I’m going to be interviewing for a small team of creative/developers in the next few months. I’m thinking of getting each candidate to put together a short pitch, based on our ideas so I know they get what we’re trying to acheive. Of course we’ll communicate all that prior to the actual interview, and give them a week or so to prepare.
Has anyone had experience of this either from an employer or candidate perspective, what worked, what didn’t. Note this part of the interview process isn’t technical, it’s about understanding the big picture of our business.
To re-enforce the programming nature of the question, how do you make sure your new coding hires get what the business is trying to acheive? Technical skill is important, but in our situation they also need to understand our market and products.
I actually think this is a pretty good question. There are a few ways of looking at this.
Firstly, this could be seen negatively for one reason: one thing you can do in a normal interview to sort the wheat from the chaff is ask them what they know about your company and industry. The good candidates–those that are keen to work for you and generally eager and inquisitive–will have looked you up and at least gone to your website (if you have one) and found out what it is you do. So by asking them this upfront you are losing the opportunity to see how much initiative they take. Of course you make up for this in other areas eg by asking off-book questions that a reasonable person may have looked up anyway.
The other potential negative is that it can often be hard to understand an industry, a business or a product from the outside looking in. I worked in stockbroking, for example, and it’s not until you get to a place like that that you can see all the different teams (eg New Accounts, Compliance, Settlements, Accounts, Call Centre and so on) and get an understanding of what they do and why they do it. Understadning the culture is also hard without being a part of it.
So Brann is right in that you want someone who is capable of understanding it rather than someone who actually does. You might be excluding good potential hires who will pick up your business quite quickly.
That being said, I like where you’re going with the question. Forcing a candidate to think about things like that is a good idea. Perhaps you could narrow the focus to a single aspect of your business, which is more digestable in a typically hour-long interview. This will also allow you to give you the opportunity to see how much initative they took beyond the scope of the original question.