It's YOUR LOSS, ThisCompany

The bad news: the data server is down in my office which pretty much FORCES me to surf the internet all day.

The worse news: Bloglines is down too! NOW what am I supposed to do? Actually TYPE IN blog addresses? YEAH RIGHT.

Instead I am going to tell you about my interview. Let's call this entry: How Not To Conduct An Interview In Such A Manner That Your Interviewee Will Lambaste You On Her Personal Website. (With special thanks to the much more famous Maggie Cheung who prevents potential employers from ever finding this website.)

1. Be on time.
I got to my interview a whole hour and a half early, THAT is the scope of my anal retentivity. (Is that a word?) I drove around and sat in a nearby parking lot reading the publications I hoped to be working for in the near future. I prayed. I thought about how this was a tiny little job that could lead to better things. I thought about how terribly cool it would be to work for ThisCompany, an amazing organization doing good works all over the globe. How fantastic it would be to say "I, Maggie, am a small cog in the many gears of ThisCompany's wonderful do-gooder machine." I reminded myself not to go overboard with the idealism, but shoot. ThisCompany is an AWESOME organization!

The HR lady found me in the lobby and led me to two or three conference rooms before she remembered which one she scheduled. My interviewers weren't there. "Oh!" she giggled. "I had to reschedule and I probably forgot to give them the new room number!" So she made about fourteen different phone calls trying to find my interviewers. She left me alone in the conference room while she hunted them down. My 4 p.m. interview started at about 4:15.

My response: Awesome! Less time for them to ask me questions!

2. Have some idea of the questions you will ask your interviewee.
You'd think this is a fairly basic concept, but we wasted another 5 minutes while the Senior In-Chief Executive Something Or Others looked expectantly at the HR lady, waiting for HER to ask me questions. Eventually they got a move on, pulling items out of my online application and throwing out a few Standard Interview Questions here and there. We talked a lot about how we love apostrophes in the correct places and how great it is to be doing a job like this for a company like ThisCompany.

My response: These people are WAY COOL. I could learn so much from them! They love punctuation! I love punctuation!

3. Present your interviewee with a basic job description.
I must admit that I do not have tons of interview experience and I'm not so much interested in the jobs that require hard core high stress interviews anyway. But it SEEMS, I mean, it just makes SENSE, that you would want your interviewee to have a basic idea of the duties and responsibilities for which she would be responsible. Right? Is it just me who thinks this? After chatting about what I can do, what I want to do, what I might not be so good at, what I haven't had experience with, we finally got around to the part where I could ask a question or two. And it only occurred to me then, that they had not mentioned anything about the actual job. So I asked them to tell me more about it. AND THEY COULDN'T. "Well," they stalled, "well, we need someone to back up In-Chief with that thing. And then we'll need someone to pick up the slack on Executive's stuff because she just has too much going on. As for Senior, well, she is just swamped and we're thinking the new person could be helping with that as well." "So kind of a catch-all position?" I said. And they looked at me gratefully, nodding their heads.

My response: Uh...

4. Your interviewee probably wants to ask more than one question.
After I asked what the job actually entailed and received my non-answer, the HR lady made motions to get up and leave. I asked when I might hear from her and she gave me another non-answer. Then they started saying it was great to meet me, and I said, "Wait! I have another question!"

My response: Wait a second here...

5. Do not misrepresent the job when you advertise.
I asked what part-time meant. "Oh," said the Senior Something or Other, "at least... 32 hours a week?" The HR lady looked confused. Then she looked at me and said that part-time meant anywhere from 20 to 39 hours a week, but (and she looked at the Senior Something or Other) she thought the job was about 20 hours. "Oh no," said the Senior Something or Other, "we're looking at the upper end of part-time." And no, they both told me, it's definitely not something you can do from home.

My response: Disappointment is beginning to set in...

6. It is only good manners to shake hands with your interviewee and see her out.
After it was over (only later did I realize it was 5 pm and they were ready to go home), we all shuffled out of the interview room. The Senior In-Chief Executive Something Or Others called over their shoulders that it sure was nice to meet me and disappeared. The HR lady rode the elevator down to the second floor and said, "You can find your way out, right?" And I rode down to the first floor, turned in my name badge and went out to the parking lot to discover that I'd locked my keys in the car.

My response: SUPER.

After some rather in-depth analyzation, I think that if I am not offered the job, it will be because I don't have certain kinds of experience, NOT because I had a crappy interview. In fact, I think the me-answering-questions part of the interview went pretty well. HOWEVER! The fact that I interviewed for a job requiring certain kinds of experience I don't have was completely news to me, as the job advertised had NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT THEY ACTUALLY WANT.

Internet, I am so disappointed. I really wanted to work for ThisCompany, but I don't want this job. At all. Even more disappointing, ThisCompany did not live up to the amazingness I believed it to be. At ALL. Internet, I could conduct a better interview than that!

I didn't really figure this out until I was wandering around the parking lot waiting for my [fabulous!] [wonderful!] [lifesaver!] father-in-law to bring me the extra key to my beloved automobile. I had a bad feeling, but I didn't know why. And the more I think about it, the more indignant I get. First they start late, then they can't tell me what the job is about, then they don't even give me a chance to ask questions because they're ready to leave the office. I'm not sure I would have even applied for the job had I known what they really wanted.

So whatever. My in-laws took me out to dinner, told me they were glad I didn't want the job because so-and-so's daughter works for ThisCompany and they send her to AFRICA to write STORIES and the travel arrangements are ALWAYS A MESS and the stories aren't even GOOD. Then I went home, cried to Phillip, watched 2 episodes of 24 and went to bed. No harm done, I guess.

Comments

[lee]

that sucks! i don't know if i would have expected them to be very organized, but this seems pretty bad. i hope there aren't blogs about the horrible interviews i gave people when they were here.

[orangepaas]

Oh Maggie. That sucks -- having your dreams dashed to pieces and all...but at least your current employer is still willing to work with you, right?