Hi Interviewee,My two bit opinion…..Clients – Absolutely the norm to refer to them by company name and to explain the meat of the project, otherwise the interviewer cannot gauge your experience. Feel free to retain the exact name of client individuals until after the first interview – it is common technique to harvest this info for bus dev purposes and you should be wary of this. Don’t get defensive – if the interviewer demands names, then provide the name of the most senior sponsor and merely state that you feel you need to respect client confidentiality with regard to the other names.Bus dev – depends! If you work on some propositions and then someone buys them – talk about it! If you were on some internal IP/proposition development team because you were on the bench, and no one ever bought the pitch, beware – best to call a spade a spade and refer to that sort of activity as the sort of thing that’s making you seek a move.Salary – do yourself a favour. NEVER base your request on what you’re earning plus some arbitrary percentage increase. Never think like this. Start thinking about how much value you will be adding to your new employer. Will your new billing rate be x% higher than your current one? Will you be leading a team for the first time? Will you be bringing niche knowledge that will allow them to win a certain sort of business for the first time? Will you be the final piece in a jigsaw they’ve been putting together? If these are the sort of questions you can’t answer by the time you get to the nippy part of the salary discussion then you’re going to be forever stuck in the salary mid-point your whole life. Don’t tell yourself that its too early in your career to start thinking like this – it’s never too early to start thinking of yourself as an asset.USE the interview process to work out what value you might ask – make sure the interviewer sees the same value. If a headhunter ever demands a figure before the interview, then don’t crumble – explain that you need to understand the role and the value that you will bring. If they insist on treating you as a cog in a big machine, and you go along with it, then you will soon find yourself as a cog in a big machine and under-valued accordingly.Good luck in the interview.
