Team Building – Choosing the best Candidates for Technical Support

What are the best criteria to use for choosing candidates?  It all depends on which phase of the team building process is at hand and the manager’s ability to be a leader.  I suggest to all of my clients that they view their team members as chess pieces.  The biggest correlation between the two is the fact that chess pieces or team members have unique abilities.  All of the unique abilities combined make the team very effective problem solvers.  One team member might be great at handling the pressure for restoring product functionality to 9,990 users, while another team member has the patience to comb through data to determine the cause of the remaining 10 user issues.  One team member likes to travel to customer sites, while another team member works best solving customer issues remotely.   And similar to chess, there is a finite number of team members.  The manager’s job is to understand each team member’s strengths and unique skills as they pertain to the department goals and use those resources to get the job done.  I suggest that the manager performs this analysis themselves rather than rely solely on behavioral assessments.  The reason is that the manager needs to take ownership for the decisions he makes about his team and assessments are data points, not a final report.   Unless the manager wrote every question himself, the standardized assessments defer ownership.

An advantage of the hiring manager performing more of the early sorting steps is the discovery of new unique candidate abilities.  Technology is always changing, so are the skills your department needs in order to be effective.  Review the candidate’s ability, assess the value, and determine whether this will make the team stronger.  Resist the temptation to grow or replace team members with a clone.  Certainly a common foundation of knowledge or experience such as a Bachelor’s Degree or military service is helpful.  Limiting the sorting to an absolute set of requirements though precludes any chance of discovery.  The most knowledgeable and effective engineer that I ever worked with never went to college.