“Qualified applicants will still
have relevant experiences to draw
upon from college courses, prior
work experience, internships,
volunteer and personal life experience. While they may not have
the depth of experience of more
tested project managers, the best
applicants will be able to provide
examples of activities that show
they have the skills and traits
required for the job.
I prefer asking behavioral
questions that help the interviewer assess how the applicant
will deal with situations that are
common in a project manager’s
life. For example, ‘Tell me about a
time when you had to get others
to get work done for you without
having direct authority’ or ‘Tell
me about a time that you had
to manage multiple competing
priorities—how did you handle
that?’ Even students with little
direct project management
experience should be able to
relay valuable information about
how they would handle these
situations.”
—Sue Kaiden, manager, career
development community of practice,
Association for Talent Development,
Alexandria, Virginia, USA
“As I interview young,
inexperienced talent, I’m
assessing whether they
have the potential to be a
great project manager, if
they are teachable, have a
fire in their belly and if they
are someone whom my
team, colleagues, partners
and I would be comfortable
working with.
Questions about experience, albeit nonwork-related for inexperienced
applicants, are still relevant
because they help interviewers gain some perspective on what skills,
capabilities and behaviors
the applicant brings to the
table. However, experience questions are not the
end all, be all. I like to ask,
‘Tell me about an experience when you led a team
towards a common goal.
What did you enjoy most
about the experience? What
was challenging about the
experience?’”
—Lynn Batara, director,
enterprise project management
office, Franklin Templeton
Investments, San Mateo,
California, USA
“The best interviewers encourage people to tell their
stories so they can explore
the person’s style, problem-solving approaches, resilience, teamwork, leadership
and the like. These stories
don’t necessarily need a
work context if they’re
relevant and revealing.
The two questions that
our team uses often are,
‘How can we set you up to
succeed?’ and ‘From what
you’ve observed of me,
where do you think our friction points might be if we
were working together?’ In
addition, I put quite a bit of
store on reversing the situation and asking the person to
interview me for the position
of his or her manager/coach.
It’s amazing how insightful
this can be. And it’s great
to debrief with them—both
their answers and an action
debrief during the interview
to assess how they and you
are doing.”
—Graham Winter, founder and
executive director, Think One
Team International, Melbourne,
Australia
“Have an open discussion with
the candidate about how they
have handled their personal
projects, like school assignments and volunteer activities,
and get them to share their
experience on their successes
or failures. This will help to assess the candidate’s ability to
handle any project as a leader
and a team member. I like to
ask, ‘What motivates you—
working indoors, outdoors,
working from home, working
in an office with teams, working alone?’ You need to ensure
you get the right person for
the right job. As an example,
once I employed a talented
young project team member
who enjoyed working from
home and working at night.
Bringing him into a day job and
to the office routine stifled his
creativity and demotivated
him to a significant extent.
After a careful cause and effect
analysis, he was given permission to work from home and
continued to produce creative
results.”
—Madhu Fernando, PhD, PMP,
CEO, Innova Strategies, Colombo,
Sri Lanka
THE NEW KID ON THE BLOCK
We asked experts how to interview job candidates who have little or no project management experience.