I Spent 7 Years as a Project Manager. Here Are My Top Tips for What to Look for in Yours

After the Great Recession yanked my real estate career out from under me, I went back to school to finish the degree I had started before I fell backward into that world — and subsequently, I ended up working my way into a job as a project manager for a small copywriting firm based in San Diego, California.

I had never done this kind of job before, but I had worked in both journalism and construction management, and I used a lot of those skills to develop into the project manager I would become.

When you’re trying to find a project manager, it’s hard to know what to look for unless you’ve been there yourself — and this is why I’m here to give you my top tips for hiring your next PM.

 

Find someone who is capable of confrontation

Not going to lie, this was the worst part of the job for me at first. I was very bad at confronting people, even when I was entirely in the right. It was a skill I had to develop, because project management is 90% chasing people around and finding out why they’re not doing whatever they were supposed to do.

When people are communicating well and meeting their deadlines, you don’t really need a project manager, but when there are consistent issues, the PM needs to be capable of confronting people in a non-destructive way.

Look for someone with solid organizational skills

Those organizational skills are applied in different ways. For example, at my PM job, we used a lot of content management systems, and part of my job was to figure out which ones were best for organizing what we were doing. I knew the ins and outs of our software, how and when to use it, and how to ensure that important information was accessible to everyone, all the time.

If you’re hiring a PM, take a look at how they present themselves and how they organize their own lives. Can they find what they need? Can you ask them for a random item and have it appear? Your goal is to find someone who can do the job consistently, not one who does it any particular way, so be open to different ways of organizing.

Choose someone who cares about time

A good project manager is also a keeper of time. They juggle project assignments, including managing individual pieces of the project, so everything happens on schedule. They’re the ones who give you a realistic timeline as to when a project can be delivered.

Sometimes they won’t tell you what you want to hear, but they should always have a solid sense of how long it takes to accomplish a task, start to finish, and how long each of the components should take to come together. This is why hiring a PM who is also an industry expert is so important, even if they cost a little bit more.

Hire the one who will get to know your team

Being a project manager is part knowing the tasks that need to be completed, and part knowing the team that they’re working with. If they won’t or can’t get to know your players, how can they be expected to know who to assign which tasks to, or how much work each person can reasonably handle?

A PM who treats people as individuals is more likely to get your product or service across the finish line, because they’re not going to be overloading people with work they can’t possibly accomplish on time. This just creates bottlenecks where they don’t need to exist. Just by knowing and understanding your team, your PM can help you be more successful and improve your reputation for consistency.

Above all else, choose a PM who is a partner

Many people make the mistake of hiring project managers and expecting them to be overqualified secretaries, and my friend, that is not the job. A PM has as much stake in the success of your project as you do, and they also have the added burden of having to be an enforcer and cheerleader at the same time.

So, for your own sake, and the sake of your team and business bank account, choose a project manager that you can see as a partner in your small business, not someone you expect to take orders from you without question.