Eighty-Five Percent

Today I am excited to head back into the office.

I have not had one since May. Oracle made my role redundant, the garden leave ran to the end of August, and the months after that were mine to fill. I filled them building software at a kitchen table with a cat for company.

From today I am a Solution Engineer at Ingram Micro, working on their HPE business in Norway.

What I did with the gap

I spent nearly thirty years in enterprise IT, the last ten of them running presales teams. I led the Isilon presales organisation for Europe West: 22 solution engineers across 18 countries, from the Nordics to Greece and Israel. I hired in all of them. I built the scorecards and sat on the panels.

Then I was the candidate, and I found the prep tools were built for everyone, which meant they fit nobody in particular. So I built PrepEdge for the room I know. Presales and solution engineering interviews at enterprise technology companies.

Then I wrote about it. Twenty-two posts since June, most of them on hiring, resumes and interviews, published while I was the one applying.

I used it on this role

The card above holds the audit. Three tasks, and what each one needed from me.

The resume tailoring worked the way it was designed to. I pasted the posting. It scored me against each requirement and showed where I was thin before I wrote anything. It found the bullets carrying activity rather than evidence, asked me for the number behind the work, and reframed the line around my answer. It added no metric I did not supply, which mattered, because I was the one defending it in the room.

The cover letter came back as a complete draft. I rewrote it. Not because it was wrong. Because it was not mine. The structure held. The argument was right. The sentences read like a competent stranger making my case. A cover letter is one of the few documents where the voice is the content, so I kept the skeleton and wrote over every line of it. That is still faster than facing a blank page. What went in the envelope was mine.

The interview practice is where the number in the title comes from. I ran the roleplay before each round, grounded in my CV and the posting. When I got into the actual conversations, around eighty-five percent of what came up was something I had already answered out loud in practice.

What that ratio means

Eighty-five percent is a good number for a tool. It is a terrible number for a plan.

Walk in treating the practice set as the interview and the remaining fifteen percent arrives as a surprise at the worst moment. Walk in having rehearsed the structure of an answer rather than a list of answers, and the unfamiliar question is survivable. The reps build the retrieval. They do not build the script.

That is the same conclusion I reached writing about these tools before I had a result to point at. The tool carries the first part. A person finishes it.

The numbers behind the search

I am not publishing an application count. The number would flatter the wrong part of the story. I was selective for the first stretch. Then I panicked. A run of applications went out to roles I had no business wanting. Those sit in the total next to the real ones.

What I stand behind is the top of the funnel. More than half the applications I sent turned into a conversation. Part of that is the tailoring doing its job. Part of it is nearly thirty years of history in one field, which is an advantage no tool hands you. The lesson I learned late is the one worth passing on. Volume felt like progress. It was not progress.

What no tool did

It did not tell me which roles to want. It did not sit with the week where nothing came back. It did not make the call that going hands-on with a strong portfolio beats holding out for a title.

I lead presales teams. I never stopped being an engineer. Taking a technical seat with the HPE portfolio fits the second half of that sentence, and I am looking forward to the work.

Five months ago my calendar emptied. I built the thing I needed, used it on myself, and found out exactly where it stops. Today I put the laptop in a bag and go and meet some colleagues.