Edition #5: Uncover Your Greatness
Bring your past work experience to life with the right context
Why Engineer’s Gate?
It’s the entry point to Central Park for the New York City marathon.
My favorite place & my favorite event to bring everyone together.
I’m a New Yorker, avid marathoner, and technical recruiter looking to give back to the city & industry that made me.
I moved to New York City for love on a $15 bus from Boston with 1 taped up suitcase to my name. Now I’m a successful business owner, wife, and mother with a mission to get you to a better place. You define what better means.
Each issue explores:
Reframe of a common interviewing & hiring scenario
Life in New York City
Running insight of the week
Join the journey.
Reframe
Interview questions offer a narrow lane of choices for the “right” answer.
Usually you can figure out context for the answer by the way the question is asked.
Clear the definition/concept questions to move on to the next phase of the interview.
Open ended questions.
Like “tell me about what you’re proud of accomplishing.”
What exactly do you do with this?
I ask this question daily in screening for my clients in Financial Services & FinTech.
I’m listening for how you talk about your work.
Are you talking about something recent or 5 years ago?
What your team did or what you individually contributed?
Are you talking more about the tech or the business process impacted?
Are you using jargon & buzzwords?
Most of all, are you rambling or concise?
After hearing a variety of answers & noticing outcomes, here are the different ways people tend to answer.
Bad: “I’m a great team player.”
This tells me nothing about what the individual person can do.
Traits < Accomplishments
Better: “I consolidated 3 web apps into 1, applied bootstrap, and standardized the look and feel of the application. The speed of loading pages went from 1min+ to 15 seconds. Data is now loaded in 1 place instead of 3.”
This gives me specifics to work with but not paired with any business process.
Best: “I was hired by a former colleague for my expertise in automation.
When I joined, the environment was waterfall instead of agile. They couldn't add new workflows or customizations. It took 3 months for clients to automate. The team morale took a hit before I started.
Then I introduced a testing framework that is now used as the standard solution across the bank. This took the automation process for client onboarding from 3 months to 1 week.
I even secured a promotion for one of my employees.”
This speaks to problems, solutions, technology & business process.
What does your answer sound like for what you’re most proud of accomplishing?
Think about it like a 3 act play.
Use this format:
1. Setup
What was happening before you started?
How was information flowing?
2. The Confrontation
What did the hero (you) do?
Speak about individual contributions as they will not be hiring your whole team in most cases.
3. The Resolution
How did it end up?
What can people do now that they couldn't do before?
Write this out for each of your jobs, making it easy to update your resume.
Get stuck, need a hand, or want feedback?
Book a 15 min call with me here
I’ve dealt with resume updates daily for 15 years & can help faster than googling.
NYC
Have you ever looked at an ancient sculpture in a museum and thought it looked like dusty broken stone?
Disconnected from the present.
Faded from its former glory.
Meaning unknown.
Out of context.
That’s how I felt until a new exhibit, Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It brought these forms to life. Restoring their meaning.
A husband and wife team researched what colors and techniques were used to decorate ancient Greek & Roman sculptures.
Then they 3D printed a replica and painted it so we can experience what it looked like in its prime.
Here’s the original
Here’s is the replica
Now you can see evidence of color and pattern where you just saw dirty stone before.
Check it out before it closes in March 2023.
Info on Exhibit here
AR experience here
Running
“Humans are meant to, and built to, run.” 1
Did you just laugh at that or silently nod in agreement?
What’s the first thing you think of when you think of running?
Pain? Injury? Freedom?
The answer is important.
It frames the way you approach running.
We all have memories of running as kids.
Whether it was tag, hide and go seek, or a physical fitness mile run in school.
We didn’t need to think about it. We just ran.
We think this same approach carries over into adulthood.
It does not.
As our bodies and minds change, so does our running.
Focusing on form helps bring us back to the child-like state of running.
That feeling of joy to move faster.
“The fact is that most adults in modern cultures have lost the connection with the body they once had as kids. Subsequently, they lost their innate ability to run with natural, healthy biomechanics.”
The old way of thinking about running was to grind out the miles as quickly as possible “no pain, no gain” style.
The Chi way of thinking about running is to connect your mind & body as much as possible.
“ChiRunning has the effect it has because it helps people discover something that is both an innate need and an innate ability: to move gracefully and to run freely, without force, without pain, and with a deep realization that this is exactly what they are meant to be doing.”
You can run with a smile or a scowl.
Up to you.
Wrapping it all together, bring your own past work experience to life by framing it into a 3 act play and restore your mind body connection with a run.
Let’s keep moving.
See you next Monday!
Jen
*Special thanks to my Newsletter Launchpad crew. Your quick feedback turnaround is noticed & appreciated.
Quotes from Chi Marathon by Danny & Katherine Dreyer
The 3 act play part really helps me to frame the whole concept better. There's a skeleton to hang your questions on.