What did you build with those skills?

I've been involved in a lot of screening activities lately for business analysts, product owners, product managers, and rules developers with backgrounds in consumer banking. It is striking how often it is unclear on the resume what the candidate actually helped to build at an organization. On the resume you will see Agile processes, user story flow, dealing with stakeholders, etc., but zippo on the actual end product created by all of the processes, or better yet, the business outcome of all that hard work. Personally, I love to see a bit of passion and pride in creation across these roles, but more importantly, so do our clients. After all, if you were planning to remodel a bathroom in your house, you wouldn't choose the contractor based on their caulking skills, right?

This screening happens often enough that we have four categories for these types of candidates in our 'post-screening interview': the "observer," the "faker," the "head pooh-bah of nothing much," and the "diamond-in-the-rough." I'd estimate we see about 25% of each in our screening processes.

• • The "observer" is a person who was 'around work getting done but didn't really understand how it fits into the overall picture.' Often, they are primarily note-takers and 'meeting-setters'.
  • The "faker" is someone who can't stand up to basic scrutiny of what they said they designed/tested. Don't know any of the credit bureau names in the United States? It’s unlikely you are just finishing an 18-month gig with Big Bank X's credit card origination system.
  • The "head pooh-bah of nothing much." This person's resume has "senior product manager/owner" with 15 years of experience. But they are really in charge of a handful of APIs that are not visible to any end-customer/are of limited range and are an all-in-one BA/Product Owner/Product Manager/Project Manager/Tester. These resumes are known for their narrative density.
  • The "diamond in the rough" is the rare candidate where, when asked, there is a trove of business understanding waiting to be released, discussed, and amplified. They just didn’t think this information would be interesting to others. They’ll say, "Oh yeah, I was involved in getting the automated decisioning rate from 65-80% for product X, with an automated time to decision of 4.5 seconds.” You never would have learned that from looking at their resume.

  As a candidate, you don't want to fall into any of these categories; instead, consider how you can succinctly describe what you built and the outcomes it produced within your resume. This approach, in turn, will get you more interviews.   

  As a client hiring executive, you can rest assured that CC Pace will continue to screen candidates carefully, specific to the role type, so that you will only ever see highly qualified candidates coming your way!