There has been a Thing going through twitter lately, about a Princeton Prof who posted a resume of failures.
CV of failures: https://t.co/iN9u4v7R1r That's a cool idea. I would work on mine but it would take too long!
-- Matt Simmons (@standaloneSA) April 29, 2016
About that...
This is not a bad idea, especially for those of us in Ops or bucking for 'Senior' positions. Why? Because in my last job hunt, a very large percentage of interviewers asked a question like this:
Please describe your biggest personal failure, and what you learned from it?
That's a large scope. How to pick which one?
What was your biggest interpersonal failure, and how did you recover from it?
In a 15+ year career, figuring out which is 'biggest' is a challenge. But first, I need to remember what they are. For this one, I've been using events that happened around 2001; far enough back that they don't really apply to the person I am now. This is going to be a problem soon.
What was your biggest production-impacting failure, and how was the post-mortem process handled?
Oh, do I go for 'most embarrassing,' or, 'most educational'? I'd snark about 'so many choices', but my memory tends to wallpaper over the more embarassing fails in ways that make remembering them during an interview next to impossible. And in this case, the 'post-mortem process' bit at the end actually rules out my biggest production-impacting problem... there wasn't a post-mortem, other than knowing looks of, you're not going to do that again, right?
Please describe your biggest failure of working with management on something.
Working in service-organizations as long as I have, I have a lot of 'failure' here. Again, picking the right one to use in an interview is a problem.
You begin to see what I'm talking about here. If I had realized that my failures would be something I needed to both keep track of, and keep adequate notes on to refer back to them 3, 5, 9, 14 years down the line, I would have been much better prepared for these interviews. The interviewers are probing how I behave when Things Are Not Going Right, since that sheds far more light on a person than Things Are Going Perfectly projects.
A Resumè of Failure would have been an incredibly useful thing to have. Definitely do not post it online, since hiring managers are looking for rule-outs to thin the pile of applications. But keep it next to your copy of your resume, next to your References from Past Managers list.