If you reveal these 3 things in an interview — you most likely won’t get hired, says CEO.
To sum up, the three things are:
- ‘I want to start my own business someday”
- you “value work-life balance.”
- Another thing that should be kept under wraps in an interview — although it’s a common experience with many corporate workers — never say you were let go as part of your company’s recent layoffs.” [I am not sure where the quote actually begins since the paragraph ends with a quotation mark, but there’s not an open quotation mark–ed.]
You know, the first trips me up. I already own my own consultancy, and interviewers will ask if I’ll still do contract work, and I say, “Well….” And I explain how sometimes former clients and friends will ask me for a little help with something, a couple hours a week for a couple weeks, and I’ll take that, but not another full time contract. But the truth does not satisfy them as much as the lies told by people who will actually do just that.
The second doesn’t trip me up.
But I dodged the last when I quit my last full-time job. The company I worked for was absorbed into the parent company, and they let go the operations staff and management and kept the engineers. But they didn’t have any QA engineers, so they were not sure what to do with the two of us. They decided to turn us into full-stack engineers (along with the front-end engineers), but I looked at the collection of 250 engineers brought into the mothership from the other companies, and I knew that somewhere along the line, that number would be trimmed. A lot. So I was kinda given the option of being “managed out”–that is, they would give me a software engineer title (but not the pay, natch) and start the process in motion to let me go, which would have involved writing me up for not being a good software engineer and putting me on an improvement plan (whatever they do in big corporations) that I would not meet and then they would let me go. It would get me a couple extra months pay and maybe an annual bonus, but I said, nah, I have my pride. Which means I can honestly answer that I’ve not been laid off (except for my first job, but that was a headcutting for the stock market move–my manager there worked his network to get me a second job, and he convinced them to hire me even though they’d just hired the two technical writers for their open positions).
But you know what does trip me up?
I am probably too comfortable in the interviews. I overshare stories of my experience, I draw parallels and explain evolutions when they just want me to declare I have such and such experience. And I can be a little glib.
I’d like to try to improve on this, but I have not had even a screener in a while (and that one was to prove that Americans could not do the job). Still, I applied to a couple of interesting-looking jobs today, and I’ve got two active part-time contracts, and I’m making progress on my next mobile app project. So don’t cry for me, Argentina.
