The following is a true story. The name of the client has been changed, and a sufficient amount of time has passed that the story can be told without repercussion. I'm going to share with you the hiring strategy of a hiring manager who was looking for PC Techs for work on an enterprise level account,
The pay rate was $12-$16 an hour, and our billing was only $15.96-$21.28, a 33% mark-up as required by the service level agreement we signed to be a vendor. The manager didn't like me, ostensibly because I wasn't his favored guy, and we had "horned" our way into the contract with a low price negotiated outside of the RFP as a favor to one of our executives.
33% mark-up, and a low pay rate to boot. But I was instructed to find the people, and was informed that to be a team player, I needed to work on this account.
Being a Team Player.
I'm not sure if it's something they put in the Kool-Aid, but I've been asked several times in my life if I'm a team player. It has always been my managers two levels up from me that want me to do something that is against my best interest, and they always ask me to say, "out loud" that I'm a team player.
Do they really think that having me say it out loud is going to change my mind and brainwash me? Don't they know that nonsense like that only works on Tom Cruise in the movies? Seriously - if you have to ask someone if they are a team player, and then you have to tell them to say it out loud, then they are not a team player, and you're an idiot for asking them.
But back to the story.
So I'm working on a low-margin account for the good of the reputation of a higher-up (and actually bad for my team of recruiters), and the manager isn't too happy with me, but he has to work with me because we're the cheapest.
That's the situation we start with. But the topic was how this manager screened candidates. How did this technically proficient manager with vast experience in PC work (certainly more than the lowly recruiter) screen candidates? He used three questions.
1) Question: Do you have your A+ and your MCSE for Windows 2000? (Remember the pay rate)
2) Question: What do you do when you see the Blue Screen of Death?
3) On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the highest, how do you rate yourself.The correct answers you needed to move on to the next round
1) I have both certifications, here are the certificates
2) Reboot
3) 5-8, and the person with an 8 better walk on water.The third question was the real clincher. The manager theorized over sushi one day( $120 for him and another "manager"), that anyone who rated themselves 8 or higher didn't know enough to know what they didn't know, while anyone under 5 had no confidence.
Based on the third response, the manager would then move on to technical questions based on your answer. Most dealt with network servers (he pulled the questions from an MCSE practice exam), a topic completely unrelated to the work the techs would be doing.
Your best best for this manager, was to tell him a 5 or 6, and study up on your MCSE questions, but it took me 14 interviews to get to the point where he explained how he interviewed.
Shortly after our breakthrough lunch, his contract was cut and he no longer needed new technicians.
What is the moral of the story? Well, the first is not to work with people who don't want to work with you, and not to work for companies who don't let you do your jobs. But the second point, and the relevant one, is that managers, for all their technical knowledge (and this manager was a good tech), often have no idea on how to hire. They know as much about hiring as recruiters know about Java Classes.
If you really want to be successul, your first step in recruiting is making sure your account managers can build relationships with hiring managers as consultants on the hiring process. You have to give them your expertise to gain their trust. And if you are not an expert at hiring, you don't belong in the business.
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