Team Building - Why Finding The Best Talent Is About Original Thoughts, Not Correct Answers

Since joining our advisory practice in late 2021, I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and our infrastructure & cloud department has grown from around 10 people to 45.

Over the course of the process of recruiting our team, I’ve had a lot of interesting feedback from the people we’ve interviewed - from surprise around the questions asked, to the relaxed nature of our process, to feeling like they were having a chat with someone they know rather than an employer.

A lot of candidates seem somewhat disarmed by the fact that we’re a single stage, very informal, conversation focused team.

Why? Being consultants, we need to have people around us who can make connections with others, often quickly. One of my team coined a phrase early on regarding our interviews - that we want people in our team to be interested and interesting.

Interested in solving problems because that’s what the day job is, and interesting because we need our team to be memorable for all the right reasons.

In reality, I shouldn’t need to meet someone ten times in an interview context to understand if they’re capable - if I do, that says something about me and my (in)ability to interview people effectively, rather than the candidates.

For me, interviews are about asking people questions that don’t have set answers - it’s about asking people to think and provide a view of what their view is on the question, and why they think it. In short, it’s to gain some insight into how that person thinks, not to tick a box, or mark a response as “correct”.

To that end, success doesn’t mean creating a slew of people with identikit opinions, or carbon copies of my highest performers, but rather it means finding people who can think for themselves - because we need people to think creatively, and to solve problems that they may never have solved before.

Our team has people from different backgrounds, races, religions, genders, and ages, albeit united by a common theme - they can think for themselves.

Same routes? Same destinations

There’s an old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, yet I see so many departments following cookie cutter approaches to recruitment into a consulting arm of a tech business.

Must have a 1st in Computer Science.

Must have graduated from an established university.

Must have significant amounts of experience.

The reality is none of these things truly matter - a consultant can have all of those things and/or none of the things and be successful or not.

What really matters in consulting are people who can pay attention, understand a problem, and do something about it.

Yes, knowledge of computer science is useful when it comes to consulting in the tech industry, but it’s far from the only route into a successful career.?

The detail is important, but a consultant is often part of a team, which means that they don’t need to do all the work/know all the things, and given they are in a constantly evolving landscape, it often means that we can’t even ask them about the next big thing given it hasn’t been invented yet.?

For me, this is the reason why technical questions are often the wrong ones to ask at interview.

Learn something new - in both directions

It has become a running joke that my interview questions, despite heading up a tech practice, are often far from technical. That’s not because I’m not technical - I’m in my 25th year in IT - but rather I see fundamental flaws in asking fixed point technical questions in an industry that is operating at the cutting edge.

Whilst there is no “top 10 questions” list I can provide from this article, my focus is generally on looking for the ability to think, and subsequently reflect, about what’s being asked.

One of my favourite questions is:

“Of all the opinions/beliefs that you hold, which one is most likely to be wrong?”

Candidates can be a bit confounded by the ask - because they’re conditioned to think that they have to answer quickly, and the question isn’t the sort of thing that would logically show up on a list of obvious interview questions.

Good candidates take a moment to think about the question, because a reflective answer often requires, well, reflection.?

Good questions don’t have one answer that you can mark as correct.?

Good answers tell you something about the person who you’re speaking to, rather than telling me more about a programming language or product I already know.

My problem with purely technical questions is you can get the answers out of Google with minimal effort. Given that a small child can work Google, I’m not overly sure that’s the barrier to entry that guarantees any form of quality control.

Knowing the correct syntax of a particular language in an interview situation gives an answer that’s only really useful in the context of an interview. Ask a programmer how much code they have adapted or taken from the internet, and you’ll realise that it’s very rare to find oneself coding a platform without any form of access to the internet or, at the very least, a textbook.

It’s not about interrogating, it’s about listening

Within the consulting team, I’m more interested in how somebody thinks, or how they learn, rather than whether they can parrot back details of the port number of a service, or details on how a code snippet is constructed.

Consulting is about people, much like business is about people and, by extension, life is about people.

The most interesting part of an interview is getting to speak to someone about who they are as much as, if not more than, the job I have to offer.

I believe you learn a lot in the first few minutes of your interaction with someone by how they respond to you, and how much you respond to them.

A good interview comes from having a good connection and, by extension, a good connection comes from having the right intentions. My mantra is fairly basic - pay a genuine interest in finding out about people and, in my experience at least, that interest will be paid back ten-fold. I am lucky to have people around me who think of something bigger than just themselves - and people who think and dream about a better world tend to go on and make a better one.?

Sometimes people think consulting is about knowing a lot of things, but often it’s like caring about someone else - it’s about how to ask follow up questions to learn more about the person.?

After all, ask a friend whether they want to hear facts when they feel lost, or if they want to be heard.

People like to be heard, to be understood, to be accepted. Why miss the opportunity to learn something about someone as opposed to just asking a question which you already know the answer to?

Does that teach you anything about them, or about you? If it doesn’t, then what are you really learning? To know they can read and memorise arbitrary facts?

Interviews should be about learning in both directions. If what your prospective team member learns is you can ask the same questions everyone else has already asked, can you be too surprised if they don’t decide to join?