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These are the two most important things to look for when hiring your first project manager

Hiring your first project manager is a daunting task.

Justin Zack
2 min readJan 7, 2022
Photo by Tom Jur on Unsplash

The best time to hire your first project manager is… when you need one.

It’s easy for companies to put off hiring a project manager because people are generally not enthused about giving up control of processes they know well and enjoy managing. However, the longer it takes you to hire someone, the more costly it becomes to put off hiring.

If you want to avoid making the common mistakes people make when hiring a new project manager and get your first hire fast, look for these two things.

Do they have project scars?

Having experience working as a project manager is one of the most important things you can look for in a prospective employee.

Asking them to describe past projects that they’ve managed will give you an idea of their level of expertise and what kind of projects they’ve worked on in the past.

No project is perfect. Listen for the things that went wrong and how they handled it. The best project managers have managed through many failures.

Are they going to be good at managing people?

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Justin Zack
Justin Zack

Written by Justin Zack

Project leader. Product thinker. Write about human things. Find me at justinzack.com

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