On 3 Jul 2001, at 13:29, Jim Utkin wrote: > A few days later I learned from a recruiter that I was passed for the > position, because some of the "team members" found me too aggressive. > Since I know I didn't try to bite anyone and I was too tired to lunge > towards someone, it came down to a potential subordinate being > threatened by me for what ever reason. I'm not claiming I was unjustly > judged, I am sharing this story, to maybe help others recognize clues > that they can use to avoid a bad interview. I've been in a situation that was almost the opposite. My employer was trying to hire a "Director of Engineering", a post that was temporarily being filled by a contractor. The consensus of those of us reporting to said contractor was that he had no leverage with the VP the position reported to, who in turn was willing to tell anyone whatever he thought they wanted to hear, even if he'd told a slightly different audience the exact opposite an hour ago. So anyway, we get this guy in to interview, and his last eight positions have all been "Director of X" with various organizations. I'm not privy to what happened in his other interviews, but in the meeting with "the team" of reports, one of my colleagues asked him, looking at his string of "Director" positions, how much of what he did was hands-on engineering and how much was "management". He told us that they had, collectively, been about 80% hands-on engineering. He *may* have expected that answer to ingratiate him with a bunch of engineers, but in fact our consensus was that another senior engineer was NOT what the team needed. As far as I know, the feedback from the "team" was uniformly negative. Now as I say, I don't actually know what happened in his interviews with peers and superiors. However, the chain of subsequent events was reported to have gone something like this: 1. Company offered him the job (despite negative reaction of team). 2. Candidatre went to current boss, used our company's offer to pry loose some plums he'd been lobbying for for a while. 3. Candidate turned down offer, having got plums. 4. Company HR began to hear back from his references -- which were NOT checking out.... Conclusion: There is more than one reason why subordinates might judge a candidate negatively.... Dave Gillett
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jul 05 2001 - 17:06:29 PDT