Could your job have been done by somewhere living anywhere in the world, or did they have to be in London ?

Would people working on social media in Kenya, or South Africa, for example by 3 years ahead in innovation and application practical understanding ?

The competency based interview has been around a while ; your list has hopefully produced a good candidate ; given the rigour of the process, perhaps you found 3 or 4 other quality people that could go to other parts of your organisation ?

In the future, Jeremiah Oywang’s blog has some great pieces on evolving roles, future job descriptions etc…..but I have not see a post on this area for a while ( maybe because of the recession ! )

All the bext

Alex

Your approach is perfect. Get them talking about their experience, as the answers will vary from person to person, but the solutions they intend to implement should be weighed against the company’s needs.

The VA and others are looking into social media – I’ve been contacted by a handful of agencies, both state and federal, and they want social media, they just haven’t figured out what they want it for.

Keep up the good work.

I think what might risk getting lost is being clear about the reasons for doing any of this in the first place, and what we hope to achieve by it, though some of it is touched on in the evaluation section. But I would want some reassurance that candidates could set out the contribution to the organisation’s overall purpose, rather than just social media/communications objectives.

So a couple of simple questions:

How will any of this help the government achieve its objectives? How will we tell?

Interesting thoughts here from Jeremy and John (touched upon by others) about candidates’ online footprint. How far, if at all, do you think it’s fair to hold it against someone if their personal blog or friendfeed is a bit lame?

We (the panel) chose not to do so at all, in this instance, and judged candidates solely on the evidence asked for during the recruitment process. I would love to include their personal profiles as part of the evidence next time – I guess you’d just need to be up front about it in the instructions/job ad.

Re the difficulty of these questions, I agree some of these are tough. But there’s no right or wrong answer to something like “what’s the difference between web 2.0 and social media” – just an opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of the issues, and the extent of reading around and connectedness with what’s happening in this field. Which others did you think were a bit too harsh?

Steph – it was so handy having you on the panel. Let’s do it again sometime. I loved your ‘why..’ question at the time, it drew out very revealing answers. I should have remembered it and included it in the main post.

The question I’ve got into the habit of asking project manager-type candidates (and I think it’s equally applicable here) is “tell me about your biggest project-related cockup, and tell me what you learnt from it”. On the basis that if that question gets answered with blather, there’s a real risk of the person blundering from mistake to mistake without stopping to think about what they’re doing and change it. Which is kind of restating John’s question from a slightly different perspective.

The link to the Brandstorming site is an interesting one, because it’s talking about questions from the candidate’s point of view. I think you could take your list and adapt to become a checklist to ask the *organisation* about their readiness – getting to the point of trying to recruit is one measure of the organisation’s motivation, but without the other components in place the candidate’s job is probably not going to succeed.