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Engineering director interview

Let's discuss what skills we want to test for engineering director. De facto, we need to check all the same things as for a team leader and even more, as shown in the figure below.

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In addition to team leadership skills, I check the following things with engineering director candidates:

Alignment of business and IT needs: what is the business, what is the mission and business strategy, how is it supported by IT, how are these goals cascaded into teams?

The structure of IT: how the work is aligned in the candidate's department, what is the structure of the teams and their interactions. How the work is aligned with other functions within the organization.

How functions such as hiring, performance review, budgeting are aligned.

Soft skills: how well the candidate is able to argument their thoughts and share their approach to the management. This is important as the candidate will be working with leaderships and not with line employees, so they will need to share with them an understanding of how to be a good leader.

Technical strategy: it is not enough for this position to have an alignment with the business. It is essential that the person has the ability to build a technical strategy for his/her division that fits into the more top-level strategies of the whole company.

And the final touch is the reasoning behind the transitions between jobs: what the candidate left and what he/she was going for in each new place.

I should also note that engineering director is quite a unique case, so we can approach their recruitment in a personalized way, combining hiring into a team with hiring into a company.

I start by reviewing the resume and highlighting the key milestones that would be interesting to discuss. At the interview itself, I suggest starting with the candidate's most recent job, and then I start asking STAR questions, with the questions centered around the topics I mentioned above.

The STAR approach itself is to:

Start from the Situation

Consider what the Tasks were there

What Actions were taken

What Results were obtained

As a result, asking these questions in a loop helps to walk through the candidate's experience and find out the approaches they practice as a technical leader and the theoretical knowledge that underlies those practices.

Another exciting method is described in the “

Who: The A Method for Hiring⁠

“ book, but such an interview will require extra interviewer skills, additional preparation time and up to 3h of interview time. This book offers a special kind of “Who interview” that asks you to ask 5 questions + use several tactics, which I've outlined in the image below.

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There are some insights to be gained from it. For example:

Questions about why the candidate was hired for previous positions and why he changed jobs.

Who he or she worked with and what they think of him or her, specifically asking for feedback from former coworkers.

That you should feel free to politely interrupt the person and switch to a new topic.

Pay attention to red flags during the conversation

Ask clarifying questions based on what the candidate has told you — this is where the STAR approach comes in handy.

Using these approaches, it is usually possible to conduct an interview in such a way as to answer the question “is it worth inviting such an engineering director” to us, and if so, for what department.

Master tactics for the “Who Interview”:

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The Reference Interview: Testing What You Learned

This can be a series of interviews, we can ask the candidate to help us by arranging calls with their references. Then, in the interviews, we can go through the questions below and cross-validate the stories that the candidate told us.

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Red flags

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Marshall Goldsmith’s Behavioral Warning Signs

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5 F’s of Selling the job

Now that we have a near-perfect candidate, we need to sell them the job opening. The authors suggest using the Five F's method for successful selling, which is described in the figure below.

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These 5 F's can be used in waves, of which there are also five.

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Summarizing the use of the Five F's and Five Waves method:

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