Interviewing acumen

Before Mike Johnson took a job as network administrator with the Urban Development Department for the city of Tulsa, Okla., he found himself in a job-hunting quandary. He was getting screened out of interview opportunities by hiring interns and headhunters who knew nothing beyond what acronyms to look for in a résumé.

"If my résumé did not have the exact buzzwords and certifications on it and did not fit the job description precisely, they would not have even told anyone about it," Johnson says.

Fortunately for Johnson, Tulsa Urban Development signed him on for an interview even though he lacked the primary skill - Windows NT expertise - required for the job. In detailing project experiences, Johnson convinced the hiring manager that he was the right guy for the job.

"I may not have had any Windows NT experience, but I've been in networking for 20 years and have been a [Certified Novell Engineer] since 1990. I was sure I could figure out Windows NT," he says. "So I told them about projects I had worked on and gave them specific examples."

Johnson's experience of being shut out from job opportunities for lack of specific skills is all too common in the IT profession, hiring experts say. Most technically oriented people over-rely on a job candidate's skills, education and training, says Lou Adler, president of The Adler Group, a training and consulting firm that specializes in recruitment strategies.

Adler tells the hiring managers he's working with to focus on what the person needs to do with the skills, not on skills themselves. "What's the project? What does the person need to be successful on the project?" he says.

Adler based this approach on a technique called the behavioral event interview (BEI). In a BEI, a hiring manager drills down on candidates' true competencies primarily by assessing how they would address hypothetical work challenges and, most importantly, by delving into the experiences job candidates identify as the most career-significant.

A BEI centers on knowing what core competencies - not skills - are essential to a job, explains Linda Pittenger, CEO of People3, a Gartner company specializing in IT human capital management. She defines a competency as a single or set of characteristics that differentiate and predict superior performance in any given job or role.

"If you have 10 programmers and Mary and Johnny are the best by far, we don't care about what the 10 do all day. What we really care about is what Mary and Johnny do that's different than the other eight," Pittenger says. "If they talk to customers more and understand competitors better, then that's what you're looking to hire for."

So if you learn during an interview that one of the toughest challenges a job candidate ever faced was dealing with a delayed application rollout, you would probe for information on how the person handled that situation. "If the last thing they did was talk to the customers, then they don't make it. That's the end of the interview," Pittenger says.

"Instead, most interviewers will ask job candidates how many years of networking they have," he says. "I'd rather have a customer-service person, if that's one of the competencies, and send that person to certification school. You can't teach people those competencies, you can teach them the skills."