A senior software engineer, who has been a high-level architect for several years and with nearly 20 years’ experience, came to me the other day with a frustrated look and an angry tone. He was complaining about how upstart engineers at prospect employer companies put him through a demeaning mill of interviews asking questions about syntax propriety and errors in a line Java code.
Asked why he let himself be subjected to such demeaning process, where he should been asked high-level questions about how to create customer value and how to create more user-friendly architectures, by those who deal with such issues at the employer’s place, he shook his head and said he could not help it. “They just walk in and start firing questions just glancing at my resume as it lays there on the table in front of me and them. How can I steer them away from such inane questions? How can I get them to really appreciate what I can do for them and for their customers? ”
Good question!
When I looked at his resume I could immediately see why he was positioned that way and why he was letting it happen to himself, despite his best intentions. His resume started with a Career Objective that said he wanted to be a Staff Engineer responsible of platform architectures (much like creating a new-model automobile, to steal a metaphor). Immediately following that statement he wrote, in details, about his technical skills that is an alphabet soup of different software languages, operating systems, tools, and such arcana. He then followed that with his detailed task-focused chronology of assignments, as most do in their resumes. This was yet another place where you found the alphabet soup, in full sentences, this time around.
Herein lay the problem. By positioning himself as a hands-on technical front-liner he had exposed himself to be asked questions by inexperienced engineers who did not really understand what he delivered through novel architectures and new platforms that created new and unprecedented value for those who appreciated it. He was not a programmer or a coder, (someone who can tune a car, to continue the metaphor) that can quickly get to the syntax and find a better way to write a line of code.
So, what did I advise him?
I advised him to re-write his top part of the resume (above the fold, in newspaper lexicon) that presented his high level skills: customer knowledge, user interface design, understanding how to create business value through great software platforms, and so on. Then I asked him to modify his details of professional experience and convert that from task-driven assignments to simple stories of leadership that showed how he thinks and how he executes. We completely eliminated the alphabet soup in the narratives and left that to the end of the resume under the heading of Technical Skills, at the bottom of page-two.
Viola! In the new round of interviews immediately following his resume re-do, he was positioned very differently. He was seen first by the CTO or head of engineering and then parceled off to senior architects to vet his skills with very different set of questions. Within just three weeks this client had two very good offers that not only delighted him but made him feel valuable in the way he was interviewed.
See how easy it is if you know how to position yourself from the get-go?