The Engineering Executive's Primer

Appendix B. Interviewing Engineering Executives

In Chapter 1, we covered getting hired as an Engineering executive, and it’s perhaps even more important to discuss the opposite question: how should companies interview and evaluate Engineering executives? As an Engineering executive, you may not directly run one of these searches, but you’ll likely be asked for advice about how to run them. In rarer cases, you will indeed end up running the process to hire your successor, which this appendix will walk you through.

The key topics I want to explore are:

• Avoiding the unicorn search

• How interviewing executives goes wrong

• Structuring your evaluation process

• Focusing on four areas for evaluating Engineering executives

These topics will prepare you to conduct an Engineering executive search that culminates in hiring a leader who can support your company today and will help you avoid bogging the executive team down in a multi-month process.

Avoiding the Unicorn Search

While most companies struggle to evaluate incoming executives effectively, there are some that are great at evaluating executives but nonetheless fail to hire effectively because they want a rare intersection of skills. For example, I once saw an Engineering executive search that wanted someone with experience leading a large Engineering function, with deep go-to-market and Product experience, deep domain exposure to a narrow infrastructure engineering domain, cultural alignment with consensus-based decision making, and ...