In the course of my duties as office manager for my company, it was my responsibility to hire a new employee who would be responsible for transcribing letters and reports for several of our key managers. These three managers and I agreed to talk before the interviewing process to determine what it was that they most wanted in the new employee. It was a new position that was created to take care of the voluminous correspondence needed in the course of the management of our company and its sales, so it took several conversations and exchange of memos to determine the exact nature of the duties and needed qualifications for the person in the new position.
My role was to gather the information from the managers, advertise the position in the local newspapers and within our company, interview several candidates, and select two which the three managers would then interview themselves. My main task in this process was to be aware of the parts of the process and do everything I could to move it along, saving valuable time for the busy managers. Although, officially, it is not really my responsibility to help the three reach agreement on what and who they wanted, informally that seems to go with the territory of cooperating with these people.
For the purposes of this paper I wish to focus mostly on the meetings I held with each of the managers individually in their offices to determine what they wanted in the new employee. I elected to do this part of the job individually because it was easier to schedule that way and less time is spent with the three of them discussing and arguing. These individual meetings lasted perhaps thirty minutes each. I asked the managers open-ended questions such as, "Describe the person you would like to have in this new position," "What are your pet peeves that you would like us to avoid in hiring this new person?" and "What are the two highest skills or personal characteristics that you would like f...