Department Executive or the Boss’ Boss

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Depending on the nature of the company, role, and makeup of the hiring team, you may or may not encounter the hiring manager’s boss or a department executive. Even if you do not meet them, understanding their role and influence in the hiring process and your ultimate path at the company is valuable information to gather during interviews.

Put simply, this leader is responsible for the hiring manager’s team’s success and likely a broader scope of work. With this bird’s eye view, they want to ensure there are capable, engaged, and talented individuals in each position and, importantly, that those individuals come together to form a high performing and productive unit working toward a collective set of priorities. The department executive is tasked with operationalizing a higher-level set of functional or company priorities and building an organization (vs. a team) that delivers. As with the hiring manager’s motivations, a strong group of teams reporting to an executive enables and impacts their success so their attention and commitment to the process takes into consideration the full team’s performance, capabilities, and expertise.

In most cases, the leader will have collaborated on, reviewed, or approved the job description. Depending on the size of the company or the seniority of the role, they may have weighed in on the content of the job description, as they help drive and delegate priorities and goals for the overall team. Typically more tenured in their career (though not always), a department executive will have institutional, industry, and team context that enables them to interview and evaluate with confidence and a perspective that is long-term and beyond the scope of many of the other interviewers. At the same time, they remain close enough to the details and day-to-day operations that they can credibly determine an individual candidate’s strengths and gaps while calibrating and comparing those attributes across their teams.

In an ideal world, they participate in the process to assess, but more importantly to help paint a vision and clarify departmental and organizational goals and the related interdependencies and accountabilities. During your (likely limited) time with the department executive, try to capture their wisdom and insight on that next layer of context by asking thoughtful, targeted questions about the manager and team you’d work with. This is an important time to also prepare a clear, concise, and compelling elevator pitch about you—highlight your strengths, interests, and capabilities and directly connect them back to the position and the conversations you’ve had so far in the interview process. While this executive may not be an active participant in your eventual day-to-day, they will be a key voice and decision-maker in influential processes and milestones (like performance reviews and promotions decisions) as long as you’re both on the team.