The Hiring Manager Interviews: Outtakes from the Q&A with Accellent's CIO
William Howell discusses how he works with his team to select candidates for jobs.
Wed, November 21, 2007
CIO — William Howell is the vice president and CIO at Accellent, a $500 million manufacturer of components and parts for medical products. He spoke with CIO.com contributor Jane Howze about his best practices for recruiting and interviewing top-notch IT staff in The Hiring Manager Interviews: Accellent's CIO Values a Candidate's Integrity and Attitude Above All. Here are edited outtakes from that interview.
Is hiring instinctive or can you teach people how to make good hires?
Companies continually deliver interview training, but I frankly don't believe that training is terribly helpful. It provides some degree of protection around not asking illegal or inappropriate questions, but invariably that type of training focuses on technical skills and not on the behavioral characteristics of candidates, which I believe are more important. It's a lot harder to teach someone how to get at a candidate's behavioral characteristics. You tend to learn those through the school of hard knocks.
In some ways, hiring may be the most important thing I do and have done in my career. In the final analysis, the best hiring managers have an instinct that they trust, and it gets sharper as they get older. However, when we're in a business setting, we are scared to death to talk about that due to fears that it will be challenged legally and we won't be able to defend the process.
Do you ever interview for non-IT functions?
I'm a member of the senior leadership team reporting to the CEO. In this role I regularly interview candidates for peer positions and for other senior positions throughout the company. For example, I participated in the interviews for our new senior vice president of human resources and our SVP of sales. I also regularly interview candidates for the role of plant manager, what we call our director of operations.
What was the worst interview you ever conducted?
I have had a number of interviews where in the first few minutes I sense that the candidate simply can't work out, but I feel obligated to go through the interview process to see if I am missing something. I don't want to prematurely judge an individual. In interviews like these, the clock stands still.
Do you have any pet peeves during an interview?
Lack of eye contact. If the candidate doesn't look me in the eye I am invariably left feeling that something is wrong.
