USPS VP of IT on Making Sound Hiring Decisions Under Pressure

December 05, 2008

Retiring Baby Boomers, a competitive labor market in Washington, D.C., and the need to support a $74 billion business. In the latest Hiring Manager interview, the USPS's VP of IT Operations George Wright explains how he chooses the right candidates under cost and competitive pressures.

Anyone who assumes working for the United States Postal Service's (USPS) IT department would be a cushy job should read what George Wright has to say about the mail business. The vice president of information technology operations for the USPS describes an enormous enterprise—bigger than even Wal-Mart in some respects—with literally hundreds of thousands of moving parts:

We have 40,000 retail outlets, and we service 9 million to 11 million customers per day. Think about the information systems it takes to manage a company with 40,000 retail outlets and 11 million customers a day. We have 300,000 carriers on the streets, and we deliver to every household in America every day of the week. We are the largest user of airline capacity. We have 600 plants that process mail. We operate in almost every major line of business that exists in the Fortune 500. ... We run the world's third largest intranet. Our entire internal organization consists of between 650,000 to 700,00 people. Many organizations that are significantly smaller than us have more [IT] resources than we have. ... We currently have approximately 1,300 people in the IT organization.

Finding candidates for IT jobs who have the skills to support such a large-scale enterprise is one of Wright's biggest challenges. Wright says the need to recruit IT professionals is intensifying as Baby Boomers in the USPS's IT department start retiring and because the need for IT talent in Washington, D.C. is so high.

In such a competitive environment for IT hiring, Wright says it's difficult to make safe hiring decisions that aren't motivated by the pressure to fill a critical vacancy. He's been burned by that pressure before, and he's learned his lesson. That may be why he's become so set in his hiring decisions.

When a situation arises in which Wright disagrees with members of his team about a candidate, he sticks with his gut: He won't hire someone he doesn't think is right, even if the rest of his team does. But he always carefully considers their views and takes the time to explain his decisions to them.

Here, Wright talks about his hiring practices, how he acclimates them to the scale of the organization, and the many mistakes candidates make in interviews that irk him.

John Mann: Many people believe that government jobs are stable and that it is difficult to be fired. Is job stability, in general, better within your IT group than the private sector?

George Wright: Postal services are going through very challenging times. The chief executive officer [of the USPS] has mentioned that we need to reduce the number of workers we have. So while most people might think that government is a stable environment, we are required to be competitive and generate revenue. Our stability is contingent upon how well we perform and how well we grow. Like any company, if the revenue numbers go down, we have to adjust by reducing costs, and approximately 70 percent of our expenses are people. If you perform well, you have job security.

What are your staffing challenges?

We have several people who are getting close to the end of their career, so one challenge we have is the turnover of Baby Boomers. We have to figure out how to match turnover with bringing on new talent. We can consider recruiting somebody who has experience in building retail systems for Wal-Mart. However, Wal-Mart only has approximately 5,000 stores. The difference between the technology needed to run 5,000 locations versus 40,000 locations is significant. In addition, most people who build software do not design it to run on the scale that we operate on. So we have scale issues, size issues, and the number of applications we run. I have an enterprise data warehouse that integrates data from about 135 systems and continues to grow. When we implemented SAP, we had to do it for 800,000 employees.

Is it difficult to hire new talent quickly in a large government organization?

The challenge is hiring people in the Washington, D.C. area. I don't know what the unemployment rate is for IT in the D.C. market, but I would bet it is close to zero because there are not a lot of people available. We have multiple avenues for how we find resources, including search firms, our own website (e-careers) and word of mouth. At the end of the day, our challenges for hiring are no different than anyone else's.

Despite those challenges, we have been successful in hiring. If you look at my staff today, I would bet that half of my managers who have been promoted in the last three years have come from the outside and half from the inside. We believe that we constantly need to bring new talent into the organization at all levels, and we have a program for promoting from within in order to get the best mix.

What positions are you currently looking to fill?

We are interviewing and hiring talent from entry level programmers to people who run our data centers. We have two large data centers—one in Egan, Minn. and San Mateo, Calif. We typically look for people who have a programmer/analyst/program manager background. All we have to do is acclimate them to our scale. We put them on projects that allow them to grow to where they need to be to deal with our scale. The interesting thing is once they have gone through that process, they become very valuable to people on the outside.

When we recruit for top-level positions, like the two people that run our data centers, we try to match experience to the position. Then we bring them onboard in a staggered fashion with the existing manager, and there is a gradual hand-off of responsibility. It is a process that we use where the new hire's peers support the new hire and help bring him up to the level where he needs to be.

What is the process for interviewing candidates for IT jobs?

The process is fairly well structured because we have HR rules to follow. We post the position. People submit their résumés, and we review the résumés. We generate a list of candidates, which is then reviewed by a committee. The selecting official will interview three to five of the top candidates.

We were recently in the process of filling an enterprise architecture position. Four different managers interviewed six candidates. After the interviews, the managers discussed the candidates and how each met the requirements for the position. By having multiple people involved in the interviewing process for our senior-level positions, we get feedback on whether the candidate fits our culture, communicates well, and on other subjective components of the interview process. Someone on paper can have all the credentials, but if their communication style or personality do not mesh with the culture of the organization, you run into problems.

When we assess someone who I want to promote into a position that supports one of the functional areas, we narrow down the list of candidates and ask the customer [in the functional area] who they are going to support. When someone gets promoted to a management position, especially from inside, the customers have experience with them. So we engage the customer in that process because the IT person is going to support them, and we want to make certain we have the right chemistry and respect between the IT manager and the customer they're supporting.

How do you determine whether a candidate is right for a given position and for your IT organization?

I spend enough time to make sure that a candidate is technically qualified, then I flip over to the soft skills. I seldom get fooled by people's technical skills.

Personal skills are harder to assess because you see candidates in a very limited environment during the interview. I think my instincts about candidates' personalities have gotten better over the years. I try to listen for things that are going to cause problems. For example, if I am hiring someone who is going to run one of my development shops (we have four development shops with a couple hundred people), the key to making that work is people skills and being able to provide technical insight and new ways of looking at things. If a person comes across as process-oriented, people who tend to be process-oriented are interested in setting up new ways of doing things. That can create challenges because this person will want to change how the organization operates. I am looking for people whose temperament and approach to problem-solving will fit into where we are going and who have enough confidence in their ability to change something if it is wrong. At the same time, if something is working o.k. but is not the way they want it to work, they are flexible enough to adapt.

What is the biggest hiring mistake you've made, and what did you learn from it?

I have hired the wrong person because pressure to fill a vacancy were pushing me to make a decision. In situations like that, I've thought, "I'll take someone who is not the right fit, but maybe they can grow into it." I realize now that it is better to leave a position vacant than to fill it with the wrong person. That is difficult because it is getting harder and harder to find the resources. Demand is high and supply is low.

Have you ever had a case where you really liked a candidate you interviewed, but your team didn't?

I have never had that situation. Usually, it is the other way around—where people want to hire someone who I do not want because I see things that are a problem. And if I think I see problems, I will not hire the person.

In situations like that earlier in my career, I had thought that maybe my team was seeing something in a candidate that I did not see. But the answer generally was no, they did not see something I missed; I saw something they didn't see. Today I will go with my instincts before I will go with my team.