Nothing can screw up a team faster than hiring a bad employee. The focus is often on certifications, degrees, and experience (CDEs). Softer traits like honesty and adaptation are often ignored. For the most part, it is easier to look at hard stats than to measure these soft qualities.
Below are five specific traits you should look for along with the steps you can take to gauge these attributes. Focusing on these and the CDEs will help you hire the perfect IT employee.
Honesty
Of the five traits, honesty is the most important. Why? Well, an honest admin is willing to admit a mistake and learn from it. They have no problem not knowing something and can admit that. A dishonest admin will pass blame or cover up mistakes.
Separating these two in an interview involves a bit of game theory. I prefer choosing from one of these two methods.
Method 1: Stump the Chump
This isn’t the most accurate of titles as you don’t actually want to make the applicant look bad. In a nutshell, start with a somewhat basic question for a specific subject that the interviewee should know. Keep moving the difficulty of the question up until you exhaust their level of knowledge. Repeat the process with another subject related to the job. You will pretty quickly see if the person will try to BS or if they are fine admitting something they don’t know. As a side benefit, you can accurately gauge their technical qualifications as well.
Method 2: Worst Mistake
In IT, we have this huge fear when talking about a mess up that we’ve caused. Hearing someone talk about a big technical mistake they’ve made and what they’ve learned provides a lot of insight into their character. Ask about past mistakes and any lessons learned from the mistake.
Preventive
If you are a regular reader, I would bet that you are a huge believer in the magician style of work. If you want to move away from firefighting (or keep those fires from even starting), hiring other magicians is a sure way to do so. Look for examples of a preventive nature in their resume. Ask questions about big projects. You can often see trends of preventive and reactive natures this way.
Ask questions about past problems at work and solutions that they have come up with. See if this mindset exists outside of IT. Preventiveness tends to run with the person as a whole. One favorite questions is actually three parts.
- Would you describe yourself as primarily reactive or proactive? (note – everyone says proactive)
- Can you give an example of a problem you proactively fixed? (most can).
- Can you give an example of a problem you have reactively fixed?
It is this last one that is so difficult to answer. Though not always true, a proactive person stays bothered by a reactive solution.
People oriented
Not to argue too much with Al Capone but you actually can get really far with just a kind word. An IT professional who is people oriented understands who they are serving (ex: the students and teachers in a school). People Oriented IT professionals don’t belittle end users for not knowing something. They go out of their way to improve the technical experience and to integrate IT into the organization as a whole.
It is often quicker to find signs that the applicant is not people oriented.
- Do they complain often?
- Are they a the glass is half empty person?
- Do they put down on who they support (or their past employers/coworkers)?
- How do they treat others around them when coming in for an interview?
I should note that an applicant who is people oriented does not have to be a bubbly extroverted person. Introverts have their own set of strengths as well. In both cases, it is important for technology to ultimately help the organization and users.
Excited about Change
Someone who is excited about change is someone who is always ready to learn. Few fields change as rapidly as IT. The very tools you use now may not have existed a few years ago.
Embracing change doesn’t mean buying every new gadget and upgrade though. Instead, an employee who embraces change evaluates new tools effectively because they are willing to try something new. Their skills remain current because technology is still fun for them. Their solutions are innovative because they learn more than is required to keep their job.
Find out how applicants feel about the change in technology as a whole and in the field they are in. What new things are they learning? How do they keep up with change? What trends are they passionate about? These questions will also highlight their ability to adapt to your IT environment.
Doesn’t Need You
This is probably the most controversial attribute in this whole article. It is arguably the most important. It might sound unconventional but an employee that doesn’t need you can make for the best type of employee. These employees might live below their means, have highly valuable skills, or some other important attribute. Either way, they are choosing to work with you.
Think about the worst employee you’ve dealt with. They were likely 100% reliant on staying employed. They might be unwilling to tell you an idea is bad because they are afraid of losing their job. Their technical skills might be so outdated that they couldn’t find employment elsewhere. They might be completely dependent on that high paycheck and are afraid to take a risk or try something new.
You can’t really come out and ask the employee how much they need to work for you. This makes teasing this out hard. These candidates tend to be passionate about the field they are in. They usually have a fairly recent example of furthering their knowledge. They may have a new certification or degree. They may have just completed a large or complex project. They tend to be confident. As a note, do not mistake cockiness for this attribute.
What do you value in a new hire? How do the items above stack up on your list?
What happens if you deal with a manager who lacks honesty and likes to pass on his foibles and failings to those under him?
Find a new manager or job. 🙂
Fantastic post Joseph!
Also – when will you start writing again? My bosses think I have run out of ideas!
Glad I’ll always have “What’s the worst mistake you can remember making?” answered.
I was in the server room at my last job (it was messy, poorly managed, and nothing was done well, everything was just done to the point of ‘working’ and then left along…so I spent most of my time fixing problems that would have been non-existent with better documentation/setup/magic) and I was wanting to get a way to monitor more things. The company had no monitoring of any kind, so things were always a surprise, and I wanted to try and figure out ways to avoid it. Anyhow, I’m standing in the server room, and I remembered a few weeks before a power outage had knocked power out for the building, and left me scrambling to shutdown our servers since the IT manager wasn’t in.
So, I’m looking at these UPS’ sitting on the table near the servers, all of our servers plugged in and humming along. It’s about 2pm, everyone’s outside working, and I notice an RJ-45 port on the back. I’m thinking this is going to be awesome. I can get these things on the network, head back to my desk, and always be able to monitor the health/load on the UPS. So, I grab a cable, plug it in, then find an open spot on our switch rack. I plug the cable in and suddenly I hear an audible pop…followed by the sound of only Cisco fans running, where once there were tons of server fans…
I’m freaking out now. I quickly unplug the cable, and toss it over my shoulder, and start frantically hitting power buttons on the servers…nothing. Finally, I grab the end of the UPS cable and re-seat it…still nothing. So I flip the switch on the back, and it comes back on. The servers start to power back up, and then I slowly start the sheepish walk out of the server room, to an open office where it feels like literally everyone is just staring at me with a face that said “What the hell happened?”. The owner walks back and said “Looks like a lot of people lost connection to Data-Entry-Program and Exchange, have you noticed?”.
So, I have to look at her, in front of everyone, and explain that I stupidly plugged something in before doing proper research. Had I done the research, I would have seen that the RJ-45 connection on the back of the UPS was actually an RJ-45 port, but that the cable was proprietary to the company, and went to a USB plug at the other end, meant to be plugged into servers.
After about 20 minutes, everything was back up and running, with only a few minutes of work having been lost…but there is nothing like accidentally killing 5 servers with one cable to get you to always read before plugging.
Aaron – That is hilarious!! I will chime in with my worst mistake now.
As an intern, I started playing around with the Dell BIOS update tools. I made a package for the Optiplex 270s that configured a ton of settings. I deployed it with PSEXEC to a computer. Everything worked perfectly! I then modified my script to deploy it to 120 computers. It was getting close to the end of the day so I left it running.
I arrived at work the next morning to the sight of 120 computers stuck in a BSOD loop… I spent most of that day imaging machines…
Lessons learned: double test everything big, do scheduled rollouts, don’t do big things at the end of the day if you won’t follow up.
Definitely glad mine only knocked a few servers down for a bit. That place in general, was a mess. So had I killed 120 computers, it would have been a very long day of going from desktop to desktop with the one DVD I thought to burn when the IT manager didn’t have a copy.
Very timely article! Looking into my first hire and these tips are outstanding (some in the comments too!). You directly addressed the soft skills I was more concerned with. DeployHappiness.com is an awesome resource, wish I found it sooner! Thank you for putting your experience out there.
Thanks Jason! And no problem at all! 🙂
Thanks for posting. It is very informative and motivating as well (at least for me).
No problem at all! If you enjoyed this article, you will love this one: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askds/2011/09/02/accelerating-your-it-career/
These are fantastic tips Joseph. Although not a hiring manager, I’ve been involved with hiring panels as a peer. We leveraged some of these and have been fortunate getting quality people. I’m involved with the government sector and our compensation is under the industry average so we tend to get applications that don’t NEED to come work for us.
I recently interviewed for another agency at the state and they asked the series of technical questions of increasing difficulty. It was frustrating to myself as an applicant that I didn’t know the some of answers. I ended up actually emailing the hiring panel after I had researched two of the questions and found the answers. It was that important to me to find out the right answer, which helped me get a second interview.
Hopefully I’ll be involved again with the hiring process so I can suggest some of these techniques.
Keep up the great work Joseph. I appreciate your blog and articles.
Thank you Brian! The doesn’t need you point in this article is so important for us public/government sector workers.