Interview Story - Time You Failed

At United Children, I was promoted to a manager role about 6 months earlier, and this was the first time I needed to hire a new team member. It was not a successful hire. But I learned an incredibly valuable lesson that has helped me ever since.

I was looking for a data analyst who could manage our donor database and, most importantly, figure out which donors needed some extra TLC, to sustain their donations or become potentially significant donors.

I interviewed several candidates based on their resumes and hired the person who seemed friendliest and most eager.

But I quickly discovered that she wasn’t performing at the level we needed. She didn’t have the technical expertise she professed and seemed quite uncomfortable with the work. Her assignments would get delayed for one week, and then another, with no clear delivery insight.

I really wanted her to work out, so I looked for ways I could enhance her skills. I didn’t have the expertise to coach her myself, so I searched for a training class that could fix the skill deficit. After paying for a three-day database-intensive workshop that didn’t yield a significant change in her performance, it was time to let her go.

Letting her go was one of the worst conversations of my life. I really liked her as a person. And even though I knew it was the right decision, I felt queazy for days.

After that hiring mistake, I took a training course on hiring run by the nonprofit Management Center. I discovered how I could ask more thoughtful interview questions and more accurately measure key skills before hiring. I learned that hiring isn’t just about liking the person. It was about assessing the skills I needed.

For this, now-open, position I got in contact with a colleague at another nonprofit who helped brainstorm some database exercises to measure the skills we needed.

After preliminary screening, my serious candidates all did these exercises. Those that didn’t excel, I could eliminate guilt-free. It wasn’t them as a person. They simply lacked the skills. From there, I could hire based on who seemed most enthusiastic about the job and the team.

The result was that I found a great team member, who at last conversation, still works at United Children, ten years later. Since then, I have had 6 out of 7 successful hires following this process.