Do You Have a Brag Book? Don’t Leave It at the Interview

Brag books are a fantastic way for you to showcase the best you have to offer as an employee. It’s a historical look at what you’ve done over your career, and it’s made up of your performance statistics, project results, product brochures you’ve created, awards, rewards letters, and even complimentary notes you might have gotten from supervisors or even high-level clients. Anything positive that demonstrates in a concrete way what a valuable part of the team you have been goes in the book.

You might imagine that it takes a lot to put one of these books together, and it does. It takes a lot of time, energy, and talent. So don’t you dare go to your interview and not present it correctly. One big way you can get into trouble is to find yourself with a hiring manager who doesn’t want to look at it now, but instead wants to keep it “to look at it later.” Do not let that happen—because they won’t. And all of your hard work will have been for nothing.
It can seem awkward for you, but you’ve got to do the tough thing in this situation: Ask for it back.

Say (in a friendly manner), “Hey, Mr. Manager, if we’re not going to go through that, then I need that back from you. Because I know that, just like in a sales call, if you leave a brochure, no one goes back and looks at it, so I don’t want to waste your briefcase space or my paper by letting you take that with you. If we could go through it now, that would be great, but if not, let’s just save it until our next meeting.”

Why is this so important? Because they really won’t review it later. Even with the best of intentions, management-level executives are very busy people, and it just won’t happen. And even if they did review it, they wouldn’t hear your voice clarifying, asking questions, and elaborating. You won’t get to point out the 5 most important pieces that really sell you for this job. You’ll lose those things as a platform for the conversation you need to have with him to eventually close the deal and land the offer.

The job interview is a sales process. You’re the product and they’re the buyer. You wouldn’t leave a brochure or product information in a sales call (or on someone’s desk for them to find later), because that’s not an effective strategy….and you shouldn’t do that here, either.