Well I just had a great phone conversation with someone at Blast Radius about my resume, as I was recommended to give them a call through a friend of a friend. The conversation brought about some good news and bad news. The good news is that I definitely feel this person has clarified the steps I need to take in improving my resume. The bad news is that I think it is going to very difficult for me to do this. Why? Because as I already guessed, showing your portfolio of accomplishments is critical, especially if you can show how your work directly profited the company and by how much (i.e. I built Site A and it attracted this many visitors and profited the company by this much).
As I mentioned to this person, I didn’t have access to that information at the time. Maybe companies today give out that kind of information to all their staff but it wasn’t something that we thought about back then. I mean if the site launch went smoothly and the client and, more importantly, client’s customers were verbally happy about the site then we felt that we did a great job. Hell we were often to focused on doing a good job and improving our process than slapping each other on the back with site statistics afterwards.
Another thing that this person spoke of was tangibles vs intangibles. Tangibles are your accomplishments that you can obviously show, where as intangibles are things on the side that still may help the company but aren’t tied to a specific job title. For example, he described a type of person called a "connector" who is like a focal point in the company that people come to for advice or information. As soon as he said that, I realized that’s what I was. However, he indicated that intangibles were like the icing on the cake. They make a great person even more desirable, yet they can’t obviously stand on their own, as you need the tangibles as the foundation.
One thing that troubled me though is he said that you have to prove how you helped and improved the company. I got somewhat flustered by this. Why? Well, as anyone who worked during the dot com bomb period knew, most of these companies went down the tubes. So I’m thinking in my head, how the hell do I prove I helped and improved the company, when the management’s direction may have doomed it? I mean I did a great job for the company. They always told me that. Yet how do I prove that if the company consistently went downhill with sales, especially near the end. In the beginning we rose from doing just one job to multiple large projects but this person kept telling me that I needed specifics to prove how I helped the companies overall sales figures or something like that. Um, as I said before, I know very few companies who freely hand out their financial information to their employees.