How to present your accomplishments?

 

How to present your accomplishments?

This happens to all the time. Whenever we present ourselves for an interview (or your PMS – this is the PMS season, you see) - either for the first time or for the nth time – we tend to rattle off our accomplishments and think that we have ‘impressed’. Have we?

 

Even small little things that are practically routine and incidental to your major task are marked as accomplishments. Actually, these things don’t impress your appraiser! (I have done hundreds of appraisals in my first innings!). This seemingly common fallacy of selling ourselves (in a manner of speaking) is a classic example of what psychologists call the ‘“Presenter’s Paradox.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem is that we assume that when we present someone with a list of our accomplishments, we are presenting facts (yes, they are true) additively meaning that if we were to assign scores to each one of the accomplishments, every little accomplishment will add to the total. Yes, numerically true!

 But your interviewer or appraiser does not see it like that. They don’t add but average the scores. So if your denominator is big, your average score comes down? LogicaL! They (that is if they are rational and biased either way and I presume all of them are rational and impartial) tend to see you as whole and not in parts! That means ‘more’ is not necessarily better. If you have accomplished significant things, highlight them. If you add trivial things, your average score will come down and dilute the importance of positive significant things!

“Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter’s Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65!

Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92 percent of them chose the package with the free download. “

If this kind of bias in our day-today living is pervasive, what do we do about correcting this? I don’t have a text book answer. But to my mind let us highlight our major accomplishments and forget the trivia. You will score high!