MAKING YOUR MILES COUNT Robert D. Scheper
Practical application of: Humble, Hungry, Smart! Hiring people is always a challenge… at least for me. I am generally not good at it as I tend to believe everyone will do whatever it takes to be successful. I have learned to water down that impression somewhat, but I must constantly monitor my impulses.
their deliveries. Being interested in your field of study means you will FIND ways to use your abilities naturally… without being told what to do. It’s a measure of personal initiative. If someone displays hunger, they go to the top of the pile.
Over the last month or so I’ve had to oversee hiring another programmer. After harvesting a stack of resumes, we began the interviewing process. What was different this time was a book I read just a few weeks ago called “The Ideal Team Player” by Patrick Lincioni. It is an awesome book for team building. The read is easy since it is in story format (Socratic). With the simple outline of Humble, Hungry, Smart! our IT leadership went about evaluating the interviews.
At the end of the first interview, we gave the applicants the option to view some training videos we have on the specific languages we use. They were each given a username and password so they could watch them at home, on their own time, before the next interview… if they chose to. Only two chose to watch; the same two that wrote their own programs. Then, of the two, one spent only a half-hour watching the 14 available hours of videos, but the top contender watched over five hours. We had only one hungry applicant.
We had four finalists that made it to the physical interview process. Almost immediately it was brought down to three. It appeared all three applicants could do the job. Their resumes were very similar, in fact, almost identical (font included). All of them took the exact same courses from the exact same college. Given what they took in college could hardly scratch the surface of what we needed, we began the frustrating process. One feature we look for in programming, more than anything else, is what projects have they developed on their own… apart from work and school assignments. Two of the three had this experience. One applicant wrote a program that scanned grocery prices and kept a total of what was in the cart. Another applicant wrote a scheduling program for a non-profit to help in 10 • OVER THE ROAD
Within five minutes of the second interview, the applicant (who had viewed only a half-hour of the videos) told us he required a base pay rate more than what our existing team began with-in their first year. Upon explaining our dilemma, the applicant stood up and walked out of the interview... and went back to his construction job (shovelling concrete if my memory recalls correctly). It’s not exactly the humble reaction we were looking for… or the “smart with people” response either. About an hour into the final applicant’s interview process, he too began making what we thought was unrealistic demands. Apparently, the government program he was on allowed him to benefit by receiving the same income as our starting wage and he thought it would be better AUGUST 2021
