[clug] Bidding for jobs - Was developer to restrict ssh

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi David

----- "David Tulloh" <david at tulloh.id.au> wrote:
> What does the collective wisdom of the list think?  Is it better to
> play down your skills but still maintain you can do the job, or portray 
> yourself as Dr. Wonderful and here to save the day.  I'm particularly
> interested in contractors who do this frequently and people who hire.

(OQ does both, effectively)
It all depends on whom you're dealing with. If it's essentially a recruiter, HR person or generic manager, then realistically the only avenue is to be mr can-do-all. That's beacuse in this case all you'd do by adding conditionals is introduce doubt into a person who is not equipped to assess this, so they'll pick the easy road and merely weed out any people with such conditionals in their info.

If you're talking in-person with someone with a clue, you can present yourself confidently on your area and level of expertise, be clear about where the current boundary of expertise lies, and your willingness and ability to also explore more. For someone with a clue, a mr can-do-all would be a pretentious liar.
But your current expertise does not define what you can do, you have skills that can be applied to go beyond and recognise patterns. We do "new" things all the time, situations and tasks that are slightly different from what we've done before... you don't want to present yourself as unable/unwilling to explore any of that, as that really makes no sense to a good employer.

I tend to hire potential more than expertise, but of course depending on the job it's a mix. The point is, some people have expertise but they're stuck - I can't use those. I need functional creative evolving brains.


Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
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