Interviewing Your Friend – Practicing the Art of Interviewing

haha!

My great friend and former co-worker and I were both laid off from the same company at the same time. This had many advantages:

• I knew I had a lunch partner
• we sent each other job postings that were in our respective cities
• we had a sounding board

and some disadvantages

• sometimes we were both woed at the same time
• neither understood COBRA
• neither one of us could bear to look at our resumes

Most recently the advantages of having worked together for so long and to both be going through the interviewing process has become more evident and appreciated. We’ve started practicing our interviewing skills by role-playing: one of us is the interviewer, the other the interviewee. Our job responsibilities were quite similar in our past roles and we also had a pretty good idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses so having this sort of immediate feedback is super.

Some of the questions we have challenged each other with are:

Describing your job role or responsibilities. You would be surprised how much you forget. We both were in our roles for over 8 years and during that time the scope, tools, teams, goals and technical environment changed immensely. Having someone to say, “You forgot about this, or don’t you remember having to present to the VP of Marketing, remember the roll-out of that new tool you helped lead” is really valuable.  Another important advantage is that while you may struggle to toot your own horn, we’ve been really good at reminding the other that “you know, you did a great job of leading that or don’t forget how you had to synthesize all those different requests”.

How do you handle a missed deadline? This question brings up tons of memories and incidences but mostly of deadlines met. The answer we both toyed with was simply accepting responsibility and then figuring out how to fix it. Honestly, we never missed a deadline, even with all the launches, product releases or infrastructure upgrades but things happen and accepting a downturn and moving to resolve it seems like the most honest answer to give.

What did you like about your last job? What didn’t you like? Both of us loved the innovative spirit of the place: new technology, brilliant people and the optimism of working with great technology. We both realized how easy it was to identify what we loved about Sun and to be fair, it wasn’t that difficult to pinpoint what we didn’t like – the year on year layoffs. I don’t think an interviewer could fault someone for revealing they didn’t like layoffs but then if you haven’t been through something like that perhaps it may be difficult to understand. Although, I’ve never had a broken bone (thank goodness)  I can pretty much imagine it probably isn’t pleasant.

Gawd, this is fugly!

The tough part about interviewing a buddy is that it can be hard to get into character and not only remain in character but not laugh and respond with “Did you really mean to say “Um, you know” before answering each question?” The upside is that we can help each other fill out the story of our careers, provide other examples of accomplishment and remind each other that we’ve got a lot of great experience and there are great opportunities out there. We can also compare notes on interviewing attire and if you have been into Macy’s recently  you may understand how difficult it is to find something reasonably professional that doesn’t look like somthing your grandma would wear to church. I mean look at this image to the left, it’s absolutely appalling. I’m not sure what the beads are supposed to do other than offer you an alternative to gassing yourself.

My advice on preparing for an interview – find a co-worker/friend and ask them to sit in as the interviewer and ask you the tough questions.  You’ll get great feedback and become more comfortable answering questions about your past roles and responsibilities and they’ll remind you of some of the great things you did!

Boulder Coffee Shops – Where I go when I need some inspiration

Just follow the sign to another coffee shop

Since I now have a bit of time on my hands I have been spending a fair amount of time in the various coffee shops in Boulder. Most often I’m there for a networking meeting, or a safe setting to follow-up with someone I met at a networking meeting or I simply need to get out of the house and interact with people.  Boulder is one of the few places I can think of that can support so many coffee shops all within about 100 yards of each other…and all on Pearl St. And this is just the East end.

Each one is a little different – obviously – but each serves a great cup of coffee and the baristas for the most part listen to your order. I always order a double-shot americano with extra room and most of the time that is exactly what I get. Most coffee shops always want to fill the cup or mug with water, turning the drink into drip coffee essentially. I don’t know why but they just can’t seem to get their head around leaving room in the cup.  I guess they want me to feel like I am getting my money’s worth.

I go to all of the coffee shops listed below; depending on what I am doing determines which one I pick. So, if you have stuff to do, are meeting someone, or simply want to chill out for a bit, here are my recommendations.

Atlas Purveyors – serves tea and yummy Coda coffee (we know one of the owners of Coda but can still say with honesty, they have great coffee) Every time I have gone into Atlas people are doing some hard work: coding, design, working on plans. A place to get things done. They even have built in desks, with access to outlets. And great art on the wall! I go here when I am preparing my resume, thinking about interviewing questions or preparing for one thing or another.

The Cup serves fair trade, organic coffee, which is roasted locally at Conscious Coffee.
A little more social, a little louder – they were watching the tour last time I was there, and their large garage doors were open so you could step almost directly from the street into the shop. They have a huge room at the back so if you are needing a bit of quiet. I go here to network, to meet and charm people (or at least not offend them) or meet up with people I have met at networking events.

Laughing Goat – also serves fair trade, organic locally roasted coffee from Kaladi Brothers of Denver. This is where you go when you are writing your novel, working on your poetry or just needing to be inspired. Great looking people come through their doors and you know you could write a short story about each one. Superb people watching, lovely and cool – just a great coffee shop. I go here when I have momentarily decided to ditch corporate life to work on my novel “The Welsh Matador”, which was supposed to be a comedy but came out rather sad.

Jet’s Espressoria – They don’t seem to have a Web site so I can’t tell you much about their coffee but I can tell you they bake a lot of their own goods on the premises and they look great. I haven’t tried them but only because I am on this weird paleo-diet challenge with my husband, which is another story all together. I go here to sit in their back area, which is wonderfully shaded by some trees and has cute tables and chairs.

The Reinforcing Enthusiasm of Being Around People with Ideas or Networking

Only When Negotiating

This morning I attended a great talk by Joyce Colson and hosted by Startup Women Boulder. I don’t why I am such a ninny going to these things; it may be because it’s early, or that I don’t know what to say when people ask what are you doing, or that I can be social nimrod sometimes but despite or in spite of this I always leave this particular networking event feeling jazzed.

Joyce gave a great talk about negotiating, highlighting some key points where she feels women are weakest: we talk too much, we offer too much, and don’t always trust our belly brain (gut).  Her main point is to keep quiet, ask questions, of course, but to err on the side of listening.  She mentioned that age-old truism about women wanting to be liked, wanting the work and how that can undermine our value both in terms of how we value ourselves and our work but also how our value is perceived by potential clients. In other words, how can you expect respect from others, if you don’t respect yourself; I know I have heard that one before often followed by “If your friends jumped off a cliff would you?”

Joyce even kindly handed out tips and best practices for us to take with us; it was simply a great morning spent with some very interesting women. If you haven’t been before and are a woman in a start-up, creating a start-up, thinking about a start-up then this is a great group to meet.

Is this anyway to run a coffee shop? The Foundry SA

I decided to escape the Colorado heat for a bit and head to Texas to cool off. And what better way to cool off than a piping hot Americano at the local coffee shop. In a scene that is probably replicated across the town and probably goes against the natural order of things, Texans come in from the summer heat to stand in line for a cup of coffee. To be fair, they are probably getting iced coffee, or a frapaphooey, or some other sort of iced concoction but this “coffee-thing” didn’t not happen when I was growing up.

At any rate, a new coffee shop opened up near my mom’s so her and I dove into the humidity and walked on over. We decided upon arrival that the reason everyone one else looked so coiffed and cool was because they drove over and we look like bedraggled mops. The coffee shop is called The Foundry and what an interesting and trendy place for an all-volunteer, fair-trade coffee, Methodist-church supported affair. Yes, that’s right. The staff is volunteer, they make a huge effort to promote the arts and use fair-trade coffee and a portion of your purchase goes to help the church with their outreach programs. But before you (or maybe it’s just me) get all squeemish, the barista behind the bar was dressed in a really nice kilt and had a really nice purple tail at the back of his head; he was completely bald save for this tassel of bright purple.  Here’s the explanation from their Web site:

The Foundry is designed to foster thought, art, conversation, and community in a world that no longer pushes towards our churches. Instead of waiting for people to come to us, we have decided to move into the community and share the Gospel message through the building of relationships. People are going to need different things from us as we go along, and hopefully, we can provide for them as best we know how by showing them who Jesus is by our actions, not just our words.

I have to admit it does give me pause about going back but they do have a really great Americano and it’s nice that they are encouraging people to come together. There wasn’t anyone there pushing an agenda and had I not visited their Web site I would never have known of the church’s influence and I can smell holy water from 10 feet. So, there you go. One group’s way of reaching out into the community in a unique way. And run by volunteers!