A friend of mine, “Amy,” emailed me earlier asking if I could help her get a job with my company. Despite being quite competent, she’s been out of work for a while (as if that’s uncommon).
Now in one sense Amy has very good timing, becuase we are about to begin interviews for three or four sales exec positions. I’ve worked with her before, and am sure she’d do well in this job; we’ve worked together before in similar positions. Moreover, I am going to have to sit in on some of the interviews, as company guidelines are that all prospective hires who get talked to by two managers at once; I was just asked to put down the days & times I’ll be available to do my bit.
But in another sense Amy has bad timing, because none of the open spots are on my team. I can’t exert nearly as much pull on her behalf as I’d like to. And I should add that, despite her general competence, she does not interview well.
So here’s the question: how much help can I give her, ethically? It’s one thing to put her resume at the top of the pile. It’s not much different telling her the kinds of things we’ll be looking for so she can prepare herself. But it’s something else to tell her the exact interview questions she’ll get in the first round (which I certainly could do, but think is iffy), or to tell her to reply, when asked what days she can come in for a talk, to be certain to say such & such a day in the morning, because that’s when I’m going to be definitely doing the interviewing.
My take is that it’s fine for you to tell her what questions get asked, unless you know your employer treats that selection process as confidential (as in, potentially of use to competitors, or you use something proprietary from a vendor that they consider confidential). Heck, you could even be re-interviewing someone who had worked there before, or at least interviewed there before, or who had a friend who was just hired and told them all about it. Varying knowledge of the selection process is the norm.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s OK for you to actually play a role in interviewing, evaluating, or recommending her unless you’ve explained how you know her to your manager and they want you to do that. *That’s *where the ethically messy part comes in, IMHO. When you give your manager biased information while hiding your bias from him/her, that’s a problem.
You might try this: tell your manager you know her, think she’d be good, would like to give her an informational interview first, use that opportunity to tell her about the job and what they’ll be looking for, then put her through the normal selection process.
Does your employer have any regulations for this? In the absence of such, I would suggest that you hand her letter of application to the manager that’s hiring, saying that you know her and think she’d be a good fit, note that she doesn’t interview particularly well, and would the manager consider her? Then you recuse yourself from the hiring process. You should definitely not be involved in the hiring process until you have to be.
IOW it’s okay for you to give her the initial introduction, but she has to win the job herself.
Assuming your company is private and for-profit, I think your main ethical constraints are to not lie (or lie by omission) to either Amy or your company. I would tell whoever is running the job search that you know Amy, you think she would be a very strong candidate, and that you want guidance from them on how the company would like you to handle your role in the search.
Chances are, they won’t want you to be one of the people interviewing her, and they would be right (you already know her, why waste the chance for someone else to see her?). I assume letting her know the interview questions would also be frowned on.
On the other hand, there’s no reason not to tell other managers that you can personally vouch for Amy’s competence, having worked with her before. That should carry a lot more weight than a half-hour interview. In fact, she should put you down as a reference, and should mention you during her interview (as in “I’ve succeeded at X before, in fact when I was working with Skald.” )
Being honest and upfront is also the way to ensure that you won’t later get in trouble.
And finally, I think both of you are lucky that she wouldn’t be in your group: even if she was the most qualified candidate, it could be uncomfortable if people knew you hired one of your friends (depending on the position, the corporate culture, etc. ).
[On preview: yeah, what everybody else said. Only I say, let HR make the call as to how much you will participate]
I just found the relevant regs. I can either give her a letter of recommendation or sit in on the interview, but not both. Since she has to go through at least two interviews, and since I’d be able to sit in at most on one, I’m going to write her the letter of recommendation. What I’m really wondering about, though, is how much coaching I can give her ethically.
ETA: I should add that, in a sense, I cannot help being involved in whether she gets to get and keep the job; I am in charge of the training department and will be grading her in the training class. But I don’t anticipate her having any problem passing that class.
I don’t think you should be feeding her the questions or anything else that would overly affect her side of the interview but I think it’s fair game to affect the company’s side with the full understanding that the more you put yourself out, the more professional risk there is to you if she doesn’t work out.
By all means, talk her up to the hiring manager and explain her circumstance. Ultimately, the hiring manager just wants to hire the best person for the job and often, hiring someone who is personally recommended is preferable because there’s a social expectation the hirer expects to live up to.
To me, this is the important part. The biggest boost you could give her is to tell your employer about your previous experience working with her and the fact that you think she would be good at this job. When I used to hire people, the best hires I made were based on recommendations of current employees. The best reference a candidate could get would come from an employee who’s worked with him/her in the past and who knows the working environment of the company.
Ethically, you have some obligations to your employer - you should tell them that you are a friend of hers, and you should take a step back from the hiring process for this reason. Once you’ve done this, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with coaching her for the interview, but you shouldn’t be there to help her along during the interview. You could mention that she doesn’t always interview well and your previous experience with her, but acting as a reference for one candidate should disqualify you from any role in the decision.
I wouldn’t mention that she doesn’t interview well unless you’re called on to save her from some type of foot-in-mouth mistake after the fact. Saying that someone doesn’t always present herself well, especially since ISTR you hire for salespeople, is not going to help her case.
I agree that you should make your connection with her clear, since that is a big plus. Far better to hire someone another person can honestly vouch for than someone sight unseen. I also agree that you interviewing her would be a waste. You already know everything that would come out during the interview, right?
Do your interviewers work by a script? I wouldn’t give her the questions, not just for ethical reasons, but because I doubt she is good enough an actor to make her canned responses convincing. Far better to tell here what is important to your company, things she might be able to find out through research.
I agree. When giving guidance with the interviewing process, you should tell/remind HER that she doesn’t interview well and that it needs to be something she puts some serious effort towards.
I think giving a recommendation is fine, but feeding her interview questions is over the line. That’s giving her an unfair advantage over other applicants and it makes her interview dishonest.
What does it mean to say that someone “doesn’t interview well?” Isn’t that just a euphemistic way to say that they’re not bright (like students who “don’t test well”)?
Interviewing well is not the same as doing the job well. I can think of jobs I’ve had where I aced the interview – where I walked out extremely and accurately confident that I was going to get an offer – and still sucked at the job.
In my friend’s case, I was quoting her. As I’ve never interviewed her, but know her competence from prior experience, I’m going to guess that she is discouraged from fighting an uphill battle for the past few months because of the economy and is internalizing blame for a more global situation.
At any rate the situation is now moot, as I did what I should have done in the first place–went to my boss and asked his input–and was told that, if I was willing to vouch for her, and as she must pass my training class to keep the job if she is hired anyway, he was willing to move her to the head of the line and interview her early.
That’s almost too bad. I was sort of looking forward to your getting all “Damn it, Rhymer! Must you be such a STINKING ethical RELATIVIST!” screaming match.
As it is, I just have to coach her for her interview with the big dawg.
If it was my friend and I was certain they could do the job well I would give them every bit of information I could to help them get the job. If the interview process is set up in a way that it is actually excluding well qualified and able applicants then I don’t think I would worry much about violating its integrity.
