Anonymous wrote:What you say or your qualifications rarely matter. People are usually hired by someone who likes their demeanor or looks.

You haven’t met my colleagues

What you say or your qualifications rarely matter. People are usually hired by someone who likes their demeanor or looks.

I always make a point show how I leveraged experience from a previous job and applied it at a subsequent job especially when it occurs in unique or unexpected ways. I also make a point to show how I picked up new skills at each new job as part of just doing the job.

I would have left off the negative part. Instead of starting with a "no" answer, I'd have just started talking about the previous roles and given very specific examples.

I don’t think what you said is bad, but it is better to put everything in a positive way. Ie talk about the soft skills etc that are relevant, then segue into “and of course, at x and y I was spearheading our work on z that was very similar to what you are doing here…

Not knowing the jobs you had, have, or interviewing for, I would have gone with soft skills like collaborating, keeping up with evolving policies, and learning from current challenges and applying lessons learned to different fields. Stuff like that.

I just had an interview for a role using skills from a few companies ago.

I was asked how my current role applies to this role.

I said “My current role doesn’t not apply to this role I’m interviewing for. Roles I had at previous companies apply to this role and those are roles I enjoyed and did well.”

Interviewer did not seem impressed with that.

What should I have said instead?