Last February, I finally got a job. Without going into a lot of detail, I got it by leveraging some contacts that I had where I used to live in NC. The number of interviews that I had from applying for jobs in LinkedIn, Indeed, and direct applying was absolutely tiny. Of course, as soon as I started doing the series of interviews for this job, I got calls for four more interviews, because that’s just how things work. I make it a rule to never speak about a current job, just that I have one. If you really want to, you can find me in LinkedIn and see who I’m working for.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interview with that company that I really wanted to work for. I won’t say who it was. I’ll just say that it would have been an ideal position for me. In order to prepare, I wrote a list of talking points that I anticipated could be discussed during the interview and I had them ready. Since this was an online interview, I had the privilege to have this with me. If this were a face to face interview, I would have just memorized them beforehand to the best of my ability. Since I suspect that I didn’t get the job, you might wonder if this exercise worth doing, I think think it is. It helped me to focus on what I wanted to say and not go off on weird tangents (like I sometimes do).