“I haven’t been an SE, but...”
That was how a client opened his interviews for sales engineering roles. He was trying to be accurate. He had never held the title, and he wanted to say so before explaining why his experience belonged in the room.
The opening gave the interviewer a reason to file him in the wrong category before he got to the evidence.
I talked this through with Mike Spaeth on Read the Room. Mike and I worked together at Coremetrics. Since then he has worked in sustainability risk, satellites, geospatial data, and AI, and with each move he had to explain his experience to people in industries he was still learning.
Full conversation:
The line running through a career matters most when the next role has a different title, serves a different customer, or sits in an industry where no one recognizes the companies on your resume. The person across from you needs to understand what you know how to do and where you have done something relevant before.
My client had relevant work behind him. His first sentence was about the title he had not held. The interviewer could hear that as a missing qualification, and the experience that might have changed the conversation came afterward.
It is an easy mistake when you care about being honest. You see the difference between your background and the job description, so you explain the difference first and hope the other person stays with you long enough to see the connection.
Mike and I also talk about naming a weak spot openly. That sounds like it contradicts this example. It doesn’t, because a missing title and a missing capability are different things.
Mike has a version of this from the other side. He went after a pivot into a role that turned out to be more physics-based than he expected. In one interview they gave him a roleplay: a helicopter company is building a new blade from a specific material, so what questions would he ask? He told them he would not know what question to ask. They asked whether he had anything at all. He said no. They said it was probably not the right role and suggested cutting the interview short. He agreed.
He told me he felt bad afterward, because he had not understood how strong a pivot they were looking for. He also called it a good save. He got an accurate read on the fit in one conversation, and it cost him one interview.
His approach now is to say plainly what he does not know, then say what he does know about it. The gap gets named once, and the evidence goes right next to it. If you have done the work, describe it. If there is something you still need to learn, say that specifically too. Asking what concerns someone has gives you something concrete to address, instead of guessing what they have already decided.
Before your next interview, look at your opening sentence. If it starts with something you have not done, ask whether you have introduced a real gap or only a title you never held.
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The ideas in this newsletter come from 25 years of working with senior leaders on how they're positioned, perceived, and promoted. I use AI tools as part of my editing process. The thinking, the client work, and the voice are mine.