Hiring Engineering Managers
Hiring highly-qualified, high-performing, results-driven, culture-aligned engineers can be a challenge for any company. However, the process of hiring individual contributors (ICs) is a well-trod path given that cohort comprises the vast majority of engineering hires; managing the sheer volume of people who compete for those positions means that the associated processes that must exist to source, filter, validate, and ultimately hire them are quite robust at this stage.
On the other hand, hiring engineering managers (EMs) is a different beast. At many companies, the EM hiring process is a near-wholesale derivative of IC processes (with minor adjustments) where the same sets of competencies are evaluated (e.g. architecture, coding, culture, etc.) This means they often neglect a key aspect of strong leadership: how to derive meaningful signals about the ability of the individual to effectively lead diverse teams with objectivity and without conscious or unconscious bias.
Isn’t Objectivity and Lack of Bias Important for Everyone?
Without a doubt, but the key question in this context is about understanding the potential scope of negative impact and time-to-remediate a bad hire.
Assuming a team was unable to identify deal-breaking biases and behaviors until an IC was hired, the fallout of this sort of hiring misstep can be contained to the individual or to a narrow subset of co-workers. Terminating the employee would result in a temporary reduction in team throughput in the worst case.
However, when we look at bad engineering manager hires, the potential breadth of impact of these deficiencies in leadership are multiplied through the basic nature of the job—leading a team of people. A bad EM hire, if not identified and corrected swiftly, can put a team back in terms of morale, productivity, and engagement while increasing the likelihood of attrition. There’s a reason we say that “people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers.”
So, yes, possessing a strong sense of fairness untainted by bias is important for everyone, but some mistakes have magnified impact.
Behavioral Questions to the Rescue?
In the traditional process, behavioral interview questions are the tools used to triangulate on “soft” skills. They are called “soft” because even though there often are no absolute correct responses, there are clearly bad responses. Most seasoned managers, however, can easily navigate the obvious behavioral traps that are being laid out during these interviews.
For example, a typical behavioral interview for an EM might be: “Describe a time when you had to manage a poor performer.” What are the salient points this question seeks to understand?
Do they understand the nature of the underperformance and underlying causes?
Are they able to connect the individual’s circumstances (personal or professional) to their performance? How?
What steps, if any, did they take to handle the poor performance? e.g.
coaching/mentoring
performance improvement plan (PIP); if so, what was the approach?
nothing—went straight to termination
Do they display empathy in describing the situation?
How do they characterize the underperforming individual when describing the scenario? i.e. do they disparage the person?
Depending on the outcome (i.e. termination or retention), do they take any accountability for the situation and outcome?
Have they learned anything from the experience they’ve described?
Would they do anything differently in hindsight?
Provided the EM candidate has dealt with this not-uncommon situation in their past, these questions are effectively softballs to which they can respond to in ways that send the correct signals even if they do not represent their true behaviors and actions. As such, these behavioral interviews may provide some measure of signal around actual depth of experience, they do little to surface the dangerous biases that lead to catastrophic hires.