Research Computing Teams Link Roundup, 8 Oct 2021
Let me tell you about a mini-fiasco this week that was entirely my own doing.
In our team, we routinely hire students for semester-long co-op positions. It happens three times a year - I think we’ve taken part 12 times over the past five years. It generally works out pretty well, for us and the co-op student.
The process is pretty uneventful generally. Our tireless administrative staff, without whom the place would fall apart, lets me know that it’s time again; we post our usual job ad; we interview some students and submit a ranked list. We’ve lately been pretty good at having projects ready for them on day one.
We had a couple more potential student supervisors with projects this semester, which is good. In the past year we’ve been upping our game at hiring full time staff, and part of that is better job ads; so we wrote a much better job ad for the co-op position this year and that resulted in fewer candidates but who were overall much better matches for the team. Win-win!
And, my fellow managers and leads, I’m ashamed to tell you that that’s where it all fell apart.
Because we had fewer, better matches, and more potential supervisors, triaging the resumes - which was my job - was harder and I didn’t do it in time. Our admin, after an earlier prompt, let me know the last possible day to interview was the next day. I dumped a pile of resumes at end of day on our volunteer supervisors, who had hours to read them after hours and choose preferred candidates. Our interviews were ill-prepared, and we didn’t have as much communication with the candidates before and afterwards as we would have liked. A bunch of meetings had to be cancelled and rescheduled because there was only one window to interview the students. The remainder of the week was all messed up.
The outcome was ok, but not great - we found some really good candidates, but we shredded credibility with them because we were visibly unprepared. One has already been poached by someone in another team in our org, and if we had coordinated earlier we could have known about the shared interest. And it completely screwed up our week and stressed out volunteer supervisors - who don’t have to do this next time around.
So why are dates of something that happens on a schedule three times a year and has done so for the past five years coming as a surprise to me and the co-op interviewers? Why was I being a bottleneck for triaging resumes - why not have the supervisors do it? (Because that’s how I did it four years ago when I was the only supervisor). Why are we making our admin, who has other things to do, patiently shepherd us through an utterly routine occurrence that we should have down pat?
More fundamentally - the co-op student hiring process is both something we do all the time, and is the fastest feedback loop we have for improving our hiring process. Why, after 12 iterations, did I not have a runbook for doing this, with a systematic way of learning and improving both the co-op process and our interviewing process for hiring in general?
The answer of course is that it was going well enough, there were no flashing red lights, and there was always something else demanding attention.
But building a process for this at any time over the past four years would have been a very valuable activity for me. It would have helped me delegate tasks that I oughtn’t have been doing, improved our team’s interviewing and hiring skills, helped us find better matches for co-op students, and improved our co-ops experience throughout the process(which helps with referrals and full-time hires).
The situation is utterly goofy. Had I been talking to a peer and they told me they had this issue, I would have encouraged them to address it. And, in my own job - I just didn’t. Even when we know the right thing to do as managers to improve our processes and help our team, it’s really easy to be caught up in other priorities -“now’s just not the right time”.
Anyway: a learning opportunity. Next time through there will be a runbook, and it’ll go better. But this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Do you have processes in your current job that badly need updating - or have you improved one lately? How’s it going? Email me and let me know.
Life Labs Learning, a management/leadership training company, has a Google Doc template interviewing playbook for team members that can be a starting point for a given team and role. It’s short but gives good guidance on creating the process for the manager, and how to conduct the interview for novice interviewers.
These are about managing and decision-making generally, but they apply very much to hiring.
The key idea of both is that, while people often list the things they value in their team -“independence”,“delivers results”,“attention to detail” - listing them as standalone values is meaningless. Nobody thinks independence, delivering results, or attention to detail are bad things, so saying you value them communicates nothing and can’t inform decisions.
But these values have tradeoffs. They’re one end of a spectrum that has another end. For these to be principled choices rather than just feel-good assertions, you have to explicitly own that if you’re hiring for“independence” you’re also hiring for“chafes at detailed guidance”.
Rubick recommends specific“We value this, over this” structures to clarify team decision making, regardless of the context:
Managing Teams