Finding the right job candidate

Imagine that you are on a commission to develop a major new park in a large city. You're tasked with hiring a park superintendent to manage the creation of the park. One of the candidates for the job is a 35-year-old travel writer and farmer who is also a struggling publisher. He has no training or experience in park planning, civil engineering or architecture. Would you hire this candidate? Would you even interview him? No? Too bad - you missed out on working with Frederick Law Olmsted.

Olmsted - urban public health leader and the catalyst for landscape architecture and urban planning in the United States - was, on paper, "unqualified" to become, in 1857, the superintendent of what would become New York's Central Park. His selection, and his success, is a lesson for anyone looking to hire "the best person for the job."

A candidate's experience and training are important, of course, but they don't tell you enough about how well the candidate will do on the job. Nor do the standard answers to the standard interview questions. (Every job candidate says he or she works well in teams.)

So how do you choose the best candidate for the job, and avoid overlooking the next Olmsted?

· Decide what characteristics are most critical for the position. Is it more important that the ideal candidate be more entrepreneurial or cautious? A motivating leader of teams or a hard-nosed bottom-line manager?
· Think about how you ranked the characteristics. What is it about the job or the workplace that make these characteristics critical? How do you envision these characteristics being used on the job?
· Strive to make your preferences known as clearly as possible in your job announcements.
· Design interview questions that will help you evaluate the candidates' strengths in the key characteristics. If you are seeking an entrepreneurial candidate, ask questions about how the candidate pursued an opportunity or led a program to completion.
· Get candidates to talk about how they faced challenges. Any team leader looks great when in successful groups. What did the candidate do when a team was underperforming?
· Be specific when communicating with a candidate why a particular characteristic is critical to the success of the position. Vague comments such as "fitting in well in the organization" could be perceived by a candidate as code for "we only hire people who are like us."
· Comb through the candidate's resume or CV. Look beyond what the candidate's job responsibilities. Look for information, such as accomplishments or volunteer experience, that tells you more about the candidate. Olmsted's background as a publisher and farmer showed that he had business and management skills. His experience as a writer showed him to be thoughtful and creative. The fact that he could pursue such different professional disciplines demonstrated that he was an entrepreneurial thinker with a broad knowledge base. All this made him a good choice for the Central Park job.

For more about Olmsted, please read "How Frederick Law Olmsted Got the Central Park Job," in Planetizen
There are plenty of free Internet resources on interviewing job candidates. Start with "Interviewing Job Candidates" from Georgia State University's office of Human Resources. If you need more information, look for materials prepared by human resources professionals.

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Do you have a professional development tip you would like to share? Have a question that you would like to see answered here? Please send it to Leo at vazquezl@rutgers.edu