Transcript: How to Hire as a Manager by Judy Thai-Kennedy

How to Hire as a Manager – Transcript

by Sophie Odgers

(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

I'd love to empower you to be better leaders and give you some of the knowledge and skills that I've learned about hiring over the years to hopefully help you make the best hires for your teams as well. My hopes for the learning objective today is to really help you understand the steps of the process—especially if you're a new leader—get familiar with the types of interviews and maybe the types of questions and formats that you're going to ask. Ultimately, how do you choose the right person?

What is my Role as a Manager in the Hiring Process?

If you're like most managers, I’ve got the feeling that you're like, help! You want to make the right decision; you want to make it the right hire for your company and for your team. You want to make sure they stay. These are very common feelings that you feel, especially if you don't do hiring as often. The question you're probably asking is, what is my role as a manager in the hiring process? Hopefully you'll have somebody at your company, HR contact or recruiter that kind of helps you with that process. They help drive how to post the position, where to post it, where to get the most selection, how to conduct interviews. They're probably going to talk you through some of those things. A lot of times leaders have questions for me about, how much do I pay for this position or what's the salary range? So that's usually things that your HR team can help you out with, or a recruiter that you're working with.

It's important that you, as a hiring manager, are the subject matter expert. What you should come to the table with is really understanding what it is that you want this person to do. What is it that you have the need for, the technical skills that you need for this role for them to be successful. You know the team very well, you can assess the team fit and also just understand who could be a good culture add as well for your team.

The 7-Part Hiring Process

We're going to go through shortlisting candidates, what does that look like? How do you conduct any interviews? The first part we'll start off with is deciding, what you want and who. If we break it down, what you want, you really want to think about it from the responsibilities. What is it from a day-to-day perspective that you want to outline that this person will be doing? So obviously, it comes with a need. You have to figure out the top 10 bullet points of the things that they're going to be working on, such as key projects –things that they're responsible for on a day-to-day basis. The level of the job is really important too, because you want to understand, if you need someone at the support level? Do they need to be a coordinator or are you looking for someone to manage other people as well?

In that case, what's the title you're looking for the job that will support what they're actually doing? Span of control is also a good thing to think about. What are the decision making abilities of the role? Are you expecting this person to support something versus create it? Or is that something that you are going to do as their leader? Deciphering between what the limits of what you want this role to be accountable for and what they can have control over making decisions on. The next piece of the deciding who you want. And I think sometimes for leaders, this can be very tricky. The great thing is that you'll have support from your HR team or an external recruiter if you're not too sure, you really want to break it down to four components.

#1 Deciding What You Want (&Who!)

The first one is education and training, there’ll be certifications that you might want them to have. The experience is a big piece, where would you have liked them to work before, whether it be in different companies or different roles? If you can get an idea of "It would be great if someone came in with this type of experience that would fit with what we're looking for here." Competencies are more of those technical hard, soft skills, leadership skills—how they deal with the team. Is it around communication—teamwork, those kind of skills? And then the knowledge piece is any regulations that they need to know as part of their role, industry practices or any kind of processes that would be helpful.

Likely, if you haven't done too much hiring, a good tip on how I kind of break these down is I like to look through Google, just to see how people break down what they're looking for. You have this big list of what you want someone to do and you have a list of components that you want this person to have as well, as part of their background. The important thing is that you start looking at the must-haves versus the nice-to-haves.

The must-haves, for example as a lawyer for Cannabis Company –are things that you can't negotiate on. You actually have to have them for the role and you might want to pick three things off the list that you've created. Some of the essentials for this lawyer would be: they obviously have to have passed the bar, so I know that they're a lawyer. I want someone who's been on a corporate council before, so they've been doing this type of work at other companies and because we're also a public company, we need them to have that public industry knowledge. Those were the must-haves with a lawyer, but the nice-to-haves are things that, it'd be great if they had, but aren’t deal breakers.

The "nice-to-haves" are that they've worked in cannabis before, that would be great. A lot of times people say, “They have to have worked within the same industry”, but a lot of industry knowledge can be trained; same thing with cannabis, you can learn as you go. I love dogs personally, so it's definitely nice-to-have if they love dogs as well, because we have dogs in our office. We also use Google Suites at my company, so, nice if they have that experience, if they don't, we can learn it.

#2 Posting The Position

This step is not so much of a manager's role, because likely your HR contact or recruiter will know where to post it, to get the most traction and give you some ideas of where to get the biggest pool of talent to apply. You can help by sharing the posting with your networks, telling your co-workers and other friends and family members about it, just to get some traction on referrals. Referrals are a great way to get more candidates interested and you can always use a #WIMDIask as well to reach out to your networks.

#3 Shortlisting Candidates

To give you an idea of what the role of a recruiter typically is, the objective is to get about 100 resumes that come in and you usually dwindle it down to a shortlist of about 10. These are kind of the ideal, (not always the case), but ideal numbers. Then, you phone screen about 3-5 people and at the end, you'll interview 2-3 and end up with one.

It's important that when you're looking at 100 resumes, that you spend at least 30 seconds to 2 minutes on a resume; a great way is to look for keywords. You have your list of must-haves and your nice-to-haves.

Those are the top things that you're going to look for on their resume, which are going to help you look at what kind of technical skills they have, but you can't assess what kind of personality they have or how they deal with certain situations. It's really just to make sure, "Okay, they have a good level of technical skill and they would be a good fit for the role."

*Caution* watch out for biases. This is when these biases can creep up on you. Perception bias has a tendency to form stereotypes and assumptions based on certain groups. At this point, when you're reviewing resumes, you want to ask yourself – “Do I have certain stereotypes about who usually does these roles or holds these roles?” You want to be aware of your own biases in understanding that before you get into shortlisting the resumes and looking at them more closely. You want to be able to find an objective way to look at your must-haves.

#4 Interviewing Your Shortlisted Candidates

You've shortlisted a couple candidates and now there are several types of interview formats you can move on to. A phone screens is usually a 30-minute conversation between you and the recruiter to get to know you better. Those usually happen at the very beginning, to get a gauge on interest and salary expectations and to make sure that there's alignment before you move on to a full on interview. You'll see technical skills tests sometimes as well. Earlier in my career, when I was in an administrative job, a lot of times you’d see typing tests or computer tests, just to understand people's level of proficiency with computers.

Those are great ways to get to know the person and understand their passions and their background, and experience. Panel interviews are common too. They tend to be more intimidating, because you probably have three or four folks interviewing at the same time, but a great way to get what you need within a short amount of time.

There's also role-playing –sometimes you have to do mock interviews, where you play different roles and see how people react to situations—and then there's presentation style, where you might have to present or you have a portfolio that you have to walk someone through.

When deciding what type of interview format to use, it really depends on the skillsets that you're looking for. It's great to use a combination, but you have to look at what makes sense in order for you to assess how you think this person would be able to show their capabilities.

Once you've figured out the interview format, there are four main types of interview questions that you want to ask in your interview. technical experience, hypothetical situations, behavioural questions, and then interest and motivation.

In terms of technical experience, it is important to ask about so that you understand their level of proficiency with the things that you want to get them to do. For ex. if you're looking for software developers, or someone in a very technical role, you can start asking them—“How would you do this coding or what's been your approach with this kind of process?” What you're listening for is their level of knowledge and how much experience they have with it and then how thorough were they in walking you through that approach or process.

Hypothetical situations are good for asking candidates who might not have experience that you can tell on their resume; You can come up with a scenario and ask them how they would deal with that situation. It might be something that's happening with your company at the moment, and you want to know how they would approach it.

“Walk me through how you would deal with conflict between two co-workers.” You want to give an example of a situation and have them tell you how they're going to work around it. Does it align with your values and the values of the company? Do they understand the risk of the approach? And then ultimately, is there anything that you're hearing that might not sit well with you? I always say that hiring always feels a little scary because you want to hire the right person, but you have to go with your gut feeling. If something feels off to you, you have to question it.

The third type of questions are behavioural. Behavioural questions are really geared towards past performance. People ask these questions because they believe past performance is a good indicator of future performance. You want to draw back into their resume and ask them questions about when they've had an experience with a certain situation. “Tell me about a time you've had a conflict with an another employee. How did you deal with it?” “Tell me about a time were you able to communicate in front of a large team? How did that go? What was the result?” And what you're listening for is this methodology called the STAR approach. It stands for: explain the Situation, tell me about the Task, what was the Action that you took and what was the Result?

You want to ask it in a way that makes the candidates explain it to you, so you get the full picture of what happened in that scenario. It's a good way to probe, because as they explain and get very specific about their situation, you can say, "Hey, did you do this alone? Were you with the team who put this together? Were you successful? Was there something that you learned from the result of it, even if you weren't able to be successful?"

The last set of interview questions are called interest and motivation questions, which sometimes I think hiring leaders forget to ask. They ask a lot of the technical questions and assess that the candidate has everything to be able to do the job, but what you really want to hear is how happy this person would be in this role. By understanding — where do they want to be in the next couple of years? What are they looking for in this role? What made them interested in the company in general? You’ll be able to make sure that as much as is a fit for you, it's a fit for them as well. You're listening for how excited they are and you're listening for what they're looking for. You want to make sure this is something that they're excited about too, because ultimately, somebody who is hungry and eager is the best type of hire that you can make.

Questions Not to Ask

Living in Canada, there are a number of protected classes as part of our human rights law. The purpose of the code is to protect yourself, others, and potential candidates from discrimination and harassment. Sometimes, certain things that leaders ask are not intentional—they don't mean to talk about these things. I've had a lot of managers ask conversationally, "Oh, are you married?" Or "Do you have kids?" because we were talking about the weekend and it ends up being one of those things where it's like, "No, don't answer that.” We don't want to be asking that at this point. You need to be careful of what you ask

#5 Assessing Candidates (with Examples!)

Okay, so you've done your interviews. You probably have a couple of candidates that you interviewed and now you're thinking, "How do I assess these candidates?" The best approach that might be a helpful tool for you, is to come up with a little bit of a rating scheme. Think about your must-have and your nice-to-haves and really consider those three areas that are going to be important for this role.

I like to break it down into hard skills, which are the technical job specific skills, then soft skills, which are those leadership skills, interpersonal skills and then values alignment. How are they aligned to your values and the values of the company? How can they be a culture add?

As an example, we'll start off with a Sales Manager. Breaking that down, the hard skills are some of the B2B sales that we want them to have, like solution selling. We also want them to be able to negotiate as part of their selling. Some of the soft skills that we also think are important, are communication and relationship building. Then, the values alignment aspect revolves around them working alone, but us also wanting them to be a team player.

If we have candidate A and we're going to rate them from 1-5, five being the best, we're going to score them at 4-5 because they do have great B2B sales. But, when we talk about their solution selling, this candidate might have more of a value-based selling, so they might not be aligned with the solution selling just of yet. So, you've rated them a little bit lower. Their negotiation skills are great –they can close the deal and they're very confident. They're able to talk very well and have great communication skills. 3/5 for relationship building. As a team player, maybe you didn't get a chance to assess that too much, but they might be someone who’s stepped on some toes as you’ve gauged from some of the answers they've been giving.

Then, you have candidate B who has very similar B2B sales and their solution selling experience is great, so you've rated them 5/5. However, when you get down to negotiation, they seem a bit soft and they might not be able to close the deal as quick—they might walk away from it versus coming back and coming up with some new options—therefore, you've rated them a little bit lower. You thought their communication skills were great and their relationship building is fantastic, they’re a team player.

Out of candidate A and B, who do you hire? The answer is... It really depends. I say that because it really depends on what you're looking for and the company that you're bringing them into. Obviously, the iffy team player is a little bit of a concern. You want all the people that you hire to be team players. You also want to think about some of the things that you could potentially coach and mentor them on as well. Even though they might not have a skill today, is it something that you're willing to help them get to the next steps with?

Watch Out for Biases

When you are assessing candidates, there are biases that can come up. The first is the affinity bias, which is most known as the “just like me” bias. You might think, "Oh, well, this person would do it this way and that's not how I would do it," but that might not be the right approach, because how you would do it is maybe different than how somebody else would do it. And perhaps they still could do the job, even if they did it a different way. Having similarities with the candidate is great, but you also have to be aware of how that's influencing your decision to choose somebody.

Then there's the halo and horn effect. Did the person come in and make a really great first impression? Maybe they brought you some cookies and from that point on, you've been very excited because you think that they're thoughtful. That’s the halo effect. Was it just one thing that they did that has made a very positive impression? The horn effect is the opposite. Did they do one thing that was very negative? And from there you couldn't shake whether this candidate would be a good fit or not? You have to look at the situation and think about whether you've made any of the assessments based on these biases.

#6 Reference & Background Checks

Once you get down to selecting a couple of candidates and you've made your decision, you get on to reference checks and background checks. Reference checks and background checks are predominantly for validating the decision that you’ve already made; You don't really want to be doing reference checks and background checks for multiple candidates. So, these are the things that you've learned about them—can you call some references to basically understand a little bit more to either confirm that this is what they've done and that there aren't any red flags?

Your HR team or contact usually takes this on, but when you do references it can be great to ask—how do I keep this candidate motivated? What's been your experience with keeping them engaged and what do you think I would need to do to be successful as their leader? It gives you good information about the candidate from someone else's perspective and could perhaps be useful for development purposes as well.

#7 Making the Offer

So, you've done your reference checks, they have a glowing background and you're ready to make an offer. Depending on the company that you work for, either you do it yourself, or you have an HR person that presents the offer. If you do get the opportunity to be able to present the offer, I really like that the leader has a touchpoint to even just say, "Hey, great job on the interview, we really enjoyed meeting you. You are our final candidate and we'd like to make you an offer." That closes the deal in saying, "We chose you and here's why."

If anyone's going to make the offer to a candidate, it's best to have them on a call or somewhere in person where you can have that one-on-one. You probably want to go through the compensation detail at a very high level and then let them sit on it for a couple days, to look it through. You don't have to go through it in detail initially and they don't have to give you an answer right away.

The best part about giving the offer in person is that you can tell by their level of excitement whether they're really excited and they're going to go over it and get back to you, or, sometimes right away, you'll know that they have questions or something’s of concern. A lot of times when I present offers, if I'm hearing something off, I’ll ask, “Is there something that’s not sitting well with you?” And that's a good way to get an understanding from them.

Summary on How to Hire as a Manager

You’ve decided what you want and who; that it's important to think about your must-haves and nice-to-haves as you walk through this; posting the position; shortlisting; you know your interview formats.

You're going to pick through the types of interview questions that have; you're going to come up with three categories on how you're going to assess any of the candidates; you're going to rate the candidates; you're going to pick a top one, get the reference checks and the background checks done and make the offer. And there you go, you'll have a successful acceptance of someone new that's going to be on your team. That's the objective that you get familiar with as you do recruiting.