Q&A

The Hiring Manager Interviews: PG&E CIO Shares Her Unique Method for Engaging Candidates During Interviews

Pat Lawicki asks candidates the kinds of questions they'd have to answer on a day-to-day basis about projects if they got the job.

By Sarah Mitchell

April 15, 2008 — CIO — Pat Lawicki joined Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) in early 2005. Her mission? To modernize the IT department.

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By June, Lawicki, PG&E's senior vice president and CIO, had developed a three-year strategic plan for IT as well as a more tactical 12- to 18-month plan. Both ultimately called for the centralization of IT, which then was distributed throughout the $13.2 billion energy company's 19 lines of business. Servers were moved into a secure data center. Hardware, software and process standards were established. And hundreds of legacy systems are being replaced with three major platforms.

"We're pushing out a lot of standard processes, standard equipment, and bringing in some new and advanced technology," says Lawicki. "We are leapfrogging what was a very minimal investment in technology and adding human capital to make it happen."

Indeed, Lawicki says that in the course of "just a couple of months," the IT organization has grown from 1,200 employees to more than 1,400. In addition to the new positions the restructured IT organization has created, she also has to fill positions vacated by retiring Baby Boomers and by IT staff who, she's happy to say, are being accepted for non-IT jobs within the lines of business.

With all those open positions, it's a good thing she has a reliable methodology in place for interviewing job applicants. In this interview with Sarah Mitchell, who runs The Alexander Group's San Francisco office (and works with founder Jane Howze, who usually conducts these Hiring Manager Interviews), Lawicki discusses her unique method for engaging candidates during interviews and describes the red flags that tell her a candidate is a no-no. Lawicki also explains why she no longer succumbs to pressure to fill open positions with candidates who aren't quite right.

Sarah Mitchell: What did you base your hiring decisions on when you first began hiring? How does that compare to how you make hiring decisions today?

Pat Lawicki: My first hire was when I was a consultant and needed a developer. How I hired back then was very different from how I hire today. Then my decisions were based purely on technical skills. I'm one of those CIOs who came up through the ranks, and at the time I was asking very technical questions, such as, "How would you do a reconfiguration of this database with these given factors?" Given my technical background, I was very happy to talk tech talk with them if they could talk tech talk. I liked putting them through the wringer to make sure that they were technically able to do their job. Of course, as you move up in an organization, especially in IT, presentation becomes much more important. Today, I'm looking for those core technology skills but also the ability to communicate technical concepts to a lay audience. A candidate needs to be able to put strategic plans together just as much as he or she needs to understand the technology.

Did you receive training on how to hire?

I've had some formal training off and on, but that's mostly been human resources–driven: the dos and don'ts of an interview from a legal perspective. I have been in organizations where there has been a template with recommended questions, but I have not been with organizations that provide training on behavioral interviewing—what to look for or how to ask probing questions. To be honest, I learned more from on-the-job training. Early on in my career, I sat in on interviews other managers were conducting. From that I learned what questions to ask to determine whether a candidate was right for a job. And of course, over the years you go through good hires and bad hires and you get a feel for what to ask and how to ask it—and how to make those judgment calls.

Do you think hiring is instinctive, or can you teach people how to make good hires?

I think you can teach people a lot, but I still think you get to a point of having a gut feel: You either have that feeling or you don't. What I do think is important in making good hires is to get a lot of different perspectives, especially if it is a hire at a more senior level. I need to have candidates interview with various people who represent not only a range of disciplines and levels in the organization, but who also represent a diversity of thought and personality types. If someone is analytical, they're going to want to work with someone else who is analytical, right? If you've got someone who likes to control, they will respond to another controller. I think it's important to get the perspectives from every single viewpoint that you can.