Lisa has a nice post, How to Hire a Manager – A Time Tested Recipe. She’s close. I’m not so sure about the “humble” part, and I would add something like “advocates for team.” But the piece Lisa missed is integrity. Without integrity, the other qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills are useless. To be fair, […]
Jurgen’s post, How to Select a Fine Technical Manager, along with the posts he responded to prompted this one. I’m not agreeing much with Jurgen today. I suspect it’s because we have very different experience. In my experience, only technical people who want to manage want to be managers–unless HR has screwed up the salary
A management audition is similar to a technical audition, but because the functional skills are so different, and because senior technical people may also require some management capability, I see these as two different kinds of auditions. As usual, your mileage may vary. Here are some possible management auditions: Facilitate a meeting Give a presentation
I was recently talking with an executive recruiter. “I’ve been recruiting managers for years, but in the last couple of years, it seems more tricky. My clients don’t exactly know what they want, and it seems as if everyone’s had an ‘untraditional’ career path. What’s going on?” Managers are people too—so why is recruiting managers
At the Better Software tutorial yesterday, several managers said their hardest problem was finding good people. If you haven’t started continuous recruitingyet, it’s time to start.Continuous recruiting is not just the “keeping your eyes open” part of recruiting, it requires your (and possibly your team’s) active participation. It means you bring a couple of hundred
A reader emailed me and asked, “how do I interview a manager who will be my superior?”The short answer is the same way you interview peers. However, your feelings about your position or your potential boss’ position (or even someone “higher” than one level above you) will certainly influence how you feel and how you
This one is for you HR managers and folks who don’t normally read my Managing Product Development blog.Esther and I are leading our management workshop: Behind Closed Doors: Managing One-on-One, July 10-12, 2006, in Minneapolis. Interested? Here’s the flyer (PDF). I’ll be adding a workshop page to my site later today. I’ll update this post
I always thought it was easier to ask senior managers and senior technical staff questions, because they had so much experience. But especially with managers, much of their experience is about judgement calls and the way they make decisions. So, I’d ask about that. But from some questions I’ve received recently, I’m in the minority
Take a look at HBS’s Working Knowledge, Hiring for Executive Intelligence. Some quotes that rocked my world: IQ test questions don’t assess the practical, on-your-feet thinking skills needed in business. What’s more, these tests have been repeatedly accused of racial and gender bias. Yet, despite these very real shortcomings, IQ tests are still a better predictor
For some unknown-to-me-reason, more and more hiring managers appear to be attempting to do their own recruiting. While I do encourage hiring managers to network and constantly be on the lookout for candidates, especially passive candidates, I can’t see how a hiring manager can effectively perform the management job and recruit for candidates.If you’re in