I was surprised to find that, in this leadership interview with VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, he cites "self-awareness" as a key quality when hiring employees. He shares that his favorite question to ask in an interview is, taking a project they've done in the past, "Thinking about it now, what would you have done differently? What did you learn from that?" If the answer ends with a lot of blame placed on someone else, for example, you can conclude that the person didn't learn much from the project and that they're not very self-aware.
In his explanation, he ties self-awareness and thoughtfulness to an ability to learn from your experiences. The ability to learn and be coached comes up frequently as an important quality in a productive and successful employee. This ability to learn is very much tied to self-awareness and particularly an ability to learn on your own from your own experiences.
So, for the job hunters out there, what should they do with this information? Meaning, what do they do now that they know employers value self-awareness and an ability to learn? Start a blog.
It turns out that I've been blogging for most of my life - whether or not I realized it. Between writing notes to my friends and starting a blog on livejournal, I've been blogging since middle school and evaluating and learning from my experiences since then. Of course, at the time I thought I was a teenage girl overanalyzing my life - which may also be true - but this exercise turned out to be surprisingly valuable. Why?
A blog allows you to think out loud and work out your experiences. It lets you process what happened during the day and put it into perspective.
A blog also shares your thought process and learnings with the world. So you, your friends, or perhaps your employers (depending on your topic and intended audience) can witness that thought process and learn from your learnings.
So if you're out looking for a job (or even if you're not) and haven't started a blog, you better start one now. It's the best way to show you have this important quality while also practicing that quality on a daily or weekly basis.
P.S. Ardath Albee published a great post on how writing is especially a critical skill for marketers. If you're a marketer who has not (or even has) started a blog, read it now and try coming up with an excuse not to blog then!
Flickr photo by themoly
