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Learning from Interviewing
Recently, I’ve been interviewing candidates for a community/marketing role that will work directly with the Mozilla community in Europe. It’s been a really interesting process that I think is worth discussing.
The biggest challenge that I have had when interviewing these candidates is trying to find out how the potential hire will interact with our community and fit into Mozilla.
I remember my first few months working with the Mozilla community (I still feel so new!), trying to figure out just how it operated and what were “the rules”. I had a lot of ideas, but was really, really tentative because I didn’t want to be a disruptive force with bad ideas. So, I proceeded with caution.
I’ve been trying to tap into candidates’ understanding of Mozilla and how they’ll move forward when hired. What are their ideas? And, how do they plan to pull off those ideas? What do these candidates know about the Mozilla community? What tools are necessary for success? Finally, how do they plan to empower others to feel like leaders?
The questions are so open ended, I’ve realized I’m more exploring ideas, rather than looking for a perfect answer. But, I’ve learned some good things.
...on empowerment: Candidates I’ve interviewed have said some interesting things on how to empower others – like having really transparent and open communication, but making sure to follow-up. People who are empowered will probably look for some sort of endorsement of their ideas, even if they are charging forward with something on their own. Providing meaningful and timely responses to others who feel empowered is really important. Complete agree! And, I don’t think I could ever stop trying to become better at this.
…on tools needed for success: Talking about tools can get dangerously high-level and the conversation can become loaded with jargon. But, in this process we’ve uncovered some pretty common-sense things. Most everyone has said that setting up environments for community interaction and dialog is critical. Blogs, forums, mailing lists, events… Luckily, I think we’re doing this, too. I came away asking, “How can I do this better?”
…on marketing and the community: I heard a few times that any organization that wants to “build community” needs to genuinely want that. Anyone that comes to the community in hope to really just market a product will probably fail because the community will quickly see through it. That was a great point I heard. In my experience, I really believe that the Mozilla community drives this project and any effort we make toward marketing is really only done if the community wants it.
The big take away for me in this process is that interviewing for some of these “softer” roles is tricky. I think I am really trying to gauge if the person “gets Mozilla”. I say that pretty carefully because it makes it sound like Mozilla is some private club that is hard to understand. It’s not really too hard to understand. Maybe it’s more appropriate for me to say that I am really looking for an organizational/person/job fit.
And, if you’re a candidate and reading this, well, I haven’t shown all my cards. I’ve saved some tough questions for you when we chat.
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Mozilla gets a visit from some Slovenian students
This past Wednesday, about 15 students from the Information Science Students Association (associated with University of Ljubljana) came to Mozilla to learn more about the project and what we do. The students are in the U.S. for two weeks doing a tour of software companies in Silicon Valley and we were the first stop on their trip. It was good for us to learn up front that many of these students use Firefox, but are not open source enthusiasts. The beginning of our conversation was educating the students on our open source community and software development process. Many of them knew our Slovenian localizer, but had not taken the plunge into the world of Mozilla. We finished a brief presentation and then opened it up for comments and questions.
Frankly, the Q&A started a bit slow and the students seemed a bit shy. Perhaps they were feeling some nervousness about their first visit or sitting inside Mozilla’s Mountain View office. Nearly all of them were avid Firefox users and the few who weren’t greatly admired the project. At this point, we did our best to engage the students. It felt very much like grassroots campaigning or organizing. We were surrounded by knowledgeable users of our software, but none had taken up the call to get involved. That’s not to say the students were not engaged, but it became pretty clear that they may not have known how. Fortunately, Mary had prepared a slide with several ways to get involved and we went right to that during the Q&A. We began to brainstorm what this group could do to and what would be fun for them.
What’s fun for a college student? Partying, of course.
The group decided that they would host a launch party at their campus for the upcoming release of Firefox 3. That party might also serve as a starting point for their campus reps program. After about an hour of visiting and touring about the office, the students left for Google seemingly enthused about helping Mozilla.
Why was this visit important and what did I learn?
For one, Slovenia has the second highest market share of the Firefox browser, just behind Finland. Both of these countries are over 40%. (see the Xiti monitor study) According to this study, Firefox has 44.6% market share in Slovenia. We’re always excited to welcome visitors to Mountain View, and we were thrilled to have students visiting from a country where Firefox has so much popularity.
Also, I was reminded about the importance understanding the audience to whom we were presenting. We had to start at step one with these students, explaining the nuts and bolts of open source software development and what Mozilla has been able to achieve. After we established that foothold, we were able to adjust our message and present a way to participate. I think we did that and the result is that we have a group of enthusiastic students who will hopefully bring the Mozilla message back to their campus.
A final takeaway: always have some good SWAG to hand out. Yep…Stuff We All Get. It can mean a lot to a visitor to Mozilla, if nothing more, it’s a nice souvenir for a tech student who visited one of the “big” companies in Silicon Valley.
With most every blog post, I like to end with a call to action. If others have similar stories of community building, perhaps messages or presentation styles that were successful or anecdotes about trying to organize others, please do share them with us.
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