This post is a follow-up to my previous posts on the qualities we prioritize as part of our strategic staffing services for data management candidates. My last post covered the importance of excellent communication skills. This post covers creative problem-solving and a few of the ways we seek to identify it in candidates.
Whatever your role, from data scientist to portfolio analyst to SharePoint/Azure lead to system architect to database engineer, excellent problem-solving skills are a prerequisite to join the team. In his book Empowered, Marty Cagan writes about the difference between task-oriented teams, which take orders and directions from the business, and empowered product teams, which work together to help solve problems for their customer. We aim to provide new hires that are able to function as part of the latter, for reasons that are hopefully obvious.
We assess problem-solving capabilities during the recruiting process by asking the candidates to actively solve complex problems during the interview. These problems are frequently generic business situations with layers of complexity. The interviewer plays the client role, providing a partially defined problem and answering questions from the candidate as part of a dialog that should demonstrate the candidate’s communication and problem-solving skills and thought processes.
Our interviews include several of these mini problem-solving interactions, each of which typically takes around 5 minutes to complete. When taken as a whole, they give us a good feel for a potential hire’s problem-solving abilities, how well they are able to think on their feet, and how they will perform in their new role when the stakes are even higher.
Interestingly, going through the interview process is one of the things that those people who go on to become star employees love, and these scenarios impress the strong performers and drive them to want to work for our customers. These are the types of people that we want to pair up with our customers, so this problem-solving interaction also helps us to hire the strongest problem solvers, which in turn provides our clients with the best resources available to meet their needs.
If you need help attracting high-performing Financial Services and Data Management talent in an increasingly tight labor market, consider DMG’s strategic staffing services. Feel free to schedule a free consultation to determine whether our services match your needs.