So today I was contacted by a recruiter from a large software company. Flattering, certainly, as I had in years past submitted my resume online to several and never heard anything back other than the receipt from them whereas this response came about a week after I submitted and it was from a human being! The recruiter asked that I fill out the questionnaire so I did. I thought it had some interesting questions so I thought I'd share with anyone who's interested the questions and answers I provided.
Do you know anyone at Company X that could act as a reference for you?
Are you willing to relocate, if necessary? yes
Are you a US citizen, permanent resident; applicant for legalization or amnesty asylee or refugee. If no, what is your Visa status or country of citizenship? Yes, US Citizen
If you currently work through a visa, what type & how many years remain? n/a
Have you signed any agreements that could preclude you from working at Company X? no
Have you ever worked for Company X before? (Please include if FTE and /or vendor contractor and yrs) no
Why are you considering a full time position at Company X? Most recently the article in Business Week about the revised attention being paid to employees piqued my curiosity. Other than that, I’ve long respected Company X as a company and liked the individuals from Company X with whom I have worked in the past as a client.
Are there any timeline issues that would affect a potential start date? no
What is your current compensation? $X base with 30% bonuses, 5 weeks vacation/year
What are your expectations for base salary? It really depends on the job expectations, location, benefits, and many other factors. I would really rather learn more about the position than simply putting out a number at this point.
Interests
If you have reviewed the job description – what interests you about the role?
Skills:
What are your 3 strongest technical skills (please rank your ability on a scale of 1-10 (novice to guru) and years of experience in listed skills)
What do you consider your areas of strength? My strengths include the ability to oversee and participate in collaborative/cross-functional teams and negotiations. I have particularly strong vendor relations. I am a believer in being extremely familiar with the available resources, not in having things memorized but knowing where to go for nearly anything.
What are areas in which you would like to improve? I am well versed in many areas of technology but not an expert in any particular narrow aspect. I’m not sure that I would like to become heavily focused, as it’s more of my nature to be a generalist because I like to see how everything fits together.
Why are you considering new career opportunities at this time? Do you have any offers outstanding? I presently work in the mortgage lending industry and our company, like many others, is trying to cope with a huge downturn in business. There is a strong possibility that the company will not survive the current downturn. I do not have any immediate offers pending and I am able to take the time to make the right decision.
As you look ahead to potential career opportunities, what are the “must have” criteria that you will be using to determine which opportunity is the right one for you?
1. A creative and challenging job that isn’t clearly defined
2. One where I can use my technical and non-technical skills on a regular basis
3. One that values and rewards its employees, particularly its star performers
How can Company X best utilize your skills? I can see several potential opportunities, some that readily come to mind include:
• Internal business liaison—working between departments, particularly in a client-provider relationship, providing strategy and vision
• Social networking tools—while I’m not a developer, I get how people use social networking and can see the evolution. There is a huge demand for enterprise-level applications and Company X is a logical provider but the current applications are a long-ways from being suitable for the real needs of the ‘Web 2.0’/Social networking. I can be the one to work with product development to help people get it.
• Customer technical relations—with the interest in learning everything that the organization has to offer in products and services, I am often very well suited to listen to the customer needs and recommend at least one or two solutions.
• IT Operations/Support management—I have a long history of customer service, I know how to balance resources and providing for the users’ needs and wants.
• The Gap recently posted a position that seemed remarkably apropos for my interests at this link.
What product/technology/application are you most interested in working with? Right now my primary interest has to do with the social networking, but I also find the home media to be fascinating—it seems like we’re right on the cusp of something huge but we’re not quite there. I enjoy wireless, authentication, Exchange, SharePoint, and other messaging applications.
What would your ideal job be? I think this depends on the company and the timing. In a small to mid-sized company my interest would be CIO/CTO but in a larger company, I see myself as a senior technologist/business liaison. In the future I see myself in a large company CIO/CTO or COO role.
What are your longer-term goals? Professionally my goal is to be CIO/CTO or COO of a Fortune 100 company. Personally, I want to live a full and satisfying life and never wonder ‘what if….?’
What is the next role you see yourself in? For my next role, I see myself as either CIO/CTO of a small to mid-sized company or a senior management IT role in a large company.
What will you have to work on or learn in order to reach this objective? To be successful in getting to the next level, I believe I will need more familiarity with enterprise applications, namely an ERP. I am currently bolstering my familiarity with telecommunications.
Describe your current or most recent company/what is the line of business/who are the customers? It’s a mid-sized mortgage lending company that is dealing with the general downturn of business in its sector. The customer of the company is ultimately someone who holds a residential mortgage.
What is your current position? Chief Information Officer
Describe the product you work on – what does it do and who is the end user for the product? My responsibility includes overseeing the managers of the shrink-wrapped applications and the custom applications that query the Oracle and SQL databases. The primary enterprise application we use is called NetOxygen and that is a loan origination application. My group also supports the servers, network, and desktop computing. Our immediate customers are internal employees.
Describe what part of the product and product development you work on and what percentage you own. Most of our applications are small custom-written Java-based apps. My group owns those 100%.
How many people are you working with on your current project? What are their roles? Most of my IT projects involve between 6 and 10 individuals. Presently we are working on customization to a document imaging solution that we have implemented. My group includes three major components: 1.) Infrastructure—network and server and desktop; 2.) custom application development and DBA; 3.) standardized application support
Do you now (or have you previously) had direct reports? If so, how many and what were their roles? Yes, I presently have 4 managers who report to me and my department of ~20 individuals. In my previous position I had up to 14 direct reports and more than 40 in total.
What is your expertise in the group? (What do you work on that is different form others on your team?) Strategy and vision.
What are the goals/objectives of your position? One of my main goals of my current position is to provide an appliance-like standard computing platform (in terms of reliability) and then to collaborate with the departments to develop new offerings to provide a competitive advantage. We work with them to listen to their business and expose them to supportable technologies, often brainstorming to determine a way to take advantage of practical opportunities.
How do you measure your success/know if you are doing a good job? Because my group is responsible for an array of services, it depends on the group. For the support side, simple metrics are logical. If it has to do with custom applications, a new application that provides business intelligence or improved reporting that is used regularly, and of course, a pat on the back is usually a pretty good indicator.
What do you enjoy most about your job? Working with others to find creative solutions or new ways to use technology.
How much experience in cross group collaboration do you have? Please describe a specific example of when you had to exercise these skills. I have substantial experience, more than 15 years. My MBA program focused heavily on collaboration and group activities. The best example I can think of is at the University of Nevada where I took part of several cross-functional committees involving researchers and academics from disparate disciplines. In academia the professors and researchers are often so heavily focused in a narrow area that working to get sight of the larger vision is challenging, but very rewarding. One committee I served on was the Faculty Senate Technology Committee. In this group I provided information on upcoming projects, listened to and responded to feedback, and worked to establish standards and expectations.
What do you consider your (non-technical) strengths? My main non-technical strengths include collaboration, problem solving, the ability to relate to business units and engineers and systems administrators and developers. I hold myself to an extremely high moral standard and am committed to the organization that I believe in.
Do you have any industry certifications? n/a
What has been the most challenging situation you have faced professionally? Did you work with others to solve? A couple come to mind, most recently is has to do with the fact that my present employer’s industry has faced a huge downturn in business. When I accepted the position in July the slated projects included creating and implementing a disaster recovery/business continuity solution, implementing business intelligence applications, improving customer service, and providing new remote access solutions. In just a few weeks after arriving the business declined rapidly and the revised projects included reducing licensing costs, restructuring and laying off several individuals. We have completed that portion of the project but the business has still not improved. One of the biggest challenges now is keeping current staff motivated. We are now working to provide the business intelligence tools and finding new and inexpensive approaches to conducting business.
Perhaps a better example with are greater resolution was at the University I worked where we were facing enterprise wide shutdowns of systems due to rampant virus outbreaks. I created a plan for a ‘supported platform’ that gave us a supportable desktop environment without restricting the ability of the academic departments to use the software and hardware they needed. This included implementing enterprise-grade anti-virus and update services as well as sophisticated custom-coded alert notifications. We went from an environment of people experiencing network and software outages lasting more than a week to virtually no outages. The most challenging part of this was the ‘sell’ to academic departments who feared a loss of control of their freedom to do what they needed. This often involved meeting with individual departments and explaining to them how it would improve their reliability and performance with minimal impact to performance or academic freedom. This required marketing materials, several meetings, and support of the faculty senate but the net result was virtually no downtime of entire segments of campus and a supportable and sustainable computing environment.
Please include a copy of your resume as a word document attachment with your response.
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