How to Assess Internal Candidates for Policy Lead Roles

Whether you’re on a large team with an existing Policy Lead position or a small team looking to formalize some ad hoc responsibilities, you’ve likely felt the need for someone who can assume a leadership role on your Policy team.

This post offers an approach you can use to select from multiple internal candidates¹ who are vying for the same vacant Policy Lead role.

Principles

We want a hiring and selection process that:

is fair and transparent;
is opt-in; people must express their interest to be considered;
gives candidates ample opportunity to prove their strategic competence;
is open to all internal team members who meet the requirements while providing a mechanism to arrive at a candidate shortlist.

Critical Steps to Include in the Hiring Process

Strengthen your company’s standard hiring practices by including these critical steps.

A. Require a Strategy document

As part of the application process, ask internal candidates to submit a Strategy document for the policy area they wish to lead.

Inform applicants that a blind document review process will be used; encourage them to write in a way that preserves their anonymity.
State whether or not applicants can work on this during business hours (e.g., “You may work on this document during business hours provided existing assignments don’t suffer. When in doubt, talk to your manager.”)

A comprehensive Strategy document will:

Describe the current state of the policy area, including its strengths and weaknesses;
Identify high-impact opportunities and looming threats that need to be addressed;
Propose a list of objectives for the policy area for the next 12 months, i.e., what they want to achieve if they were to become the Policy Lead;
Enumerate the resources and other dependencies they need to accomplish their objectives;
Plot a timeline in monthly increments, with key milestones indicated;
Identify what work, if any, we’d have to give up to achieve these objectives, ranked in order of priority; and
Offer a quick look into possibilities beyond the first year.

Bonus points go to a Strategy document that covers one or more of the following:

How the Policy team’s work aligns with and supports the company’s broader objectives;
How their strategy stacks against the team’s broader priorities;
Practical ways to improve how we measure the Policy team’s impact; and
Tactics to strengthen or deepen our stakeholder relationships.

You can provide a Strategy template or allow candidates to develop their own. A template gives away clues as to what you’re looking for but has the added benefit of letting you set a tight submission deadline (e.g., 2 to 3 weeks). A template also makes it easier to compare the submissions you receive. Finally, consider imposing a page limit to keep the review process manageable.

B. Use a Blind Strategy Assessment Process

The use of a blind process—one where the reviewers do not know who submitted each Strategy document—allows the panel to rate each submission based on merit and without bias.

For the assessment process to be a blind one:

Anonymize the strategy documents if needed. For example, remove or redact the applicant’s name if they added it to the document (this step should be done by someone not on the interview panel);
Define the evaluation rubric before the document review starts. Share this rubric transparently before the submission deadline. Ideally, the criteria will include:
- The minimum score or rating for a candidate to progress to the interview round;
- Disqualifiers, e.g., what things, if not present, will automatically disqualify an applicant?
- An assessment of the candidate’s systems thinking skills based on the way they’ve presented the strategy and its dependencies;
- People management factors if the role is not an individual contributor role.
Ensure that the hiring panel submits their evaluation scores independently, without conferring with others on the panel.

A caveat: there may be limits to your ability to make this a fully blind process. Despite your instructions, candidates may talk about the work they’ve done in a way that inadvertently reveals who they are. It’s worth reiterating to the panel that they’re expected to respect the spirit of the blind process and refrain from speculating about the author’s identity.

By the end of this blind assessment step, you may have eliminated some candidates from consideration. If so, take the time to thoughtfully communicate your decision to unsuccessful candidates to encourage development and manage any morale impacts.

C. Conduct the Actual Job Interviews

Interview the candidates who pass the blind assessment stage, taking care to give each candidate equal time. Include a standard set of questions that you ask all candidates to establish a baseline for comparison. In addition:

Ask the candidate about their proposed strategy. Discuss any relevant context they may not yet have, especially if these impact the viability of their proposed approach. Use an interview guide so each interviewer on the panel covers a different aspect of the Strategy with the candidates.
Give the candidate ample opportunity to clarify their understanding of the role and your expectations. How do they envision working with you, their supervisor, the head of the team? What things do they anticipate bringing to you, and what would they expect to own? Many new questions likely came to them as they wrote their Strategy document, and the interview is a good place to tackle them.
Get a feel for what the candidate would be like as a Policy Lead. Talk through a current issue in light of their Strategy document and see how they think through the implications, especially when their strategy relies on their ability to lead and influence without authority. Use the discussion to assess the candidate’s proficiency in the critical skills required by this role.

A well-run interview panel will help answer the question: In what ways will we work better as a team if they’re the Policy Lead?

D. Make the Anonymized Strategy Submissions Available to the Team

Once the hiring panel has deliberated and identified their pick, make the anonymized submissions available to anyone on the team who cares to look at the entries to promote transparency.

Additional Considerations

A. Exclude Applicants from the Interview Panel

Anyone who applies for the role cannot be an interview panel member. Even if you had initially considered asking them to be on your hiring panel, they forfeit this chance once they apply.

B. Decide if this role should be a Tour of Duty

A Tour of Duty² is a time-bound commitment.

The individual commits to being in this role for a pre-agreed time. The hiring manager commits to supporting them.
The absolute minimum term is one year; you may opt to make it longer.
At the end of each term, the selection process begins again. While the incumbent may re-apply, they’re not automatically guaranteed to get the role again. A handover takes place if a new individual assumes the role.

It’s understood within the team that stepping back from the Policy Lead role after completing a Tour of Duty is a perfectly acceptable career choice.

If becoming a Policy Lead is implemented as a Tour of Duty, it becomes a role that people take on rather than a permanent position in the organizational chart.

This distinction between role and position is particularly useful if you find yourself in one or more of these situations:

You are piloting the Policy Lead role for the first time or expect the duties of a Policy Lead to evolve based on what you learn. You want a chance to update the role description after the first term is over without all the attendant legal and HR headaches that you’d have if the Policy Lead were a formal position in an employment contract.
You don’t have the budget for a new position, but you need someone to fulfill the obligations of the role and a fair and unbiased way to assign the work.
Your policy team is still small, and the role is not substantial enough to be a person’s full-time job. Being a Policy Lead will be a part-time role they take on in addition to other duties.
There’s a chance that the person selected won’t do well. With a tour of duty arrangement, there is a built-in term limit, and you can choose someone else after the current term expires. This reassignment can happen as a matter of course, without much drama or fanfare.
Your policy team members are wary of making long-term commitments out of a concern that being tied to one role will limit their ability to develop breadth. The term limit assures them that they can move on to other roles after completing their ‘tour of duty’ without their career choices being held against them.
The current incumbent will be on an extended leave, and you need an Interim Lead until they return. You can use a ‘tour of duty’ to cover extended parental leaves, sabbaticals, and other similar periods of prolonged absence.
You see the role as a development opportunity and want several people to experience it. For example, you want to use the role to expand your succession pool by giving different people a turn in the spot. Positioning the Policy Lead as a rotating ‘tour of duty’ gives you that flexibility.

Closing Thoughts

Due to the nature of their work, Policy teams care passionately about procedural fairness and transparency. They will demand the same when it’s time to select leads on the team, especially if you’re picking someone who’s already a teammate.

The above approach offers several benefits beyond finding the most suitable candidate. It also:

Helps identify any critical information or context that the selected candidate needs but doesn’t yet have;
Offers everyone on the team visibility into the caliber of the candidate’s thinking and abilities through the shared, anonymized Strategy doc;
Gives ambitious but unqualified aspirants a private, face-saving way to realize they’re not quite ready for the role when they struggle to flesh out their strategy;
Crowdsources fresh ideas and insights from all applicants through their respective submissions;
Increases employee engagement and job satisfaction when the successful candidate gets to implement elements of their strategy or incorporates ideas from other submissions;
Sets the selected candidate up for success because they already have a plan before they even step into the role.

While these additional steps require more work than a typical selection process, I see this as a matter of choosing when and where you will expend your time and effort.

We can invest early on by strengthening the selection process, or we can expend as much (if not more!) energy later when we grapple with resentful accusations of favoritism or pick a candidate who’s not quite strategic enough for the role’s demands. I know which of these two pipers I’d rather pay.

Footnotes

While this post focuses on the task of selecting from internal Policy Lead candidates, the same principles can be adapted and used to hire senior leads in other disciplines (e.g., Principal Application Architect, Chief of Staff, or Program Management Lead). The approach can also be modified to require a policy-writing assignment for screening external candidates. ↩︎
I borrow the term “Tour of Duty” from the book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age but use the term more loosely than the original concept proposed in the book. ↩︎

_{Author’s note: I am grateful to several people: LM—with whom I worked to first conceptualize and flesh out this approach; JFR—for trusting us enough to implement it; IR—for reminding me to focus on the ‘value add;’ and DH—for adding much-needed rigor. Any errors and omissions are mine.}