Thinking about interviewing someone for a data governance or data intelligence role such as a Data Governance Manager or a Data Governance Coordinator? Maybe this is a new role in the organization. Maybe data governance is new to the organization. Maybe this is a person that is already on staff and seeking a new challenge. When hiring someone, you want to make sure that they are a culture fit for the organization. You want to ask them questions that will allow them to give answers where you can make an informed decision about their fit for the position. Make sure that the job description is clearly defined and that the candidate has reviewed the description before the interview.
Each interview is different. Each candidate is different. Questions might change if it is an existing staff member changing roles vs. a person that is new to the organization. I know that when I am on an interview panel, I draft up some questions to ask the candidate. But appreciate some help in the question creation. This blog post has some ideas for questions to ask a data governance related position candidate.
Pick some of the following questions to ask or make up your own:
General Data Governance Questions:
1. What is data governance? Explain it to me as if I had never heard of it before.
2. Why is data governance important?
3. In your opinion, what are the various components of data governance? (business glossary, report specs, data quality, data stewardship, etc.)
4. Who or what group at an organization is responsible for data governance?
5. Explain a sample data governance road map for an organization (what happens in what order). (no right answer for this one as you need to start with why doing)
Previous Governance Experience Questions:
6. How did you come to be involved in data governance?
7. Give me your elevator pitch about you and data governance.
8. Give me an example of how you went about implementing data governance before and what you would do differently this time.
9. How did you get buy in for the data governance programs?
Questions About Previous Organization:
10. What has been your biggest accomplishment in data governance?
11. What has been your biggest challenge in data governance?
12. How many data systems were included in your data governance efforts at your previous organization?
13. What functional areas at your previous organization were included in the data governance efforts?
14. Tell me about your experience with data stewards.
15. What data governance tools/software/solutions have you used in the past?
16. What were these tools used for and how effective were they?
17. What was your involvement with these tools?
Data Governance Content-related Questions:
18. Have you written business glossary / functional definitions? Describe the process to write and what was included.
19. Have you written technical definitions? Describe the process to write and what was included.
20. Have you written specifications about reports, dashboards and ETLs? Describe the process to write and what was included.
21. Have you been involved in data quality issue resolution, assessments, and rules?
Data Governance and This Organization Questions:
22. How familiar are you with this organization?
23. How familiar are you with the data at this organization?
24. From what you know, which data governance components would be most appropriate for this organization and why?
25. From what you know, provide me with your quick thoughts on a 30/60/90 day plan for this position.
26. What would improved data governance achieve in this organization?
I hope you have found this blog post useful. Please feel free to use and share this resource. Good luck with your recruiting or job filling. If you have any questions you would like added to this list, then please add them to the comments below. Additional people-related resources regarding data governance and data intelligence can be found here.
IData has a solution, the Data Cookbook, that can aid the employees and the organization in its data governance, data intelligence, data stewardship and data quality initiatives. IData also has experts that can assist with data governance, reporting, integration and other technology services on an as needed basis. Feel free to contact us and let us know how we can assist.
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