinctive style of most CIOs in this country. They're leading-edge and visionary, and their sense of time is the future.

That may be terrific, but - as in other personnel areas -- a team with too many people with similar personalities could produce conflict -- or equally destructive inertia. For example, if a group of programmers all want to hold off putting a system into effect until it's perfect, the project would never get done.