The ideal project manager, um, software developer, make that employee
Being a services firm, recruiting is one of our most important (and challenging) functions. Rather than hiring specialists, we tend to hire Jacks-and-Jills-of-all-trades. We look for people that know a lot of different software technologies, people who always want to learn more, and people with strong non-technical skills.
As we grow, it becomes harder and harder to "teach" the newest employees what we look for in candidates. To help describe what we're looking for in the interview process, we came up with the concept of an "Ideal Employee Law":
Programming Experience * Problem Solving Skills * Ability/Interest to Learn Technical Things = Energy/Attitude * Consulting Skills * Professional Skills * Communication Skills * Leadership Skills * The “Everything Else” Constant
The name might ring a bell with anyone who took high school chemistry.It's sort of a “PV=nRT” for recruiting. What's it mean?
- The "product" of the attributes on the left (technical skills) has to "equal" the product of the attributes on the right (non-technical skills). In short, the best candidates have strong technical skills AND strong "soft" skills like communication skills, organization skills, and leadership skills.
- A strength in one skill can offset a deficit in another. For example, we'd overlook a candidate's relatively "light" programming experience if they provide proof of an exceptional ability to learn new technical skills (because, hey, if they can learn new technical things, they can learn a new programming language). However, skills on the left side of the equation can't replace those on the right or vice-versa. In other words, even the best communication skills can’t offset a lack of programming skills.
- There's a sort of “Plank's Constant” involved (the "Everything Else Constant") which means we have a min. bar that every candidate must exceed. It's a high bar. It also provides us a way to “tune” the formula based on a candidate’s overall work experience. We don’t expect a senior in college to have the same skills as someone with ten years of industry experience.
- We don't actually use a “formula” when evaluating candidates, but we absolutely use the concepts it embodies.
The attributes above are pretty specific to our line of work, but I think the principle applies to any job hence the title of this post. The emphasis is on a broad range of skills rather than specific attributes, so it really can work with almost any job. Feel free to plug in your own. It’s also my belief that somebody who fits the above equation will do well in almost any activity in which they participate. More than one of our employees came with a reference from a former supervisor along the lines of “I don’t know what this person’s job will entail, but you’d be an idiot not to hire him.”
These people are out there but certainly not en masse. We extend offers to less than 10% of the candidates we interview. The upside is that we end up with strong software developers that can also communicate with our clients, understand a client’s business, with whom the client enjoys working, eventually lead a team, and are highly interchangeable among projects. The “downside” is that once our clients work with these people, they never want them to leave <g>. The developers also free up our Engagement Managers’ time to concentrate on other issues. Likewise, because our Engagement Managers have strong technology backgrounds, they can accurately estimate development effort (so they rarely over-promise), help the more junior people on the project solve difficult programming problems, teach “programmers” how to become “team leads”, etc. It also enables us to staff smaller teams which saves our clients $$.
In my experience, IT firms tend to look for people that only fill out one side of the Ideal Employee equation, and they end up with top-notch programmers that can’t see the big picture or project managers that have no idea what the team is working on (nor can they help with difficult issues).