Many non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s) forbid you from disclosing details about specific work for your current or previous employer. This makes it a very awkward situation in interviews .Questions many job hunters will ask themselves are:
Do I say nothing about my previous role?
Will I chance it?
What will happen if I say nothing?
In general the best tack to take is to talk about projects in broad terms and to be up front about the non-disclosure agreement. The fact that you are strictly adhering to an NDA already speaks well of you in that you can be trusted with sensitive confidential information and the chances of you divulging is extremely low. This is re-assuring to a potential employer.
Another potential tack to take is commence with a high level description of the project. For IT projects you could mention the language you used and be sure to mention that it was in an extremely security sensitive environment.
Of course every NDA is different in regards what you can and can’t divulge. A good tip is to review the specifics of your NDA prior to going for interview. If you divulge confidential information in an interview to a potential employer it probably won’t impress them and you will more than likely be regarded as someone they can’t trust with their commercially sensitive information. Also you will more than likely only have met your interviewer on a few occasions so in essence you are divulging confidential information to a complete stranger. That does not augur well for you landing your dream job.
Finally Ireland is a small island on the periphery of Europe and there are only a few degrees of separation between everyone on the island. This is even less in the business community, especially if your potential boss is in the same industry. Hence there is a strong probability that your “new boss” will actually know your “old boss” and the fact that you breached a non-disclosure agreement could have major legal ramifications.
