Situation 1:

Since you graduated with your Master’s at 25, you’ve been working day and night in pursuit to reach your dream: become an entrepreneur.

You have a background in journalism and a passion for writing.

Thus, you were always interested in building businesses along these lines: grant writing services, business plan writing services, copywriting services.

You failed a few times.

As a 31-year-old, you started a grant-writing business that you named We Drink and We Write Things Ltd. 

After almost ten years of hard work, together with your co-founder, you managed to grow the company to 18 employees, mostly working as full-time grant writers.

Even though it’s only been a decade since you’ve started, and you earned a strong reputation in the field and built a brand around it.

Today, you offer grant-writing services both to universities and companies.

This company is not only your source of income but also your baby: the biggest project of your life that you have been working on 70-80 hours a week for many, many years.

You are proud of it, and you will go to any length to make your company thrive.

Your situation is not easy. The competition on the market is currently so harsh that you operate on a very low profit margin and cannot afford any losses.

Thus, you cannot afford to hire a person who might underperform as a team-player or miss deadlines.

You also cannot afford to accept a candidate who might potentially be unhappy about their scope of duties or salary, as this involves a danger that they will leave the company soon and put you in trouble.

Since hiring the right people is so crucial for you, you didn’t hire a recruiting manager yet, but rather, you decided to find the new person by yourself.

You are currently looking for a new Technical Grant Consultant. You received around 60 resumes, and you’ve selected 20 candidates for a phone call.

Out of those, you invited five candidates to face-to-face interviews. 

The candidate whom you are interviewing now for the position of Technical Grant Consultant right now has an excellent industry CV. They played a variety of roles before, both in private and public sector – from business consultancy, through research positions, to advisory roles in think tanks. However, they have never acted as a full time writer.

You seriously consider hiring this candidate, as you find this person one of the top two candidates.

However, you wonder if this person will be able to communicate with the clients and adjust to their needs, as well as stick to hard deadlines – as every project will last for 4-12 weeks and typically cannot get postponed.

You are on a short budget. You are prepared to pay the new employee no more than 3,800 Eur gross monthly. However, if the candidate is excellent, you might stretch this amount to 4,000 Eur gross. It is your company after all – so you don’t have any Approved Salary Range to adhere to.

You also have deals with local gyms and spa centers, and you can give away free monthly passes to your employees.

Plus, you got a deal with the local, private kindergarten in the proximity of your company. Therefore, you could reimburse 50% of their monthly fees for your employees.

There are also two positions of a Senior Grant Consultant in the company (with a salary of 4,700 Eur gross) — when one of these positions becomes vacant, you might think of promoting one of your Technical Grant Consultants to this position.

Please start the conversation by greeting the candidate and asking about their financial expectations.

During the interview, try to find out whether the candidate fits the profile that you are looking for, and whether you can reach the consensus, salary-wise. 

Situation 2:

You are just searching for a major career leap in your professional life.

You have a strong analytic mind and you developed programming skills in your last position where you spend the last three years as a Junior Programmer, mostly occupied with Data Science projects.

You also acquired strong logistic skills as you collaborated with other teams while working in your previous position, and you trained interns.

You are interested in staying in IT and you have an affinity to technological innovation. You consider yourself a geek and you are an eager early-adopter of new technologies.

However, you would like to step up your game this time, and gain your first formal experience as a manager.

Therefore, you got interested in the newly opened position of Product Owner at the local plant of an international corporation Corpo-Mess. 

This large and highly respected company produces new software for a wide range of products, from self-navigating cars, through drones and robots, to new, intelligent medical devices.

It’s an ambitious place to start your journey in the IT world. This start would guarantee your good future job opportunities.

Product Owner is a type of job in which you would need to coordinate a team of programmers who develop one particular feature of the new product – a drone navigation system in this case.

You would also need to talk to the customers throughout the process to make sure that the feature also scores high in the customers’ books.

You would be dependent on the Product Manager, who manages a few Product Owners responsible for various features of the product. The Product Manager is the person who will interview you for the position.

Formally, you have never had a full-time job as a manager. However, you feel certain that you’d like to take the challenge and try yourself as a Product Owner rather than going for a 1-2 year long, low paid internship in the company first as some other people with technical experience choose to do.

Your last salary as was 3,000 Eur gross and you would enjoy it if the next salary is any higher than the previous one.

You would also enjoy additional benefits such as the possibility to sell your vacation days back to the employer or free passes to gyms or other entertainment options.