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“They Only Give Us 30 Minutes to Do This, You Know”
“Hey, John (not his real name), why don’t you take a seat? They only give us 30 minutes to do this, you know.” I offer him my hand as he approaches.
“Yes, sir,” he replies, shaking my hand and taking a seat.
“Oh, don’t call me ‘sir,’ that’s what they called my dad. I’m just Jim.” I just violated one of Charles Murray’s Curmudgeon rules: Don’t start the relationship with a young person on the familiar, let it evolve and let the inner curmudgeon offer the time for transition to first-name familiarity. But this is different, I’m at a job fair for veterans and they’ve only given me half an hour to talk to John. My whole day is back-to-back interviews. John isn’t my first interview today and by a long stretch won’t be my last.
I scanned John’s resume last night before the job fair. He’s US Army, doesn’t list his rank on his résumé (some do, most don’t). From the positions that he’s held (the military refers to them as billets) and his time in service, I guess that’s he’s a 1st Lieutenant, maybe recently promoted to Captain. It also looks like he’s been deployed but it’s hard to tell. Some list their deployments, most don’t. He’s Infantry.
“So, were you deployed?” I ask.
“Yes, sir,” he catches himself, we both smile. “I went to Afghanistan in…”
I interrupt him, “Okay, good, when you were over there did they give you an interpreter to work with?” Normally I won’t interrupt a candidate during an interview. I prefer the conversation to be a seesaw-like back and forth. But this is different, I only have 30 minutes and I need to cover some ground.
“Yes, they did,” he says.
“How was his English?” I ask. I already know the answer: not good.
“Not so great,” he replies.
“Okay, so tell me how you worked with, and used, a translator with not-so-great-English,” I ask.
“Well, the first thing you need to do is make friends with him, then you…”
Bingo, good answer. I’m interviewing John for a team lead position with my company. If hired, he’ll lead eight to 12 developers. We do software development and have lots of foreign nationals in our technical positions.
One of things that I learned long ago is that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on people who can develop complex code for software. There are schools in Europe and Asia that can turn out software developers on par with what we turn out here in the States. I’m not here looking for technical talent. We interview at US and foreign engineering schools for that. I’m here today looking for people who can lead technical talent in small teams.
Most of my developers have great English-language skills, but some not so much. You’ve got to work with these guys because despite the fact that they have not-so-great English, their programming skills are world class … literally. There’s going to be a real reluctance on their part to bring you problems or ask for help because, well, no one likes to feel less than capable. The solution is simple: make them your friend and the reluctance will fall away. John’s answer is a been-there-done-that one.
I let John roll for a while but find a place to get the conversation back. “Okay, so when you were deployed, you picked up a platoon that was already there, right?”
“That’s right,” he says.
“OK, so tell me how you went about taking over the platoon.”
“The platoon lead that came before me had been moved up to a company slot,” he said. “So the first thing I did was get a brief from him, then I met with the senior enlisted from the platoon, and…”
Another good answer. If I hire him I will, no doubt, ask him at some point to take over an existing team within a project. He’ll have senior technicians on his team. He’ll learn fairly quickly that they can give him the best data when it comes to day-to-day operations, personalities, issues, relationships with clients, and the like.
We’ll go back and forth like this for the next 20 or so minutes. I’m keenly interested in how he answers team-related questions. Particularly about dealing with members of the team on a day-in/day-out basis.
I work for a global consulting company. If we hire John, his work will be 100 percent travel. We go “on site” with the client to do our development work. When John goes on site he may very likely stay in the same hotel, eat in the same restaurants, and perhaps fly on the same flights as his team members. Needless to say, he’ll work with them throughout the day.
I’ve been a consultant for longer than I can remember (I have ties older than most of the junior members of our team). I’ve gone long stretches where I only went home on the weekends and consequently spent more time with my team than with my family. Ignore for the moment the hardship this creates at home. My experience tells me that people who don’t know how to work for long stretches with the same people will isolate, withdrawing from the team (“Hey man, I just need my space, you know what I mean?”) and then eventually leave. Staying in close, constant proximity to the people they work with is not something they can handle. Service men and women who have deployed overseas understand this “proximity problem” in spades. They already know how to walk the fine line between isolation and over-familiarity, with themselves and with others.
John consistently gives me the answers that tell me he’ll make a good team lead. Service veterans are beyond the question of do-they-or-don’t-they have leadership potential. Men and women without that potential are eliminated by the military as part of their officer selection process and the promotion process for enlisted men and women.
This is not my first veteran job fair. Last year we hired eight veterans into my group. For the most part, we don’t measure individual performance, per se, we measure teams. After one year the veteran-led teams are ranked in the top 10 percent. The client loves them, the team loves them, and management loves them. And their teams deliver.
I may have come to veteran job fairs originally as part of some outreach program. Not anymore. Now I’m looking for leads and this place is a gold mine.
Near the end of the 30 minutes I’ll flip the interview around. “So, I’ve been asking all the questions. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?” The questions are varied but I almost always get questions around the travel. Yes, we reimburse. No, I don’t care where you live so long as you can easily get to an airport served by a commercial airline. John asks me, “during your corporate presentation, you said something about being millennial-friendly. What does that mean?”
On the first day of the job fair each company makes a 30-minute presentation on who they are, the type of business that they’re in, how fast they’ve been growing, etc. Our overview was done by a colleague. I vaguely remember the millennial comment. I can’t remember my exact answer, but tried to leave John with the impression that young people like working for us, which is true.
I later mention John’s question to my son, who is a Captain in the Marine Reserves. My son laughs. “Yeah, in the military, millennial is code for ‘problem child.’” Hmm … OK … Important note, strike the comments about millennials from our overview.
I’ll put John through to the next round of interviews that will be held in a few weeks at our corporate headquarters. These will be a bit more leisurely in structure and he’ll interview with me and several of my team leads. He’ll do well, I can tell. I’m not new to the interviewing process. He’ll do well.
Published in General
It’s interesting, I recently turned down an offer largely because I got such a bad feeling about the company’s attitude toward reservists. I don’t think the company was anti-military, but it was pretty clear the hiring manager wasn’t familiar with it and was the kind of guy who wanted you in contact 24/7.
When I got out of the military, I went with one of the various head hunters that specialize in placing junior military officers (JMO’s). My experience was not very positive. Unless you were an engineer (I was) they were focused on placing officers with sweat shops. One recruiter even acted as though it was a selling point that he expected his “managers” to work the laundry machines if the high turn-over hourly workers didn’t show up. I’m sorry, but I didn’t go to college and serve as an officer of Marines for six years (at that time) to run a laundromat.
I got the impression, back in the mid 90’s, that the goal was to exploit military officers to work horrible jobs with empty promises of advancement possibilities. Even as an engineer, I took a job that I realized on showing up the first day, was a sweat shop. I was expected to work 13 days every two weeks, about 12 hours a day. I foolishly kept that job for two years.
JMO recruiters rely on military officers having an ethic of mission accomplishment that is entirely misplaced in the civilian world. It is not rewarded or valued, except by sweat shops — who only value it but don’t reward it. In the civilian world you are rewarded for making the boss look good or yourself look good, damn the best interests of the corporation.
cont’d
After many years’ experience in the civilian world I learned a few key rules:
I learned in the military that hard work and results are rewarded. In the civilian world, it’s not so true. Self promotion is often all that is rewarded.
Self-employment may not bring riches (and it might) but it does bring freedom.
Unless you work for the government or a large company that does a lot of business with the government, it is usually very difficult to keep a job while a member of the reserves, or at least it’s very hard to advance in that civilian job.
It worked for me when I was self-employed, but only when I could get a billet near where I lived. It was very nice for the benefits, but when I had to fly from Austin to Kansas City every month for three years, I didn’t make any money at all.
This is fantastic advice here – much to mull over.
And since we’re talking hiring, I do have 1 or 2 slots right now for electrical engineers in central Ohio.
Thanks Brent, my first main feed promotion. I enjoyed writing it.
More.
It’s critical to remember that an interview is a two way street. You are also evaluating the company to see if they are worth working for.
I was once invited to an interview with a company outside Austin that was looking for someone to help them in their manufacturing facility. The hiring manager was a young guy very impressed with himself. He asked me to rate how good I was using Microsoft Excel on a scale of one to ten. I went into detail with my answer, telling him all the cool things I knew how to do with it, but acknowledged that it’s a very complex program and there’s always more to learn. I said I was a nine on some arbitrary scale.
“Oh, really?” He said. “I’m only a seven myself.” His tone of voice clearly implied that since he was the manager that I could not possibly know as much about it as he did. I was probably 15 years older than him and I was in my late 30’s.
I told him he failed the interview, and I was not interested in his job. Well, I was a bit more polite than that, but I did leave the interview earlier than he wanted.
And to leave on a positive note, I worked for a company that laid us off and moved production to Mexico. I was out of work again at no fault of my own. It took a long time to get interviews and job offers, but on three consecutive days I got three fantastic job interviews.
I took the gig with the Marines, did six months of school for a new MOS and immediately went to Iraq with an infantry battalion. When I gave the news to the Tucson and Tennessee companies, they both told me they would hold the job for me until I got back. The Tucson job even called when I got back and tried to coax me over.
But I went to law school instead. Both of those jobs were great jobs working for great people. But freedom is more important. Now I am free, working for myself and not having to do desperate interviews every time my company makes dumb decisions and I get laid off again.
I need to get down to Suwanee again. This time we can hit that little cigar shop, not sure where it is, a co-worker took me there.
Call me when you get back. We can see if we can get JPark out again.
Steve, I might be wrong but a billet is for officers and a barracks is for enlisted men.
Unless it’s a bivouac-