One of a leader’s most important responsibilities is assembling balanced, successful teams. Resumes and keyword filters get candidates in the door, but by the time someone is sitting across from me, they’ve already cleared that bar, and so has everyone else I’m interviewing. What separates them is harder to screen for but matters more.
After years of interviewing management consultants, product managers, business analysts, solution architects, and other solution definition and delivery roles, these are the seven things I look for.
1. Initiative
Each individual owns his/her personal professional journey, and is accountable for setting professional development goals, and making plans to achieve them.
In an interview, I ask candidates about what they’ve done on their own to learn more about and get better at their craft.
- What have they read lately?
- Are they active in professional networking or development organizations? What do they do beyond what’s required?
- Do they expect their employer to “develop them,” or to enable a plan they already own?
- If hired, how would they ramp up quickly in a new environment?
The answers tell me whether I’m hiring someone who drives their own growth, or someone waiting to be driven.
2. Poise
I ask behavioral questions about hypothetical, difficult situations — not to see if candidates get the “right” answer, but to watch how they think. This kind of questioning pushes people off the happy path and out of the realm of rehearsed talking points, forcing real critical thinking under a bit of pressure.
How a candidate responds in that moment is usually a good preview of how they’ll respond to pressure on the job. And since resume screening has already filtered for experience and keywords, behavioral questions are where candidates who look identical on paper start to separate.
3. A grounded definition of success
Many consultants and solution delivery professionals have been conditioned, over time, to equate success to hitting a milestone by a deadline. While that may be one potentially useful data point, there is so much more to being successful. I often ask questions like:
- Can someone in this role be successful even if the overall project isn’t? How?
- How do you define success for the team, and for yourself in this role?
- You often don’t directly produce a usable or marketable product. So where does your value to the organization actually come from?
Candidates who have thought about this give me confidence they’ll make good judgment calls when the plan and reality diverge – which they always do.
4. Fit – in both directions
Diversity of ideas and approaches makes teams stronger. But sometimes it becomes clear in an interview that a candidate’s personality and ambitions simply don’t align with the team or the organization. Better to discover that now than six months in.
Fit cuts both ways, though. As the hiring leader, it’s on me to be transparent when candidates ask about the team and the organizational context, so they can judge whether they’ll be comfortable and able to thrive. I tell candidates directly: this interview is bi-directional. We’re evaluating fit for us; you should be evaluating fit for you.
5. Agility, or the ability to be flexible and responsive to change
The solution delivery role is increasingly defined by versatility. Whether the environment runs a classical serial approach or an agile delivery method, I want practitioners who are comfortable applying the fundamentals — planning, definition, delivery — in any of them.
A candidate without deep agile experience can still succeed if they can speak to the fundamentals and the philosophical differences between delivery methods, and to how solution definition and delivery fit into each. I’m hiring for the principles, not the nuances of ceremony.
6. Passion
I want to see genuine professional passion for the work. I appreciate candidates who talk about the value of what they do and the satisfaction of doing it well — who get animated describing the work they’ve done and the difference it made.
I’m wary when a candidate’s recent experience is only tangentially related to the role, because it suggests this job may be a stop-gap until something preferred comes along. To be clear: enthusiasm doesn’t trump capability. But all else equal, give me the person who loves the work.
7. An effective resume
Solution delivery professionals are — or should be — communication experts first. We facilitate mutual understanding, in writing and in person. So I treat every candidate’s resume as a work product and hold it to the same standards I’d apply to a project deliverable.
The resume is a sample of the written communication and documentation quality I can expect. And because the candidate wants the job, I assume it represents their very best work. I look for a resume tailored to the role, with emphasis on the qualities, attributes, and outcomes that matter for the position as posted. A generic resume for a communication-centric role tells me something, too.
I believe that most solution delivery professionals are, or should be, first and foremost, communication experts. We must be able to facilitate mutual understanding through both spoken and written means, With that, I treat each candidate’s resume as a work product and hold it to many of the standards I would use to evaluate a project deliverable.
Whether you’re a manager working out how to identify strong candidates, or a candidate trying to understand what hiring managers are screening for, these seven signals should serve you well.
If this were your list, what would you add or change?
