By Jeanine Hage
I am a woman, a tech entrepreneur and a firm believer in teams that include women perform better and provide greater results.
Yet when I was hiring for a data analyst position at our company, I did not hire a bright, intelligent, talented woman. I was denied every possible opportunity to recommend her hiring to our team members. And the first person to deny me was the candidate herself. Let’s call her Amy.
Our company recently went on a major interview spree to hire a data analyst for one of our complex projects. We required a candidate with specific technical expertise that is in high demand but hard to find in the market. To ensure the right fit, we developed an internal technical test with five exercises to be completed within an hour.
We passed on dozens of candidates over 12 months of searching. Mostly men applied for the job. They generally came into the interview selling their skills in a very confident manner and started the test believing that they could complete in half the allocated time.
Most of them failed.
Two young women, one of whom is Amy, passed the test. In fact, Amy had the highest score among the candidates.
We enthusiastically hired one of them. It was not Amy.
When our head engineer went into the room to review the test results with her, Amy spent the next 20 minutes of her life (and ours) putting herself down and slamming her results. “There’s no need to check my test results. They are bad!”
When our engineer gently tried to ease her stress and tell her that the answer to the first exercise was perfect, she went on asking him not to waste his time looking at the rest of the test.
She carried on like this, prefacing each result in advance of its reveal with “terrible,” “not worth your time,” “no need to go to the next one.” Yet on each one of these exercises she got a high score.
I was stunned and saddened to hear about this reaction. I know she lost credibility with her team lead before she even started on the job. I was reminded of this quote I read online that has stuck with me over the years:
“It is ok to be unsure, but not ok to be insecure.”
People in our industry know that working on emerging technology projects is not for the faint of heart. It is a lot like a roller coaster ride. Beyond great talent, it requires the heart and will to deal with unexpected twists and turns, and sometimes, steep drops.
Our team needed a team player who was up to the task and who could be counted on in a pinch. This is where Amy fell short even though she was an immensely talented and qualified woman.
To my female readers: Ladies, it is perfectly ok to be unsure in certain professional circumstances…it happens to all of us. But being insecure in professional settings can make peers and companies feel like you might be the kind of person who gives up before a task has begun.
I’d love to know what you think. Would you have hired Amy?