First Impressions

Posted May 6th, 2009

In his podcast interview with Susannah Pfalzer, Andy Lester tells a story about a job candidate who made a horrible first impression that cost him the job. The candidate was supposed to bring in a print out of something he’d written and then, as part of the interview, he and Andy would discuss his work. Instead, the interviewee handed Andy a disk and explained that his printer wasn’t working.

I smiled when I heard this story. I’ve been going through this with my daughter since she was seven years old. She writes her school reports days ahead but often doesn’t print it out until the morning it’s due. If I’m home, this works smoothly. If I’m on the road and can’t really help her, invariably something will go wrong somewhere and the report just won’t print right.

“Why didn’t you print it when you wrote it?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Well, what’s going wrong?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, “I hate this stupid printer.”

By the end of our conversation I’ve usually walked her through what she needs to do to fix her problem but not before she’s decided it’s my fault for buying this stupid printer and setting it up wrong.

I worry that she’ll end up handing somebody a flash drive at an interview instead of the printout they asked for. But she won’t. She’ll make sure she gives the person what they ask for. She’s figured that out and she’s twelve.

The guy in Andy’s office has no idea that he’s shown Andy how he’ll behave if Andy hires him. He’ll be given clear direction and when his printer doesn’t work he won’t stop to consider how else he can give Andy the pages he’s asked for. In a big way, this is a gift to Andy. It would have been a lot harder to get that information from the candidate’s resume.

The hiring manager needs to know how you’ll handle the curve balls that the job will surely throw at you. I had a job interview with a new boss. I prepped my materials and went out to my car. Ohhhh. A flat tire. Well, that’s ok, I thought, I’ve got enough time to bike down there. I went back in the house and my bike had a flat tire too.

I called to let him know what had happened and I could hear the disbelief in his voice. I have no history with this man. There’s no way he’s going to believe me. I tell him I can walk but I’ll be about fifteen minutes late. Would that be ok? In this case it turned out well. In others, it would have meant the end of the interview.

You’d be surprised how much these little things you do combine to make a first impression. You’d think that being late, how you’re dressed, how you respond to questions are obvious areas to watch for. On NPR the other day someone called in to say they hadn’t considered a candidate because she signed off her email to them with something like “Toodles”.

It’s easy to ask “what’s the big deal”? It only takes Andy a minute to print out the report. We can tell the young woman not to use “Toodles” in corporate correspondence. But these are the red flags that later we say “oh, we should have realized back then”. Although there are flat tires and broken printers there’s a lot of truth in the phrase “how you do anything is how you do everything.”

So we are releasing Andy’s book Land the Tech Job You Love today. This is a book that looks beyond the obvious. In fact, Andy challenges conventional wisdom. If people tell you your resume should lead with an “Objectives” section, Andy asks why. How does listing your objectives help you to get the job that you want to get? His conclusion is that it doesn’t so you shouldn’t include one.

Andy’s book joins Chad Fowler’s “The Passionate Programmer” in our Life Series. Together these books help you take a fresh look at your career. They invite you to take control and decide what you want to do and commit to what you need to do in order to get there.

So are we contradicting ourselves by releasing Andy’s book today? I don’t think so.

We’re ready to sell you a copy of Andy’s book before it’s been typeset. Is that nuts? Isn’t that counter to everything I’ve been saying? We don’t think so. This book has been written, reviewed, revised, edited, and proofed. Everything is done except for the final typesetting pass and then sending it off to the printer. In this economy, we think it’s better to make this book available now rather than hold you up another couple of weeks.

So here’s the deal, we’re selling this as a beta book because that’s our mechanism for books in progress. In this case, that means that the font and spacing isn’t quite right yet and you’ll see these little rectangles here and there to warn the typesetter that there’s a line he needs to adjust. Other than that, the book is ready for you. You can buy an electronic version today or you can buy both the electronic version and the print version bundle and we’ll send you the print version as soon as the typesetting and printing is done. In either case, we’ll also send you a note when the book is complete so you can download the final version for free. If all you want is the printed version, we’ll have that for sale in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve read and re-read the book as it stands now and am convinced that this beta offering will make a great first impression.

Daniel H Steinberg,

Pragmatic Life, Series Editor

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.