Leading Geeks

Dear Job Applicants:

Your résumés are driving me nuts.  So nuts that I’ve created a list:

• You don’t tailor your résumé to my job posting.  If my job posting says you have to know marketing and be able to teach, the word “marketing” should actually SHOW UP on your résumé.  If I specify that you have to know how to administer Compellent SANs, guess what I want to see on your résumé ?
• For the love of everything, get someone to proofread your résumé.  I read one today that said, “References can be refurbished upon request.”  Seriously?  Seriously!?!?!?!?!
• I really don’t care about your job responsibilities that much.  Your accomplishments, sure.  Your responsibilities, not really.  I want to know what you did.  Did you manage a network?  Did you manage humans?  Did you manage a budget?  How many?  How much?  How big?  I’m reading to see if you have what it takes to manage my network, humans, and budget.
• Please tell me why you want to do this job.  Especially if it’s an unusual job.  For example, we hire for a role at HubSpot known as “Inbound Marketing Consultant.”  And, honestly, it’s not a job like any other job.  As a result, if I can’t figure out from your résumé or cover letter WHY you want this job, I have to waste time in the interview figuring out two things (below), and I HATE wasting time.
1. Do you have any idea what this job is?
2. Given your understanding of the job, why do you want it?
• Please have some clue what’s on your résumé.  Seriously, people, if you don’t know what’s there and I’ve only spent 30 seconds skimming it, we’re in a world of hurt.
• Please put complete information on your résumé.  I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve had where people say, “It’s not on my résumé, but…”  Well, then, your résumé isn’t complete, now, is it?

Image courtesy of CharlotWest

Yeah, I know. Your job sucks sometimes. Servers crash, users complain, you are looking to your next job but haven’t quite gotten there yet, etc. Or maybe you’re having some troubles at home, not sleeping, etc.

I promise you that I will do my best, as your manager/leader/director/chief whatsit officer, to make your job better.

I will shift your workload, give you plum projects, take you out for beer, approve tons of personal time, etc.  I will do everything in my power to make you happy and productive, because I know that happy workers are better at their jobs (except lawyers.  No, really–I don’t have the citation on hand, but I read a study in business school that said so.).

But, honestly, I can’t keep you fixed.

I will protect you from politics, and defend you like a mother bear defending her cubs.  I will fight for your requests even if I don’t necessarily completely agree (but do see the merit).  I will joke with you, cry with you, and get angry alongside you.

But, still, I can’t keep you fixed.

As adults in the workplace, sometimes we need to take responsibility for our own happiness.  Should we fight for what we want? Absolutely.  Should we go to our managers with our complaints/problems? Yes.

But it’s not their job to keep us fixed.  It’s our job to fix ourselves.  If I’m going to my manager with a problem, I should also have some ideas of solutions.  Maybe they’re not tenable solutions, but “I’m not going to do that” isn’t a solution–it’s creation of even more problems.

So yeah, jobs suck sometimes. And as a manager, I do my best to keep my team happy.  But as a team member myself, I need to be cognizant that there is mutual responsibility for the fixing.  I can’t keep you fixed, just like my manager can’t keep me fixed.  But together, I think, we can probably do a decent job of getting through the day.

**Note to fellow grammar geeks: I know I switched personal pronouns, but it sounded really cranky when I didn’t…

Photo Courtesy of DaveOnFlickr.

“We always hire the best.”

“The people who work here are the best people in the world.”

“We never use the phrase ‘good enough’ in our hiring.”

I’ve seen countless companies completely mess themselves up by sticking to some sort of resolve to “hire the best” without thinking it through.  They hire the coolest, brightest, smartest, and quickest people and then have morale and retention problem that they just can’t figure out.  They leave out one essential piece of hiring “the best”–they forget that they need the best for the job.  So they end up with…

• Brilliant technologists who are miserable working a Help Desk phone
• Great managers who are lousy consultants
• Great user support folks who are cranky systems administrators (this one is hard to tell, since systems administrators tend to be cranky anyhow)
• Great applications people who are bored trainers

I’ve found that behavioral interviewing can really separate the best (in general) from the best for the job.  Here are my favorite questions:

• In job x, you’ll often experience situation y.  Can you tell me about a time when you were in a similar situation and how you reacted?
• How do you handle it when you feel like you’re at the end of your rope, and what sorts of situations make you feel like that?
• I’ve made mistakes that could turn your hair grey to hear them.  Tell me about how you handled one of the worst mistakes you’ve ever made (I don’t make them tell me the details of the mistake).
• How would you handle <some situation they’ll experience on the job>?
• What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done in work or in life?  What made it so cool?

Their answers to behavioral questions will help you rapidly see that sometimes a completely awesome candidate just isn’t the best for the job.  And honestly, one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a hiring manager is to let someone’s degrees/qualifications/personality blind you to a bad fit.

So how about you?  How do you distinguish between to “the best” and “the best for the job”?

Photo courtesy of Rachael Voorhees

Image Courtesy of Richard Rutter

I’ve been trying to figure out best practices for, well, just getting stuff done with other people.  Somehow, it seems like we use email when we should use a meeting, a meeting when we should use a quick face-to-face, and a quick face-to-face when we should use email.  I’m constantly left feeling somewhat, uh, unsatisfied with the way we get things done, and I’m using this post to try to figure it out.  Any and all insight would be appreciated!

Email Errors

Last week, a coworker & I went out for lunch, grabbed a beer, and took 30 minutes to figure out a transition process.  (A transition process that we and others were actually pretty darn happy with, actually.)  Had we tried to do this via email, it would have taken eight thousand years, and I’m not sure we would ever have gotten it done. Yes, we did some prep work via email and drop-bys (and I am a Salesforce data geek, as we found out), but we got it done much more efficiently in a quick meeting than we ever could have done it via email.

I was also part of an email chain last week where we could have cut through it with a couple of cubicle drop-bys.  In fact, I got so sick of the email chain that I started walking around the office and talking to the people involved just so we could get the darn thing done.

Face-to-face Follies

That’s not to say that everything can or should be done face-to-face.  We have a bunch of consultants and salesfolk here who are almost impossible to get in front of–they’re on the phone constantly.  As such, email is absolutely vital for communication.  I’ve also been known to wander the office for many minutes looking for the person with whom I want a quick chat, only to forget about it after I got back to my desk.  Email can be vital for in-the-moment communication, so that nothing gets lost or forgotten.  Email can also include lots of parties and save people from having to wait for three weeks in order to put a meeting on everyone’s calendars.

At the very least, it’s a good idea to chat with someone face-to-face, return to your computer, and send a follow-up email to make sure everyone both remembers the conversation and is on the same page.  You can also loop in folks who weren’t part of the conversation but should be aware of its occurrence.

Meeting Madness

As you can see from above, I definitely think that quick meetings have their times and places, but should be minimized overall.  If you have one-way “vital” information, an informal “pull someone into the conference room” can often do the trick.  (As I write this, I realize that I’ve scheduled several meetings already today–all of which involved multiple people or really needed the 1:1 sit-down function of a meeting.  No, really!)  I think it’s entirely too easy to decide to schedule a meeting rather than communicate more openly and constantly.    But overall, I’m still trying to figure out the threshold for holding a meeting vs. one of the other communication efforts above.

Does anyone have any ideas?  Do you have any specific “I hold a meeting when…” criteria?  Please share!