Using T charts to Prepare for Interviews

Cover letters and resumes are written in an effort to communicate how well qualified a job seeker is for a particular job position. Using today’s modern job search techniques we tailor every letter and resume to do our best to position ourselves as ideal candidates for a particular job position. The problem that we have as job seekers is that these tools are focused on us. The T chart process changes the focus to the needs of the hiring organization and highlights the accomplishments of the job seeker that meets those needs.

The T chart process is simple and effective, so I will march you through the process. Using an Excel spreadsheet, copy all of the job description, qualifications and requirements into column A on the spread sheet. Often the description will have requirements embedded into the narrative, so distill each of these onto a separate line. In column B, opposite each requirement or qualifications, line by line, enter your accomplishments that prove you meet the requirement. Sounds simple, but it may take some work to make it easy reading.

The T chart process itself is very useful, because often job seekers will expect the hiring manager to glean pertinent achievements from their resume or cover letter or they hope to make their top achievements known in the interview process. Often the most important achievements are not listed on the top of resume where they are easy to find. The most important achievements in the eyes of the hiring manager may be listed further down in the resume or worse not listed at all. The T chart forces you to list your achievements directly related to the requirements of the hiring organization. This process forces you to focus on the needs of the hiring organization which is not typically the focus of your cover letter or resume.

It may take you some brainstorming to come up with a story of an achievement that is directly related to the requirement or your story may be dated. Let’s say you wrote an application in Cobol to run on a Mainframe. Well Cobol is not used as often in today’s high-tech world. More often than not the application will be written in C++ and runs on a large server housed in a server farm, but the principles are the same. Cloud computing is a fancy name for running applications on-line. Just like we did in “old days” of computing when we used terminals instead of PC’s to access the application. Today we call this Software as a Service (SaaS). So begin by writing your achievement story in paragraph form, beginning with what you remember.

Use the STaRs process: Situation, Tactics and Results, to distill your story down to 3 or 4 lines. Next take a highlighting pen out and highlight the key concepts or phrases which you can turn into bullets and insert into column B in your T chart. So your old story may look something like this:

· Wrote an on-line application that serviced 20,000 customers.

· Developed the application from concept in 6 months, tested in sandbox for 3 months.

If you are going to hand the T chart to the interviewer, your recruiter or send it with your cover letter, your achievements must be condensed. It is amazing how people will get the idea even when you use a minimum of words. Just look how much information is exchanged using text messages, short emails or Twitter. You can do it, but it takes some work.

Using the T chart insures that you are prepared to meet the interviewer. You will be ready. If you run across a person that is not a good interviewer, you can simply hand him/her the document and they can go to the items that they are most interested in.

The T chart will help you to prepare for all of the published requirements, but you will have to dig a little deeper for requirements that were not published. Often these requirements are personal to the hiring manager or were developed in the process of interviewing candidates. These requirements are never published, so it is up to you to get them out in the open through informational interviews with HR or with contacts that you have developed inside the target organization. Asking questions about unpublished requirements during the interview often gives the hiring manager an opportunity to get his/her requirements to you. And it gives you an opportunity to hand your T chart to the interviewer which shows that you have prepared thoroughly. The interviewer can then find the requirement that they are most interested in and read about your accomplishments.