The interview you never get.

The interview was on Zoom in 2022, and I joined it thinking I already had better people in the pipeline. He'd spent his whole career at one local design company and had never worked abroad. By the time we hung up I'd changed my mind, because of a line on his CV I had read straight past.

I was hiring discipline leads, the people who run one engineering discipline on a project, for a department in Moscow that didn't exist yet. The business it had to support was expected to turn over several billion a year. A project worth more than $2 billion was already on the horizon, and 6 months was the longest we could spend getting ready for it.

Today he leads the function I helped set up.

We were a startup inside a much larger organisation. Nothing was written down about how the work was meant to run, and there was no team. Whoever took a discipline would be writing its procedures in the same weeks they were expected to deliver against them.

There were 6 seats, and I couldn't step into any of them myself. A wrong pick doesn't show on day one. You spend a few months finding out what somebody has actually done and how good they are, then a few more finding their replacement, and with no process and no team behind them nobody covers the gap while you look. One wrong lead could use up the whole 6 months.

So I had a rule for choosing, and after probably 7,000 or 8,000 CVs across my career, I trusted it. A lead needed friction. Somebody who had moved around, or walked into a team that didn't know them, had already learned to build under pressure. For that seat, the rule had already put 2 stronger CVs ahead of his.

Both had moved across international projects inside the country and already held lead titles. The man on Zoom had one employer on his CV and had never left the country. By my rule he should have dropped out on the first page.

What I needed, though, was not really a well-travelled lead. It was somebody who had set something up while delivering on it, even if it wasn't exactly our situation. So I asked about the parts of his CV that looked ordinary. One was a move inside the same company, from the office where he'd started to another city, with a lead title. I'd read it as a regular career move.

It wasn't.

He had gone there to lead a discipline in a new team, which meant setting up the work before he could run it. Of everyone I spoke to for those 6 seats, he was the closest to the situation we were actually in. It was the friction I had been looking for, and none of it was on the page.

I found it because I knew how to ask. By 2022 I'd done enough interviews to lead with questions and hear in the answers whether somebody would fit. A hiring manager who hasn't run many, or a recruiter working through a pile, reads the page and moves on. He would have been the CV they moved past.

For a while, I was that CV.

I wanted to move to the owner's side, the company that pays for the project rather than the contractor that builds it. I'd worked hand in hand with one of the major operators inside an integrated project management team, which is about as close to the owner's chair as a contractor gets. I applied a couple of times. Each time the answer was that I didn't have owner's experience.

I had it. My profile told it in a contractor's words.

What changed that was the same Moscow job I was hiring for. On some of those projects we were bringing investment in as well, so the question stopped being only what a project would cost. It became what the project would do for the business, and where the economics could be improved. In 2023, interviewing for an owner-side role in Sweden, those were the cases I brought.

They weren't the only reason I got the offer, but they helped. For the first time I was describing my work the way an owner would, and the years in that integrated team read differently next to it. I've watched plenty of people who want the owner's side badly stay on the contractor side for years, with the experience already on their profile, written in words nobody on the other side is looking for.

A good interviewer can find the similarity for you. Most of the people reading your profile won't be that interviewer, and whatever the profile leaves out, they assume isn't there. Mine left out an owner's way of looking at a project. His left out the one move that made him right for the job, and he only got to explain it because somebody asked.

So, this week.

Open your CV or your LinkedIn profile and find the one line you'd describe as a regular career move: a transfer, a promotion, a new site, a change of project. Underneath it, write what that move actually asked of you, the team you had to build or the case you had to make for the money. Then read the line again as somebody hiring for the role you want next, who will never get to ask you about it.

Until next Saturday,
Vitalii

P.S. If you'd rather have someone read it cold for you, that's what the Career Snapshot is. You send me your CV and the move you're planning, and you get back a written read of how it comes across for that move, with next steps. I review every one before it goes out. It's 9 EUR and in your inbox within 24 hours of sending your CV: vitaliilavelin.com/snapshot