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Over the past 10 years I’ve led Implementation and Onboarding team in Healthcare, Services, and SaaS companies and while each role was vastly different and had varying requirements for skills, I found there was an underlying set of skills and abilities that are core to the role.

  • Fundamental project management skills
  • Time management
  • Communication
  • Problem Solving

There are others that will be role specific like technical skills or system or platform experience but for the most part, the above has served me well as a foundation. The problem I’ve found recently is looking at hiring requirements through the today vs tomorrow lens. 

I have been in my current role for about 7 months and there was a large hiring initiative just before I joined the company. What I’ve found was that a significant number of our recent hires were made because they had the skills, abilities, and experience we needed then, not what we would need in the next year or two. I’m in the process of hiring a new Implementation Specialist in the UK and after the first round of interviews I had to rethink the areas we were focusing on because the candidates that made it to second round with me were decent candidates but I had a hard time seeing them grow with us as we continue to get larger and more complex clients.

My team and I sat down and restrategized on how we were going to approach this and future roles to make sure we were focusing on what our expectations were in the future so we could truly focus on long term growth of the company and our team, not just what we are looking for today.

This is obviously different for different companies as the growth needs of a startup are very different from an established company who may need more consistency, but I’d love to have a discussion on this topic and see what the rest of you think.

I love this @rondeaul! Thanks for providing a list of core skills. I’m curious how you assess their skill level for the skills you listed. What kind of interview questions do you ask?

As for them meeting tomorrow’s needs, I’m curious if you and your team identified other skills that can be taught vs. not?

For example: Adaptability, the ability to adjust to change/pivot, is something I look for in my team members. There are people who can roll with the punches whereas I’ve worked with people who are great today, but aren’t open to new ideas/concepts and they have a hard time adjust to change. I feel like that’s a non-negotiable, but I don’t think there are learning courses on that. You either have it or you don’t. 

We have actually moved to a rather structured process where I review the candidates in our ATS and identify the ones I want screened. For my current team (primarily implementation specialists) I’m looking at the resume to find examples of:

  • Client facing experience
  • Broad project scope (longer rather than shorter projects)
  • Technical ability

That can be difficult as many candidates use a standard resume without tailoring to the needs of the role. This means I have to read between the lines in a very short period of time.

Once I’ve identified the candidates to screen, we send them a virtual interview where they are given a list of questions and time to answer each one via video. Each answer is expected to be between 1-3 minutes long. These questions are:

  • Our projects typically last 3-6 months and we're assigned 4-6 projects at a time. How does this correlate to your previous experience? How do you stay organized and manage client priorities? 
  • What is your experience working with and building complex formulas, queries, and/or analyzing data? 
    Problem solving plays a significant role in our projects. Can you tell us about a time when you had to solve a problem to help a client?
  • How do you ensure a project stays on schedule and within scope? What do you do when a client wants to add something to the project that is not in the project scope?
  • What do you consider the most complex project you’ve ever worked on? What was your role, why was it complex, and what did you learn from it?
  • During our implementation, we spend hours with a client conducting discovery on the existing commission plans so we understand all the complexities and can build a scalable solution for them. What have you done in the past that requires that kind of time and effort to understand the scope of a project?

I just revamped the questions in the past week from what HR/Recruiting was using and have already received the first response with them and they are much more valuable than what was being used before. When I get the response, I typically listen to them at 1.5x or 2x speed and slow down where needed for the additional details. I have the ability to leave notes on the responses and grade on a 1-5 scale. Once I’ve reviewed I mark each as a pass/fail and if they pass they then get sent an assessment.

Because of the technical nature of our IS roles, we send the candidate a 12 question exam that includes several tabs of data and they have to come up with formulas that provide the answers we need. Each of the questions are increasing in complexity and allow us to have insight to the individual’s experience writing logic and formulas and their ability to write efficiently. To be honest, I’m reviewing the assessment as I feel it is overly complex and needs to be streamlined a bit to still give us the understanding of their capabilities without making them spend an exorbitant amount of time on it. We have had candidates see the exam then realize that their skillset wasn’t in line with the role and remove themselves from consideration. I’ve also seen some results come back that were very clearly generated by AI which has also been a decision factor. Our goal is to move forward any candidate who has answered 9 of the 12 questions correctly.

During the 1st round interview with two of our implementation delivery managers, the focus on:

  • Being one part of a larger project team
  • Experience working with client contacts that include individual contributors up to C-Level executives
  • Length and complexity of previous projects
  • # of projects worked on simultaneously
    • Balancing workload
    • Changing priorities
  • Technical experience relevant to our role

When the candidate passes the first round they are sent to me for a second round interview. I tend to review some of the items that are reviewed during the first round but also look at:

  • Ability to scale to large strategic projects
  • Managing expectations
  • Managing escalations
  • Managing scope creep

I know this is a very long post but I think the additional detail shows that there are a lot of factors that influence what is right for the role, not just today but to make sure they are able to grow with the role and company.

You’ve outdone yourself @rondeaul! I really like what you’ve shared here. Thank you so much for pulling back the curtain and letting us into your brain! There are so many key takeaways here, especially if you’re hiring for or looking to get into a new IS role. 

We should do a livestream where we explore each of those answers and try to reverse engineer “How to get hired by Leo.” I think there would be A LOT of valuable takeaways from a session like that!

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