Re: vague interview opener questions are irksome

On Wed, 5 May 2004, Steve Leibel wrote:

> Nobody ever asks how hard you'll work for them, whether you'll make
> their problems your own or turn it off at 5:00pm, whether you'll just
> collect a paycheck or whether you'll make everyone around you better.

Of course they don't ask questions like that -- everyone would give the
same answers.

  Q: How hard would you work for us?
  A: Oh, very hard, I would work very very hard for you.

  Q: Will you make our problems into your problems?
  A: Of course I would, the company's success is very important to me.

  Q: Will you just collect a paycheck?
  A: Heavens no!

  Q: WIll you make people around better?
  A: I'll sure do my darndest, you betcha!

Unfortunately, the interviewer has to be a bit more subtle & probing
than that. Of course every applicant is going to say that they're the
best one for the job. As Winston said in "Ghostbusters", when asked if
he believed in ghosts, esp, and other silly paranormal things, "if it'll
get me the job, I'll believe anything you want".

But how does the interviewer separate those who *claim* that they're the
right ones for the job from the ones who are *actually* right for it?

Questions like the ones you suggest don't seem likely to get very far.



I was just offered a job last week, at a company I'd been contracting
for since January. Their procedure is interesting: for sysadmins (me),
they give you an interview and if it seems like things might work out,
they bring you on as a contractor so that everyone can get to know you
and vice versa. If they're happy & comfortable with a contractor, the
person is offered a job eventually; if not, they are sent home, but at
least you can kind of think of it as a long, paid interview process that
maybe you learn some things from in the process.

But then, as far as I can tell, the only reason they do this is because
no one has thought of a decent way to assess sysadmins in the context of
a day-long interview. With programmers, they have actual programming
tests to try to assess one's abilities, but they've never been able to
come up with a useful test on the other side.

The important thing though -- not just where I was hired, but anywhere
I've heard of -- is the interview process. Don't think of those pat
questions as a waste of time; think of them as friendly chit-chat. These
questions have nothing to do with what you can do; they're about who you
*are*, what you're like as a person, will you be the sort of person they
want to have coffee breaks with every day for the next few years, etc.

Skills, mah, that's secondary. Important, but hey in this market there's
lots of people with skills looking for a job. What makes you different?



In a previous job hunt, I posted a link to my resume to a social mailing
list with people from all over the US, UK, and Europe. It was
interesting to see that what I was writing for my resume was more or
less what the Americans expected to see, but was way out of line with
what the Europeans were looking for. In particular, one guy was telling
me that it should be longer, and it should spend some time chatting
about my interests and hobbies, and just talking about who I am outside
of work. That is, he wanted to know answers to kind of the "irrelevant"
questions that started off this thread. A lot of the Americans strongly
disagreed, saying it should be "just the facts" -- state only what you
think the position is looking for, and don't waste time with non work
related stuff.

And yet here we Americans are going over these non work related things
in our interview process. And why not? We're still social creatures, we
have to find room for this side of ourselves somewhere.

No one wants to work with a robot, ya know?



-- 
Chris Devers, rambling