Career Boost

The Hiring Manager Interviews: Accellent's CIO Values a Candidate's Integrity and Attitude Above All

William Howell shares his hiring mistakes and his secrets for selecting the best job candidates, finding objective references and using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool.

By Jane Howze

November 21, 2007 — CIO — William Howell holds strong opinions about hiring IT professionals.

The vice president and chief information officer at Accellent, a $500 million manufacturer of medical components, detests "Microsoft" type questions—brain teasers intended to test a developer's problem-solving skills. He's perturbed by the number of people who use the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator to pigeonhole job seekers. And he thinks most companies do a mediocre job training up-and-coming hiring managers in how to suss out candidates. The best training ground, according to Howell, is the school of hard knocks.

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Outtakes from this interview with William Howell

He should know. Howell admits to having made a few hiring mistakes—including one big one in the 1980s while working for the University of North Carolina (UNC)—which he discusses in this Q&A. The incident at UNC irrevocably changed his hiring process, and his experiences have taught him to trust his instincts, to prize a candidate's integrity above all and to rigorously check references. If you've got any skeletons in your closet, Howell will unearth them.

Howell shared with CIO.com his lessons learned over the course of his 30-plus-year career in IT, and his secrets for identifying whether candidates have the right stuff for a job in his 35-person information services organization, for finding objective references and for using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool.

What IT projects are you working on, and how do they impact your hiring?

Our biggest initiative is an Oracle ERP deployment. Three years ago when I joined the company, the chief executive officer at the time was very focused on implementing a common platform upon which to consistently gather and analyze business data. He saw that platform as a way to consolidate operations under one umbrella. We are implementing this initiative across 19 manufacturing facilities worldwide (15 in the U.S., three in Europe and a very large one in Mexico) in a controlled manner. We do two plants at a time and have done seven plants so far.

Most of our hiring falls into two or three areas. In particular, we hire Oracle ERP experts for our Boston corporate headquarters—senior business analysts and senior developers. These individuals are tied into our Oracle ERP deployment. They also support the sites that are now running on Oracle ERP.

I also hire IT people for our factories, which range in size from approximately 60 or 70 to 450 employees with an equal number of machine tools used to cut metal parts. In my ideal world, I would have one IT person per site, but I'm not quite there for financial reasons.