Peggy Klaus

by Brag!: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It

  To her credit, though, instead of skulking away and hiding under the covers for the next two days, she called back one woman on the interviewing committee whom she knew from a board they had once served on together. Admitting that she was not happy with the interview, Donna asked if she could come back and present a full-fledged development plan. The woman agreed and Donna took advantage of her second chance not only by crafting a bang-up development proposal but by getting all her bragging ducks in a row.

  DON’T LET YOUR RÉUMÉ SPEAK FOR YOU

  “Why should I have to I tell them? It’s already on my rßsumß.

  Last year my nephew Max, who had just graduated from college, returned to Philadelphia to look for a job. His days were devoted to the hunt, while evenings he worked as a bartender. Before he contacted me for advice, he had attended eight informational and four actual job interviews but had come up empty-handed. I was surprised to hear this. Max had been an excellent student and had completed two high-profile internships a few summers before, one with the mayor’s office. Something wasn’t right. At the urging of his increasingly nervous mom, he called Aunt Peggy before his next important meeting with a prospective employer.

  When he finally reached me, I suggested we try a mock interview, which I opened up by asking, “So tell me about some of your work with the city.”

  “Well,” said Max, “two years ago, I completed a summer internship with the mayor’s Business Action Team, his personal arm of the commerce department. I got to do some different things in helping the city retain and attract businesses.” End of story.

  “Max, is that it? Or is this just a bad cell phone connection?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s about it, Aunt Peggy, at least for that question,” he replied.

  “But … what I did was really nothing. I don’t want to come off like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  Okay, you might think it’s nothing, but III bet a lot of others would think it’s something. Don’t sell yourself short by underestimating the value of what you do.

  “Really? I remember you telling me about a whole bunch of interesting projects you were doing for that commission. Why don’t you take me through them?”

  “They’re on my rßsumß—do you want me to shoot you a copy?” he asked.

  “No, Max,” I said, “I want you to talk about them and bring them to life.”

  “Well, here, I’ll read it to you,” he said, proceeding to robotically recap his résumé. And therein lay the problem. Max, like many other college graduates, had sunk hundreds of dollars into getting his résumé just right. He had devoted all of his job preparation to the written word. As a result, he assumed his résumé should do most of the talking. I asked, “If all employers wanted was for you to read your résumé to them, why do you think they would bother to meet you?” I reminded him that employers weren’t psychics, and explained the purpose of an interview was for them to get to know him, see what he was like, and hear the story of his accomplishments. I added, “Your résumé doesn’t have your sparkling personality and energy, You need to show employers how you would be a great asset to their firm because of the experience you’ve had and your enthusiasm for the position.”

  Taking great liberties as his aunt, I continued, “Moreover, you sound like you are snoozing your way through this mock interview instead of schmoozing. Your energy is low. Your voice is a monotone. Your sound bored with yourself, and you’re boring me. So get up off your tush and pump up the passion. Start walking around the room and get some blood flowing to your brain. But before you start telling me again about this fabulous experience you had working with the mayor, I want you to say to yourself in a very exaggerated manner: I am so excited to be here. I can’t wait to tell you about my experiences, and you would be absolutely crazy not to hire me!”

  There was a long pause. “Okay, Aunt Peggy, give me a moment,” he said. (I told you he was smart, didn’t I?) He then launched full throttle into a very detailed story about his summer internship with the mayor’s special arm of the commerce division. He talked about helping small businesses cut through the red tape at City Hall for services, and about how he was part of a team that enticed three large companies to relocate to the city, adding millions in tax revenues. Barely stopping for breath, he bridged that experience to his most recent summer job, dropping the name of his boss, a well-known commercial developer acclaimed for his urban work reviving two depressed downtown neighborhoods. He delivered additional brag bites about his research scouting out large abandoned lots for revitalization and their impact on communities and the environment. Max ended by saying how exciting it had been to report his findings to the developer and how he had even played Ansel Adams, taking stunning photographs of the depressed sites ripe for renewal and incorporating them into his various presentations. His knowledge, his wit, his passion for urban renewal came through loud and clear. I wasn’t surprised when he called me the next afternoon to say he had been asked back for round two. One more interview after that and he landed the job. I considered taking 10 percent of his first year’s salary, but Max swears he’ll take care of me in my old age.

  GET CREATIVE

  “I have no experience—who would ever hire me?”

  Aileen, a soon-to-be economics graduate from Wharton, came to me for interview coaching. She was concerned that she had no corporate experience to land a job on Wall Street. I had to agree with her on that score. Fortunately she was graduating from a highly regarded college where she had excelled in her studies. Her grade point average was high, and two of her economics professors had written letters of referral praising the research she had conducted for her senior thesis on the emergence of microcredit in underdeveloped nations. She could certainly draw on her successes from college, but what was missing was the hook for her story—the reason she had a passion for the financial side of business to begin with.

  “Why are you interested in Wall Street?” I asked her.

  “I’ve always liked working with numbers” was her response. Imagining how far an answer like that would get her on a job interview, I said, “Aileen, isn’t there anything that sparked your interest in the financial side of business, like running a lemonade stand or something?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so,” she said.

  It all started with my grandfather, who founded and ran one of the largest retail stores in the Southwest. From the age of twelve, I spent my Saturdays and summers working for him until I went to college. I would have gone back to work with him more, but he passed away and the business was sold. When I first started, I did small jobs like stocking the shelves, sweeping the floors, and showing customers where to find what they were looking for. By age fourteen, I was running one of the registers, and a year later, overseeing all the clerks. Eventually I moved on to inventory—taking it and figuring out how much we had to order each season based on previous years’ sales and the local economy. My grandfather taught me accounting, and by the time I went to college I was already doing much of his bookkeeping. Come to think of it, I was really a financial analyst even back then.

  Now we were getting somewhere! So in her next interview Aileen said this:

  My passion for economics and the financial side of business started at the ripe old age of twelve. I worked in my grandfather’s retail store on Saturdays and during summer breaks. It was quite a large operation in Tucson that sold everything from panty hose to peanuts. I started with stocking the shelves, moved on to the register, and then inventory control. By the age of sixteen, I was pretty much handling the accounting and bookkeeping. I was a financial analyst in the making. My grandfather taught me everything. He would have been so proud of me graduating from Wharton with a degree in economics with honors.

  Something must have worked. Aileen got her first job on Wall Street two months later.

  ZAP THOSE ZINGERS

  “If you’ve been so successful on your own, why would you want to work for someone else?”

  Bernice
, age fifty, has spent the last twenty-five years working for herself as a management consultant for family foundations. Although highly successful, she wanted to return to a more traditional job in the corporate world. On one of her first job interviews, she found her heart stop when one of the partners asked her point-blank, “If you’ve been so successful on your own, why would you want to work for someone else?” This is when she felt herself slipping into defensive mode and, as she tried to justify her success, her responses became increasingly curt.

  “What was the real truth?” I asked her. She told me that it was simply because working from home had allowed her the flexibility to care for her children, while at the same time earning a living. Now that they were grown, she was ready to spread her wings again. Together we worked on a good way to answer the question so it no longer stopped her in her tracks. The new bragologue went like this:

  I have been working in the field of philanthropy for twenty-five years. When I had my last child seventeen years ago, I realized that my job demanded too much travel and too many late nights for a mother of three. So I left the company and went out on my own, to have more control over my schedule. I had planned all along to return to a firm when the youngest left home. D-Day is about to happen this fall, so I am taking the step that I always knew I would. I have really enjoyed running my own business and have learned a lot of things about myself, my values, my boundaries, and of course, managing profit-and-loss statements. I’m lucky to have been successful while enjoying each and every one of the families and foundations I’ve worked with. Now I want to use my skills on a broader stage, which I think a larger organization will give me. Believe it or not, I am actually looking forward to the travel. Isn’t that ironic, given that most of my friends have been on and off planes for the last twenty years and are ready to stay at home?

  Fortunately for Bernice, she didn’t have to suffer through more than one heart-stopping experience to realize that she had to prepare and practice for this inevitable fastball. By her second interview, however, she was zapping that zinger with a carefully constructed bragologue. As of this writing she is deciding between two offers.

  MAKE THE LEAP

  “I know it may not look like it, but I’m perfect for this job.”

  Howard was one of my very first clients on Wall Street. Three years ago, he decided to leave that world, where he had spent thirteen years as head of a multimillion-dollar research department, to work in the nonprofit field. First, however, he took two years off and fulfilled his dream of writing and publishing the Greek version of Roots, a cultural travelogue tracing the stories his grandmother had shared with him growing up.

  When he reemerged in search of nonprofit work, he knew it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. He figured he had six strikes against him: (1) He was a middle-aged guy. (2) He had taken off a chunk of time at an age when people are expected to be seriously into their careers. (3) He was switching to a field in which he had no formal experience. (4) The country was in the middle of one of the worst recessions ever, meaning that few were hiring. (5) He was going to have to beat down the stereotype of an insensitive corporate “slasher,” as he moved from one of the most cutthroat industries on earth to the more benign and gentlemanly nonprofit world. (6) He had to overcome his reluctance to toot his own horn.

  A self-confessed introvert, Howard was one of the smartest and most accomplished professionals I had ever met, yet I had always had to drag every good deed out of him. Despite these formidable odds, we worked together taking a full inventory of his skills, personality, and history. We filled his brag bag with brag bites and bragologues galore, so that he came to the interviewing arena fully armed.

  “But … you don’t need to brag if you can deliver.”

  Oy, this makes me crazy! It makes no sense. Why do people say this? Does it mean that anyone who talks about something she has accomplished is incompetent? Puh-leeeze.

  As we’d predicted, the interviews always started off with zingers like, “So why do you want go into the nonprofit world when you will be paid half to two-thirds less than what you made on Wall Street?” Instead of getting defensive, he calmly answered, “At this point in my life, I am lucky to have made enough money and am comfortable with taking a salary cut.” He always added, “I realized how much I wanted to do this kind of work when I looked back at the last five years and noticed that I had spent all my free time outside of the office working with nonprofit groups. I was an active member of one board and became a management consultant to two others. I helped them design and stick to a budget, hire administrative staff, and implement their technology systems. I was also able to use my IT background, having developed the first web library in the early nineties—unheard of even in financial firms— which I managed to build with just ten people and roll out globally six months ahead of schedule to thirty-five thousand clients.” He then further quelled their fears by adding that he would not be the nonprofit Al Dunlap. “At my old job I was charged with reducing the budget for analysts’ reports by fifty million dollars. I did it without firing a single soul; instead, I found more cost-efficient ways to do the research and print the reports.” They got it: If he could deliver for a large firm, he could be effective with an organization one-sixteenth its size.

  STAR PLAYER VS. TEAM SPIRIT

  “How can I claim credit when my most impressive work experience is from a team effort?”

  A client of mine, who worked as an assistant brand manager for a packaged-goods company, felt uncomfortable taking credit for successful sales force initiatives because he had played only a small part in a much larger collaborative effort. I recommended that he break down the project into ten parts that were all key to the project’s success, then asked him to talk about the two or three he was the most involved in, being sure to underscore the team effort. His bragologue sounded like this:

  I grew up eating so much Cap’n Crunch that I could have joined CEA, Cereal Eaters Anonymous, so I was in heaven in my last position launching a new breakfast cereal. What’s more, I was fortunate to work with an amazing group of colleagues and was able to learn so much more from the collaboration than I ever would have on my own. The team leader had twenty years of experience in the ready-to-eat-cereal industry and was a wonderful mentor. By the end of the project, I felt like I had soaked up at least half of those years just from working so closely with her! I was responsible for managing the research and sales data and creating all of our reports. It’s really important to me that information is presented in a clear and concise manner and that reports have an attractive and simple-to-follow appearance. During the project I received many compliments on my work from the manager and from my colleagues. Our company president sent an e-mail congratulating all of us when the project was completed, and he specifically mentioned how much he liked the format of the final report, which I had produced.

  TRUTH TRICKS

  “I don’t know what to say when they ask for a reference from my last boss; frankly, she didn’t like me.”

  Okay, so you and your boss never bonded. She didn’t like you much and you were not crazy about her. Still, you can turn this to your brag advantage as Jessica learned to do. When she no longer could stand working for her high-strung, demanding boss, who’d had it in for her from Day One, Jessica walked away from her job of two years as an advertising representative. This is the bragologue she developed to zap the zinger:

  I learned a lot from Bonnie and developed my skills a tremendous amount, but eventually I outgrew the position and wanted a job with more responsibilities. I had expanded my client base to three times the size of when I first started and held the top two accounts in the firm. I was ready for bigger challenges; I wanted to manage projects and really test my expertise. To be candid, Bonnie and I had differences of opinion about how things should be done, and so she is not the best person to ask for a reference. I do, however, have three other colleagues, one of whom is a founding partner at the firm. She would be happy to talk w
ith you about my work.

  BRAGGING THROUGH YOUR WEAK POINTS

  “So tell us about your biggest weakness.”

  You should be prepared to answer this perennial favorite of seemingly every interviewer, one that is sure to get you squirming in your chair. The best way to respond is to gracefully acknowledge a liability, while spinning it as having a positive side with benefits that far outweigh the negatives. For example, my friend Lynn readily admits that having too much energy is her biggest weakness. In an interview, her bragologue should sound like this:

  Some people might say that I have too much energy. And it’s true that being so energetic makes me prone to think I can do everything by myself. I have been known to take on too many tasks without delegating. Then when I get pressed for time, I can begin to talk so fast that I sound like Alvin the chipmunk. On the positive side, I get an amazing amount of things done. I can multi-task with the best of them, and at the end of a major project I don’t need much downtime to recover. Fortunately my high energy level is accompanied by a positive disposition and the optimism needed to see even challenging projects through to completion.

  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SMALL DETAIL

  “I have an MBA and five years of experience, but the clincher was something I hadn’t expected.”

  Jennifer, a thirty-one-year-old analyst in the food industry, had been wanting for some time to make a move to the booming natural-foods sector when a ripe opportunity presented itself. Even though she had no professional experience in this industry niche, Jennifer’s brag bag was filled with natural-food nuggets from her personal history that she could leverage to show the company why they were a perfect match for each other. In her cover letter she talked about growing up in the health-food store that her mother owned, testing recipes in college for a famous natural-foods cookbook author, and nurturing a lifelong interest in organic farming. That, combined with a finely tuned résumé, seemed to do the trick. Within days she was asked to a screening interview with the HR director, followed by a callback with the person who would be her boss, then invited to meet with the company president. Each person asked Jennifer whether she had experience in the natural-products industry and she said, “Well, I did grow up in a health-food store!” And each interviewer replied, “Oh yeah, I remember that from your cover letter.” This moment became the springboard for Jennifer to mention how her early experiences with the family business led to a lifelong interest in health and nutrition as well. A seemingly little detail about growing up in a health-food store quickly developed into mythic proportions because her boss, it turned out, mentioned it in his all-points e-mail announcing her hire. As Jennifer recalls, “The first week on the job, it seemed that everyone I met brought it up to me, saying something like, ‘I hear you were the health-foods poster child. So tell me, what was it like growing up in your mother’s store?’ Who would have thought that such a personal detail would end up carrying the day?”