Hello and welcome to This Is Not What I Signed Up For, the podcast for new managers preventing you from sinking by teaching you how to swim with the new skills you need in management. Now, for those folks who've listened to the podcast before and have listened in the last year, you would know that a lot of the format that I've done is interviewing thought leaders in the space and asking them a bunch of questions about their experiences in the world of management and passing that knowledge onto you. as the listener. Now, in the last little while and with the season this year, I've been getting some feedback from listeners, which it's great to know there are listeners. Thank you to you listeners that have been providing feedback. If you've got views that you want to share with me and you want to give me some feedback on the podcast, by all means, reach out as well. But I've received some feedback on folks wanting to hear more from me and my views. Now, one of the views I took when I started this podcast was that I have a book out there, which is a lot of my experiences. put a lot of content out. I do some coaching. I do speaking in this space. And the podcast was to get a bit of extra voices in there. But I realized that a lot of folks aren't exposed necessarily to me giving these talks or the book and the new book is coming and that side of things. So with that, the feedback has been to give some of my views. So this episode that we're going to do today, is a lot of my views. It's my hiring process that I do. And I've had a few folks ask me about, how do I hire? How do I go about this? But some of the changes you're going to see from the feedback we've received is that some of the episodes going forward are going to be a lot more of my views. And to do this, it'll be some episodes like this one where it's just going to be me talking to you. But we're also quite exciting. And I say we because I'm already getting into the zone of this. I'm going to have a co-host with me and this is going to be a co-host who is a manager who's starting out and might cycle co-hosts to other people as well, but basically doing a bit of a hot seat coaching session where I can give views on challenges that these managers are having. So I'm very excited for that to come. As well as this, I'm also going to get a lot more. managers in the space in. So a lot of C-level executives, the folks that are already up at the top of the chain who've gone through this journey, who are dealing with managers on a day to day, and you're going to see a lot more content. You would have seen a couple of episodes already, but there's going to be a lot more episodes where I'm bringing in the C-suite to chat to you and give their views on things. So I'm really, really excited about that. But in this episode, like I say, we're going to go into hiring. and in particular, the process that I use for hiring. So I'm quite excited about this. This is something I've been very passionate about for many years. And I had proper training in hiring in a particular format or methodology, which is called top grading. Now to me, top grading is an incredibly effective methodology in getting A players. And that's really what the methodology is about, is getting these top performers, A players into your team. Though I do think the methodology as a whole is really onerous on the hiring manager and it's really taxing on a candidate. And in this day and age where we're hiring really quickly and we're bringing people on board quickly and we need to onboard people really, really quickly and scale, I don't think it works as effectively. That said, there are parts of top grading that I bring in. that I think are really, valuable. But I would encourage you to go look at top grading and the smart hiring method to see what the kind of questions are out there. And if you're interested, dive into it in a little bit more depth. But I'm gonna go through a bit of a cherry picked version of it, and as well as different things that I have tacked on over the years and things that I look for to kind of give you an idea that either A, if you're applying for a role somewhere, what to look for, maybe another hiring manager is like me, or if you're hiring, what do you wanna look for in your team to bring someone really good in? Now, 15, 20 minutes is not gonna be enough time for me to go through my entire process, but I figured I'd give you some key points that I look at in the different types of interviews that I do, which I think are critical to look at. Now, the way I structure it overall when I'm hiring someone, is I look at the resume when it arrives. So that's kind of first point is when the resume gets to me or your CV, depending on which country you're listening from. How that looks is the first kind of thing I look at. I then follow that up with a screening interview. So I don't dive in immediately to a one hour interview. I wanna have a quick phone call with you to know that you are actually a person I wanna meet with, you're interested in the role. the right fit for you. So like personality wise and the kind of quirkiness that maybe I have. So I have that screening for that. Then I go into technical interviews or a deep dive interview in your resume and CV, like about your past and things like that. Lastly, I do references and I have specific questions for references and the way I do references. And these are kind of the overarching steps that I use. But let's dive in a little bit to these steps and I'll take you through kind of what I look at and what I look for. So starting with the resume, and you know, this is really your first entry into a company, you know, what are they gonna see about you? What are you gonna see about them? So I'm a hiring manager, I wanna know the cliff notes. The resume tells me that. But what I'm gonna look for in there as well, particularly being a stickler for attention to detail and a lot of the managerial roles I hire for and have hired for in the past are around detail. It's developers, it's coders, it's folks that are reading contracts, that side of things. So it's really, really attention to detail. So I'm very, very strict when it comes to spelling and grammar in a resume. If I start seeing a lot of spelling errors, a lot of grammatical errors, I'm going to start kind of marking down on that. And I know there's not necessarily English being your first language or something like that. And that can be a barrier to spelling. But with the amount of tools out there at the moment for checking your grammar, checking your spelling, Word that you compile your resume in is likely going to check your grammar and spelling. go through that, go through that process and get that grammar and spelling. I look at this as an attention to detail kind of thing. So especially if the role I'm looking for needs that attention to detail to text, I'll be looking for spelling and grammar. On a bit of a flip side though, if I'm hiring for a more creative role, for a more design focused role or something like that, I will look for a bit more creativity in a resume where I might focus more on the layout and design of the resume that comes to me and whether it catches my eye to kind of see a bit of design chops. Now, I know this is very generalized that I'm saying, but it is important. And I try and match how I look at the resume to the role that I'm trying to fill. I'm not necessarily going to put a very bland, boring resume into a design role that's meant to be building UIs and really cool stuff. But a programmer or developer that needs to be very clear on syntax, I'm not gonna really worry about the design aspects of the resume. I wanna know that everything is in the right order and looks really structured well. So bring that forward and when you're looking at a resume, of see what kind of role you're hiring for and see how the resume fits it. Now, one thing I will say here, perhaps I sound a bit mean being so strict on spelling and grammar, give leeway if you're working through an agency and the agency provides you with resumes that are all in the same format. I see this a lot where we've got perhaps schools or colleges and programs that have put students through. and they're submitting a batch of resumes of students or graduates from this program, and the resumes all look the same. And I have a bit of a gripe with agencies when they do this because then I can't see that spelling and grammar. I can't see that creativity that the person might have. So bear in mind, use your discretion when you're looking at these, but if it is coming from an agency, You know, it might be the agency that's doing stuff to this resume that you don't like don't punish the candidate for that Similarly if you're applying for a role through an agency see whether they're gonna strip out everything and put it in their own Format it might help you it might hinder you just see how you do that Right. So that that's kind of the resume side and the soapbox over there Then I get to screening. This is where I've looked through resumes and there are folks that I'm very keen on seeing. I don't ask a lot of questions in a screening. The idea is that I'm probably gonna speak to a lot of people if I'm hiring for a role. I wanna know that I'm just gonna spend a few minutes with them to say, yes, I wanna spend an hour with you versus going into a one hour interview, wasting everyone's time for someone that I know in the first five minutes I'm not gonna hire. So the screening is to kind of fill that purpose. So I ask three main questions in a screening interview. I don't get into the resume, I don't get into the past. I don't think any of that's relevant for a screening interview. I wanna know aptitude and if there's an immediate fit that I can see. So I ask, what are your career goals? And this is not, where do you see yourself in five years? I don't know where I'm gonna see myself in three months, let alone five years. So I don't expect someone to come with that, but I want to know what someone's goals are for their career. Where do they see themselves going? What direction are they wanting to be in? Because then I can see whether the role I'm offering is gonna be somewhat in line with that direction, and that means likely they will stay in the role for a good while and give some good service there. If someone's career goals are wildly misaligned to what the role looks like, then chances are I'm gonna screen them out at this point because They are gonna come in, maybe be in for six months to a year, decide they don't like it and it's not fulfilling their direction that they wanna go in, and then they leave anyway. And then you're really taking an expensive gamble. So that's the first one. The next one I ask is, is three things you're really good at. So this is where people can tell you the stuff they enjoy, the stuff they're good at, the things that float their boat. What do they do on a day-to-day basis that excites them? So I want to hear from developers that they enjoy coding and that they enjoy getting into the detail of things and finding out how to fix problems, solve problems. Those kind of things really work there. And it's to see that they enjoy things that are going to be in the role on a day-to-day basis. And the flip side of this is the last question I ask, which is, what are you not good at or not interested in? And this is not to do like a gotcha, hey, you're bad at this, I'm not gonna hire you. It's to see if they say things that they're bad at or not interested in that are part of the role on a daily basis because then they're gonna hate it. And you don't wanna bring someone in that hates it, they're gonna get animosity for you, you for them, it's not worth it. So find out what they're not interested in. One of the nice things about asking this question though, is that you get to hear, how they've improved it. And these are the really good answers that I enjoy hearing is when someone says, you know, I'm really, I'm not good at project management or I don't enjoy project management, but I have taught myself to have a methodology that I can get through it well and I can do it. So that tells me like, okay, cool. I know they're not really interested in project management. They're going to be in a dev role. They're not going to really be project managing. There is a project manager for that. So that's fine, but they've taught themselves the skill. That's great. That tells me more about their personality as well. So these are the kind of things I look at. And it's as much for me as the hiring manager to find a match as a protection for the candidate to see if we're going to match because there's really no point in bringing someone in who's going to hate the role that you're in. So those are the three things I look at in a screening. Now, jumping into the next aspect when I've had a screening and I really like someone. This is when I go into generally the technical interview. So this is looking at technical skills. Now, if you're coming from a DevOps role, development, a technical support role, somewhere where there's really good hard skills that you can test for, you're probably used to the fact that there's a technical test in an interview that can happen. Now, when it comes to management, there are tests there as well. You know, I am gonna ask in this interview the kind of things you do on a day-to-day basis. How do you manage your team? What sort of soft skills do you rely on? What projects have you done? Kind of the usual questions you would think to ask. But one of the big things that I will ask in a management technical interview is how someone has hired people, how someone has fired people, and how someone has done performance management with their staff. So hiring people, you get to see how they choose people and what kind of process they go through, which I think is very important, as you can hear from this episode. How they fire people is a really tough one because firing people sucks. It always sucks. I have never enjoyed the few firings that I've done in my career and I really don't wanna have to do them. They suck so bad. But you want to know that someone can, and this is more, I think, for longer term managers. So folks that have been in a managerial role for a little while, say a year plus, you want to know that someone has taken that road of saying, okay, we do need to look out for the company at some point. This was not working out. We made a decision to cut someone on the team or something like that. It's not nice. but it can speak to the decisiveness of the person that you are hiring. And it also shows that someone's gone through a really hard process. And that kind of links to the next one, that third question, which is around performance management and performance improvement plans. If there is someone in a team that hasn't been performing, I want to know how this manager went about trying to improve that person and keep them on board before firing them. I have a very serious thing that you really need to try and improve someone if they're not performing rather than just cut them. Give them the benefit of finding out what is wrong, having a sympathetic ear to them, hearing what problems might be there and try and help them solve the problems so that you can have star performer again. No one likes letting someone go. It affects the team even if it's like a bad apple in the team, it can affect the team negatively when you let someone go. So performance improvement is really, important. And I think that's the step that needs to happen before firing. And in my interviews of managers, that's something I'm gonna look for as well. Probably also there as well, just speaking on as like a little footnote there, I will also very often in these technical interviews, and this goes for even just any staff member I'm hiring, I will ask around what kind of initiatives have you put in in the company to improve things? Did you find stuff that you didn't like that you tried to fix? How did it go? Even if it failed, I want to see that folks have that initiative that they go into. Right, so the next one I go into is a bit of a deep dive. This is where I'm gonna go into your resume in detail, go through someone's work experience, what kind of things have they done. This is really matching up past experience with the job description and how someone's gonna do the role. I will also very much, would say my biggest thing here is as much as I'm gonna go into the positives of previous roles. I'm gonna go into the negatives of previous roles as well. I wanna hear how someone had bad experiences, how they turned those around, how they coped with these things. Did they come up with coping mechanisms? Did they fix the problems? Did they iron things out? I wanna know that problem solving and I wanna know that someone has the initiative to solve these issues. when someone says they really never had any bad experiences in a role or they can't think of anything that they disliked in a role, I very much battle to believe that. And I find that people really will always have something they didn't enjoy. They're trying to impress, I get that, but it can be a red flag if there's nothing they didn't enjoy because I, for one, I mentioned project management earlier. That's my thing. don't enjoy project management at all. I've learned how to do it. I've got a qualification in project management. I don't like doing it, but I can if I need to. And that's the kind of thing I want to hear from people as well. I didn't really enjoy project management, but I was in tech support. I didn't have to do it as much. I did it on the odd occasion. And it went fine because I developed methodologies for it. So that's what I want to look at there as well. Now. The other thing that I will really ask someone in the deep dive is, how would their previous hiring manager have rated them out of 10? What would they say were your greatest strengths and your greatest weaknesses? This comes from that top grading side and it gets people thinking, how would a third party think of the work that I did? I do see it as a warning sign when someone comes in there with great bravado saying, well, I'm amazing. Generally a bit of humility in the interview goes a long way. I generally look for ratings of like a seven to nine out of 10 from their hiring managers. It's a good indicator to me what they think other people thought of them. And often these hiring managers that are giving the ratings in this interview, those are the folks I would like to use for the last interview, which is the reference interview. Now, when I'm hiring someone and I go through this and the hiring managers, I will go through why they left the role. And if they go into the leaving the role as to how much they hated their former boss or something like that, it starts being a warning bell for me. And you will have it like most people leave roles because of bad managers. But you want to hear that they can handle this diplomatically as well. I think it looks very poorly on someone if they absolutely slate their previous teams. their previous managers and there may well be valid reasons that they cannot stand their previous manager, but don't berate them. do personal attacks in an interview. And if I hear that, I start wondering what more of a story there is back there. So bear that in mind. People that overly attack former managers, there's often a story there. People that are overly confident as to how amazing they are, there's generally a story there as well. Now this gets me onto the last spot, which is the reference interviews. As I said, I will often get the reference names from those hiring managers in the deep dive interview. And I want to speak to those folks because now I know what the candidate feels like that that person would say. I'm now going to get what that hiring manager would say. So I have very simple questions for the hiring managers, you at the time that you were working with them or the person was working with them. what were the things that they were really good at? What were the things that they could have perhaps improved on a little? I won't say bad at. I will say what things could they have improved on a little? I don't wanna put them on the spot to have to badmouth anyone and you don't want that. By the time you've got to this point, you've gotta be pretty sure this person is the really shit hot person you wanna hire into the role. So references generally go really, really okay. But I want to have those hiring managers. I want to ask those questions. What was the person good at? What could they have improved on at the time? And then get a rating. What would you rate them out of 10? And that generally you'll get great ones. Often, when I'm at this point, after the types of questions I've asked, you get good ratings of 9 out of 10, 10 out of 10, 9.99 out of 10. That's the kind of stuff I'm looking for. And it looks great. One of the things that I do ask for at this point though, when I am taking on a reference call is I will ask the person I'm interviewing to set up the reference calls because this also, this gives them a chance to brief the references. You're not phoning them out of the blue. They can have a chat. They can kind of brief them on the style that you as a manager have. And it also gives you an idea of their turnaround time on arranging things and perhaps the skills they have on setting up an interview and the rapport that they have with those hiring managers. So I like them to set them up. One caveat that I would say is references, I generally always want the direct hiring manager. Unless there was something horribly wrong and there is no way you're talking to that hiring manager, maybe there was a... Who knows, maybe there was a sexual harassment claim against a manager or something like that. Then sure, don't put me in touch with that manager. Maybe put me in touch with someone higher up. But you want someone that's in the reporting line that they were into, not necessarily someone who worked alongside them or in another team or something like that. Sure, it's a great character reference, but it doesn't give you how that person worked on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, so I think this is a... massive dump of a lot of information that is something I could talk about for days. it's, it's, I will say that these are just really one-off little tips that I use. The interviews that I go through are a lot longer, but I hope this gives you some kind of inkling as the way I approach these interviews. I hope it gives you some value and something to think about. This is not to say that you should use this approach. I'm known as a very finicky hiring manager. I am strict. know what I want. And the kind of questions I ask are the ones that get me the detail that I'm looking for. But I also really love the people I've hired using this process. And it's something that I've developed over the years and worked with and the formulas that come from these really great approaches that I think really highlight those A players that you want in your team. And you really want top performers. If you're a team of top performers, man, the sky's the limit for you. And it makes your managerial role really, really easy because people self-manage when they're A players as well. So I hope this has resonated with you. Stay tuned for some more interesting podcast episodes. Like I said, we're going to have some great C-suite interviews. We're still going to have the thought leaders on. We're going to have interviews with me. And we're going to have some of these interviews with my methodologies that come through. So. Yeah, thank you again for joining us. Thank you for listening. If you have feedback, please, by all means, send me feedback. Contact me on LinkedIn. Find me in Link in Bio or on Blue Sky or Instagram or TikTok. Pop me a message there. It's been great having you with us. Keep listening. Keep swimming. And I will chat to you next time. Until then, cheerio.