Altan Khendup

I am typically asked to interview very senior candidates. Mostly due to my experience, but also because I tend to be more honest about the challenges being faced in an organization and the delicate balance between technical, management, and leadership skills and personality that will be necessary for a great organization fit.

When interviewing candidates for positions I look at it as an investment. Firstly I am spending a lot of time and consequently money in the process, and the person will be with the organization for a long period of time, potentially up to 5 years if the match is good, longer if the match is great.

Personally and professionally I find very little value in what I call "memorization" questions for technical professionals. Most of the management I meet ask for a basic set of questions for vetting purposes. However I see these questions more ineffective and wasteful than anything else. I care less for someone who has memorized every buzzword or specific syntax for languages or commands; this is what things like Unix man pages and Google searches are for. Just because someone is good at memorizing things does not make them a good fit for creating solutions.

When interviewing I look for the following:

• Are they leaders? Senior positions are not followers but rather leaders in their own right. So I ask questions about initiative taking, risk management, and investments.
• Can they think outside of the box? In almost all of my situations the initiatives being undertaken have not really been done before. As a result, there is no "best practice" solution that someone can look up and solve it. The senior positions have to have the ability to see this situation and move ahead, figuring things out along the way. This includes new approaches, new viewpoints, new technical implementations, etc. It can be even a new way to do something on older approaches.
• Do they ask for permission rather than for forgiveness? In many cases what I am looking for are the necessary leaders and initiative takers that will sometimes bend rules. Not important ones mind you such as regulatory compliance, but rather set-in-stone mind sets that need to be challenged. I want the person to be independent so the questions along this line are what I am looking for.
• Can they play well with others? Regardless of how stellar an individual is, they are still working on a team. From a 2 person startup to 300,000 person fortune 50 company the needs are the same. This is very important to determine since prima donnas often derail efforts rather than build them.
• Do they have what I call "I am a hammer, everything is a nail" perspective? In my experience specialists are needed for certain specific tasks but leaders need to be demonstratively better cutting across boundaries than specialists. Especially in technical professional ranks, I often come across people that are very good at a certain set of technologies: all Java, all C, all Python, all systems, all Oracle, etc. The questions that I ask determine whether or not they can cross multiple specialities and using generalist thinking quickly understand, grasp and apply what they have learned to the problems at hand.

Often times memorizers make very poor fits for effectively solving problems. They wait for requirements as opposed to going out at getting them, they are geniuses with certains sets of tools, but horrible when learning new ones, etc. In any organization that is looking to grow, they need to see and build towards the future, not what is front of them for the moment.

This process has worked out very well. I have had professionals who had done very poorly at the memorization and at my insistence have been brought back for another session. In many instances, these individuals that I have helped to hire turned into excellent and capable contributors and leaders, delivering outstanding values to the organizations that hired them.