A diversion from technical stuff to career development - (It is all about you)

I have been in several interviews, reviewed resumes and I have one bit of feedback for candidates looking for employment, regardless of the position or company you are applying too. You need to be able to tell the interviewer on your resume and in the interview what you did in your last position or on a given project. Please no more interviews telling me about "the methodology", or the long explanations of what the project was all about. I am most interested in, "what you did".

An interview with me contain very few questions:

1) What did you do...?
2) Tell me more about that (drill into the details of how you accomplished what you described in question 1).
[repeat questions 1 & 2 until the hour is up]

Far too many interviews and resumes spend way too much time talking about the size and cost of a given project; or the methodolgy used and not nearly enough time talking about you, and the value you added to the role or assignment. The resume and interview is a chance to sell you, not the approach or the concept of your last project or assignment (save that for a blog entry somewhere). The rest of the resume is simply about buzzwords that help get the attention of some search engine so I can find out more about...(you guessed it, you). Please do not make buzz words and describing those buzz words the focus of the interview (just drives me nuts).

Now with everything comes balance - There is no need to come off so self centered as if the world revolves around you. Just make sure you are clear about what is being asked of you and communicate the value you added to the process, team or role. The key here to not sounding self-centered is describing the value you "added" to help create the success.

This is the end of my rant. I look forward to hearing about you in future interviews. :-)

Thanks,

Ed
Special thanks to Mary F., (another manager in a large company tired of the same issues in the interview process) for prompting this blog entry