In Part 1, I shared my criteria for selecting a great Project Manager. Once you have the criteria, how do you identify all those traits during the interview process? Below is an approach I’ve used successfully for many years.

The hiring process for a Project Manager is usually tough. My approach below doesn’t make it any easier on them, but it will ensure you cover all your bases before hiring the right candidate. I have to say that experienced PMs won’t be strangers to this type of approach, so there’s no need to cut corners. In general, whoever makes it to the finish line of this 4-step process will most likely be a stellar candidate.

Step 1: HR interview

This is the beginning of the funnel. After reviewing many resumes, an HR representative contacts the candidates who stood out. The goal is to get some basic information about their experience, interest in the company, etc. The better the description you give HR of what you are looking for, the better they’ll be able to filter candidates for you. The importance of this step is that HR will be able to filter many candidates that looked good on paper but aren’t really a good fit. Without this help, you’ll spend most of your day reviewing resumes and having screening calls that go nowhere. If you work at a small company and can’t afford this luxury, find a way to delegate. HR folks are professionals, but that doesn’t mean you can’t train your admin or somebody else to help you with this load.

As a rule of thumb, I like to check the candidate’s salary expectations at this point (unless it’s one of my direct reports doing the screening for me). I’m not looking to box them into a number, but I want to know if their expectations are aligned to mine. If the salary requirements are way off, then it’s best to save everybody’s time and move on to the next candidate. When having this conversation, make sure HR understands if the candidate’s request is just base salary or full compensation package. That can make a big difference. I’ve seen some huge discrepancies especially with freelancers that are used to being paid by the hour.

My advice here is to do your homework and get a feel of what the market is paying for the type of candidate you are looking for as well as how much your company is willing to pay for that position. A good place to get a feel for the market is Salary.com. Once you are familiar with market and internal ranges, then you can adjust your expectations on the level of candidate you can realistically afford. Usually HR takes care of all this for you, so check with them first. If the range is off, then you’ll need to pitch to your Executives why they need to invest more/less to get the experience level you require. “You get what you pay for” is usually true here, and like everything else, great Project Managers will be expensive.

Step 2: Hiring manager conversation

After HR sends me a handful of viable candidates, the next step is for me (or the hiring manager) to have a conversation with the candidate. This is a short conversation to see if the candidate has the right experience and personality to join the team. I usually do a 30-minute call mostly to see if we click and if I feel this person is a good fit. I also take the time to give a deeper overview of what the position is and what my expectations are. During this interview, I ask them a few open-ended questions such as:

• Can you walk me through your resume? (How they go about this tells you a lot about their oral skills.)
• What do you consider your biggest accomplishments?
  
• Where do you want to take your career and how will this position help you get there?
• Why do you want to work for this particular company?
• Knowing what you know of our company and the role, what can you bring to the table?

Assuming we clicked and I get a good gut feel, then I’ll move them to the Team interview. I always keep in mind that by advancing a candidate, I’ll be asking for time from my teams, collegues and even executives. Before I do that, I need to make sure this candidate has a decent potential to make it all the way through. If I have doubts and I bring them in “just to see how they do”, then I’ll be wasting people’s time, and I’ll be harming my reputation as a hiring manager.

Step 3: Team interview

During this step, I usually ask the candidate to come on-site and interview with representatives of the key areas she’d be working with. This usually takes several interviews but I try to schedule this stage in one day out of respect to the candidate. If the PM will be working with development, make sure she meets with developers and dev management. Involved with Sales? Then somebody from Sales needs to talk to her. You get the picture.

I also make sure the candidate meets with her peers. Encourage them to understand what the day-to-day looks like and also what it is like to have you as their manager. They are evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them, so transparency is key.

I like to leave the format of the interview to each of the groups. They know best how they’ll be interacting with the PM, so they’ll know what to ask. I usually schedule a more formal interview with this candidate. Here I go deeper into “scenario-based” questions to know how they handle specific situations. Basically I conduct a behavioral interview. I leave the “technical” PM interview to their peers. I personally dislike “puzzle” type questions. Maybe it’s because I’m awful at standardized tests, but I just don’t think solving a small puzzle tells you much about a candidate. I’d rather ask situational questions related to the role and probe deeper from there. For example:

• Tell me about a time when a project you were managing failed. (key here is to let them define what “failed” means to them.)
• Can you give me an example of how you dealt with a difficult team member? (difficult client, peer, etc)
• I’d like to hear your thoughts on a S.W.O.T analysis of our company. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)

Once all the sessions are done, I organize a debriefing session with everybody involved. In order to move forward, the decision has to be unanimous. There shouldn’t be any doubts or questions. If a single interviewer has doubts, that’s an automatic “no” for me.

Step 4: Presentation

This is where the rubber meets the road. Many people are good at interviewing, so how do you know if they are the real deal? Well, you test them out. The goal of the presentation is to evaluate their overall knowledge, attention to detail, presentation skills and how they work under pressure.

In preparation for the presentation, I give the candidate instructions. I’ve found that asking them to drive a typical PM meeting (kickoff, postmortem, status update, etc) works really well. Take a kickoff for example. The instructions will include fake project instructions; basically it includes the info a PM would get in order to prepare a kickoff meeting like company and project background, timelines, budget, constraints, etc. The goal is for the candidate to take this info and drive the meeting as if they were presenting to clients or internal stakeholders.

It’s important to be upfront with how long you expect the preparation will take. The ones I’ve done usually take between 4-8 hours of prep. In this case I give them the prep materials 5 to 8 days in advance so they have plenty of time to prepare. The presentation itself is usually 45 minutes with time for Q&A.

During the presentation, I usually invite other people to play various fictitious roles like Sales, Marketing, Development, etc. The tone needs to be friendly, so the candidate can feel at ease. An interview is a stressful situation to begin with. The goal is to ask many questions and throw a few curve balls to see the candidate react on the spot. For example, change some of the assumptions included in their prep package, reduce the budget or cut the timeline short. The candidate will have to think on the fly on how to make the project work under these new constraints. They’ll have to think on their feet while keeping their cool. That’s exactly what you want.

It’s amazing how many candidates fail during this process. They forget their content, become visibly frustrated, get snappy or even get aggressive. All these behaviors wouldn’t come out during normal interviews. This presentation will give you a good feel for how this candidate will perform in the real world. The best PMs know how to always keep their cool and be professional at all times. No matter what.

After the presentation is done, I ask everybody involved for feedback and their recommendation. It needs to be either “hire” or “don’t hire”. There’s no in between.

The Bottom Line

Software Project Managers, like any other leadership position, are always very key hires. This process might seem overkill, but believe me, you’ll be glad you used it. Many Project Managers that I’ve hired tell me that they actually enjoyed the process and would like to see future hires go through it. They acknowledge that the bar is high, but they understand that the goal is to find the PMs who pass with flying colors.