We will interview the project manager
Immediately I would like to decide on some concepts in order not to provoke anyone into polemics because of a misunderstanding of the key points. I also want to warn you that this is not a guide to action and not a manual, but only a story in the style of “like others do”.
For me, the project manager (projects) is a person who primarily has a deep understanding of the subject area, in our case, Internet development, having experience of independent development, being aware of technological and business trends in the market. Similarly to the above-mentioned qualities, the ability to communicate and find a common language with completely different types of people. Knowledge of the RP must lie not only in the plane of development, but also in the prototyping of interfaces, and in design and in Internet marketing.
Perhaps, after the previous paragraph, there will be a feeling that we are looking for supermen-generalists and our utopian demands rarely find a response in the earthly candidates for this position. Naturally, this is partly true (it is really difficult to look for and such people are rarely met), but as practice has shown, such demands bring their dividends and quickly pay for the labor costs of searching for such people.
Of course, for different companies with different business objectives, the requirements for candidates can be very different, but I described my understanding of the “project manager” and I would like to tell you about my approach to finding and hiring an RP of this type.
')
After reviewing the resume and selecting the candidates that interested me, I immediately invite the candidate for an interview. Given the specificity of the requirements, it is possible to form an opinion on the candidate’s professional skills only during direct communication (or I’m just not aware of the secret techniques).
Next, I will definitely pay attention to the various trifles that precede the interview itself — whether assistance was needed in finding an office (I doubt that a person who is unable or unwilling to use a card can manage the processes and people), how a person is dressed, how it goes and how it sits.
The most amazing thing is that all these little things make it possible with a high degree of probability to immediately determine whether a person is suitable or not. If I studied to be a psychologist, I would probably be able to reveal this topic, but for now I have to be content with amateurish conclusions and definitions. For all these points, I am trying to define a person’s self-reliance, his self-confidence, interpersonal skills (a terrible word dragged along the resume), adequacy in general and in general.
The main focus of the conversation is the candidate’s story about himself, his achievements, mistakes and experience in general. In the course of the conversation, leading and clarifying questions are asked, and at the end - a series of questions that allow to form a final opinion and make a decision in one direction or another. I take an interview for at least two hours - it takes about an hour to tell the candidate, my questions are designed for another hour of conversation.
During the candidate's story, it is possible to find out very many, important for the work of the RP, the moments - the ability to interest the interlocutor, the ability to expressly communicate thoughts, the ability to “sell yourself”, the ability to argue the point of view. I immediately inform you that we have an hour for this part of the conversation - thus, a person has to count on time and concentrate on the main point, present only significant facts, answer questions without unnecessary details.
During the interview, the interviewer does not sit, propped up on his head with a cam, but participates vividly in it, I can highlight the following points, to which I pay special attention, leading the candidate to clarify them:
If after the previous stage the opinion about the candidate has developed negatively, then it doesn’t get to the questions, sometimes some questions are asked during the conversation. Before asking questions, I talk about job responsibilities and the intended role of the RP as a whole, about some of the accepted methods of work in the company.
Experience in the development and understanding of the subject area.
I am opposed to tests and tasks for the parser - which will output one or another line of code and so on. Here are some technical questions that I usually ask candidates for the position of RP:
Project Manager Week. How do you imagine the working week of the RP?
There are no leading questions like “what kind of meetings should be held, how, when and to whom to distribute tasks”, exclusively narration in your own words in a free form. A good candidate leads a fairly extensive scheme of work, where forks depend on the operational situation, project, business tasks and other conditions.
Did you have to recruit people to the team? How would you put the candidate’s qualities in order from most important to less important?
The point of the question is not even to understand whether a person can be engaged in recruiting, but exactly how priorities will be set, whether a person understands what a team is and how to form it. One of the signs of a good candidate is to avoid utopias, theories and bright ideals, to be aware of the realities of a harsh and merciless world.
How do you usually lead (would like to lead) a project? From collecting business requirements to release.
The meaning is the same - reality and experience against theories and assumptions. Usually this question is asked during the first part of the conversation.
Criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of developers. How to evaluate whether the developer is working effectively or not. Should I forbid reading Habr and whether it will increase productivity, does the duration of the presence of a developer in an office influence his efficiency, what to do with delays and so on. Everything is clear here - is a person capable of adequately assessing the effectiveness of his team and how he may influence this effectiveness?
Solving conflict situations. In a team of 4 programmers, one has fallen into inadequate - he becomes psyched, nervous, sends everyone to the forest. The second one, working as a whole well, stalls on some tasks, tries to put them off in every possible way or tries to transfer them to other developers (tasks are not classified, the task of the same type can be perceived differently).
There are no correct answers here, the candidate must go through the situations independently with different development options and propose his own solutions at each stage. Sometimes I propose another type of conflict - two high-ranking people in the company are pulling the blanket in different directions, the RP in this situation is extreme, he is offered to solve this situation.
Fiction.
A question that many seem trivial and useless. I strongly disagree with this. The conversation about literature, besides the natural conclusions about the candidate’s outlook, allows one to assess how easily the candidate moves from a tense conversation about work to an unobtrusive conversation about literary predilections and back.
Rate interface. A prototype of the interface from a pair of layouts is shown, the business requirements are briefly explained, the task is to evaluate and comment on them.
In my opinion, a very important question, but in order to ask it - you need to understand the subject yourself.
My favorite question. As far as I remember, this type of questions is asked in Microsoft and Google, I have long felt its charm in full and use it on all interviews, regardless of position (of course, I mean the IT sphere).
Example: “The task has been set to count how many women in Kaluga walk in heels”. The point is that the question had no solution, forced the candidate to include logic, analytical thinking, imagination and his entire arsenal as a whole. I usually ask for at least two solutions, while trying to find weaknesses in the decisions and in every possible way ruin the theory of the candidate.
In my case, this list is quite enough to form a fairly complete picture of the candidate and make a decision in one direction or another. I deliberately missed a few questions regarding the specifics of the company and the programming language used in order to make the list as universal as possible.
After more than 100 interviews of developers and RPs, I still can’t explain or classify some things, increasingly making sure that staffing is more a matter of intuition, experience and the ability to “see people” than any techniques, questions and secret knowledge. But I still hope that this note will help someone, as well as I will be grateful to any additions and comments in the comments.
For me, the project manager (projects) is a person who primarily has a deep understanding of the subject area, in our case, Internet development, having experience of independent development, being aware of technological and business trends in the market. Similarly to the above-mentioned qualities, the ability to communicate and find a common language with completely different types of people. Knowledge of the RP must lie not only in the plane of development, but also in the prototyping of interfaces, and in design and in Internet marketing.
Perhaps, after the previous paragraph, there will be a feeling that we are looking for supermen-generalists and our utopian demands rarely find a response in the earthly candidates for this position. Naturally, this is partly true (it is really difficult to look for and such people are rarely met), but as practice has shown, such demands bring their dividends and quickly pay for the labor costs of searching for such people.
Of course, for different companies with different business objectives, the requirements for candidates can be very different, but I described my understanding of the “project manager” and I would like to tell you about my approach to finding and hiring an RP of this type.
')
Come back tomorrow
After reviewing the resume and selecting the candidates that interested me, I immediately invite the candidate for an interview. Given the specificity of the requirements, it is possible to form an opinion on the candidate’s professional skills only during direct communication (or I’m just not aware of the secret techniques).
Next, I will definitely pay attention to the various trifles that precede the interview itself — whether assistance was needed in finding an office (I doubt that a person who is unable or unwilling to use a card can manage the processes and people), how a person is dressed, how it goes and how it sits.
The most amazing thing is that all these little things make it possible with a high degree of probability to immediately determine whether a person is suitable or not. If I studied to be a psychologist, I would probably be able to reveal this topic, but for now I have to be content with amateurish conclusions and definitions. For all these points, I am trying to define a person’s self-reliance, his self-confidence, interpersonal skills (a terrible word dragged along the resume), adequacy in general and in general.
Tell all
The main focus of the conversation is the candidate’s story about himself, his achievements, mistakes and experience in general. In the course of the conversation, leading and clarifying questions are asked, and at the end - a series of questions that allow to form a final opinion and make a decision in one direction or another. I take an interview for at least two hours - it takes about an hour to tell the candidate, my questions are designed for another hour of conversation.
During the candidate's story, it is possible to find out very many, important for the work of the RP, the moments - the ability to interest the interlocutor, the ability to expressly communicate thoughts, the ability to “sell yourself”, the ability to argue the point of view. I immediately inform you that we have an hour for this part of the conversation - thus, a person has to count on time and concentrate on the main point, present only significant facts, answer questions without unnecessary details.
During the interview, the interviewer does not sit, propped up on his head with a cam, but participates vividly in it, I can highlight the following points, to which I pay special attention, leading the candidate to clarify them:
- Experience and skills indicated in the resume. The point is not even to catch a person in a lie or exaggeration of their knowledge and merit, but in assessing how well a person balances between a sound assessment of himself and the ability (desire) to sell himself.
- How firmly a person holds his position - I try to convince a person in a particular issue. I especially like to talk about project management systems.
- Reasons for leaving previous companies.
- Experience or knowledge in related areas - internet marketing, interface design, design, layout.
Questions
If after the previous stage the opinion about the candidate has developed negatively, then it doesn’t get to the questions, sometimes some questions are asked during the conversation. Before asking questions, I talk about job responsibilities and the intended role of the RP as a whole, about some of the accepted methods of work in the company.
Experience in the development and understanding of the subject area.
I am opposed to tests and tasks for the parser - which will output one or another line of code and so on. Here are some technical questions that I usually ask candidates for the position of RP:
- What benefits does the PLO provide and does it give at all? Pros and cons of the two approaches - objective and procedural.
- What does AJAX mean, how does it work, what actions need to be taken in order for a registration form with server field validation to appear on site X without reloading the page?
- How to distinguish bad code from good?
- What do you know how to deal with high loads?
- How does the web server work, tell as much as possible? What is the difference between apache and nginx?
- What patterns do you know?
- What are the signs of a good layout?
- What is a version control system that you know, can you use? What advantages do they give the team?
Project Manager Week. How do you imagine the working week of the RP?
There are no leading questions like “what kind of meetings should be held, how, when and to whom to distribute tasks”, exclusively narration in your own words in a free form. A good candidate leads a fairly extensive scheme of work, where forks depend on the operational situation, project, business tasks and other conditions.
Did you have to recruit people to the team? How would you put the candidate’s qualities in order from most important to less important?
The point of the question is not even to understand whether a person can be engaged in recruiting, but exactly how priorities will be set, whether a person understands what a team is and how to form it. One of the signs of a good candidate is to avoid utopias, theories and bright ideals, to be aware of the realities of a harsh and merciless world.
How do you usually lead (would like to lead) a project? From collecting business requirements to release.
The meaning is the same - reality and experience against theories and assumptions. Usually this question is asked during the first part of the conversation.
Criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of developers. How to evaluate whether the developer is working effectively or not. Should I forbid reading Habr and whether it will increase productivity, does the duration of the presence of a developer in an office influence his efficiency, what to do with delays and so on. Everything is clear here - is a person capable of adequately assessing the effectiveness of his team and how he may influence this effectiveness?
Solving conflict situations. In a team of 4 programmers, one has fallen into inadequate - he becomes psyched, nervous, sends everyone to the forest. The second one, working as a whole well, stalls on some tasks, tries to put them off in every possible way or tries to transfer them to other developers (tasks are not classified, the task of the same type can be perceived differently).
There are no correct answers here, the candidate must go through the situations independently with different development options and propose his own solutions at each stage. Sometimes I propose another type of conflict - two high-ranking people in the company are pulling the blanket in different directions, the RP in this situation is extreme, he is offered to solve this situation.
Fiction.
A question that many seem trivial and useless. I strongly disagree with this. The conversation about literature, besides the natural conclusions about the candidate’s outlook, allows one to assess how easily the candidate moves from a tense conversation about work to an unobtrusive conversation about literary predilections and back.
Rate interface. A prototype of the interface from a pair of layouts is shown, the business requirements are briefly explained, the task is to evaluate and comment on them.
In my opinion, a very important question, but in order to ask it - you need to understand the subject yourself.
My favorite question. As far as I remember, this type of questions is asked in Microsoft and Google, I have long felt its charm in full and use it on all interviews, regardless of position (of course, I mean the IT sphere).
Example: “The task has been set to count how many women in Kaluga walk in heels”. The point is that the question had no solution, forced the candidate to include logic, analytical thinking, imagination and his entire arsenal as a whole. I usually ask for at least two solutions, while trying to find weaknesses in the decisions and in every possible way ruin the theory of the candidate.
In my case, this list is quite enough to form a fairly complete picture of the candidate and make a decision in one direction or another. I deliberately missed a few questions regarding the specifics of the company and the programming language used in order to make the list as universal as possible.
We arrived.
After more than 100 interviews of developers and RPs, I still can’t explain or classify some things, increasingly making sure that staffing is more a matter of intuition, experience and the ability to “see people” than any techniques, questions and secret knowledge. But I still hope that this note will help someone, as well as I will be grateful to any additions and comments in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/62622/
All Articles