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The Hiring Manager Interviews: Patrick Tisdale Shares His Techniques for Sussing Out Candidates

The CIO of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe always asks about a candidate's past work environments, community service and work-life balance concerns.

By Jane Howze

July 17, 2007 — CIO — As the legal industry goes global, and merger and acquisition activity renders individual firms bigger and more complex, Patrick Tisdale’s job as a hiring manager is changing. The CIO of the law firm Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe is looking for a new kind of IT professional. Instead of pursuing classic IT engineers, he’s shifting the focus of his IT organization toward hiring candidates who can quickly create and articulate strategies and motivate employees from different functions within the firm to work together on cases for attorneys. And instead of seeking employees who’ve previously worked in law firms, he’s open to hiring IT professionals from other industries that, like the legal industry, use technology to connect far-flung employees and make knowledge and information easily accessible to everyone in the organization. Tisdale himself had no previous law firm experience. “I am challenging my managers to hire people with attributes that dovetail with where we as a firm are going, rather than hiring people with the skills that they’re most familiar with or the skills that worked successfully for the firm in the past,” he says.

Tisdale focuses on sussing out a candidate’s personality, work ethic and cultural fit whether he’s interviewing a “rank and file” IT staffer, a direct report or a candidate for an executive level position with the firm. Given the consultative nature of IT work at the firm and the changes it’s undergoing, an individual’s ability to get along with the rest of the team is critical. So it’s a good thing Tisdale has honed an astute ability to identify successful candidates over the course of his 20-year career in IT. Here he shares the lessons he learned and the pointed questions he asks to determine whether a prospective employee is right for the organization.

When you first started hiring, did you receive any training?

Not at first. I was working for EDS at the time as a systems engineer. This was the early 1980s, and the company was in a massive national growth phase. In some cases, we were doing three to four team interviews a day with candidates for jobs as systems engineers and seasoned business analysts. The first training I received was devoted to labor laws—things to be careful about, dos and don’ts, anything that might come back to haunt you. Later, I got more sophisticated hiring training, but by then, I had several years of hiring experience.

 

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