Allow me to tell you about my latest round of job interviews. I become a bit long-winded again, but if any of this helps you -- just to see some of yourself/yourselves in it -- then I'll be pleased. I realize that potentially none of what I write here pertains to you specifically, and for that, I apologize. But maybe a lot of it does. If you have further questions, please keep asking, and I shall be more specific with my help.
Interviews have been some of the most horrible things I've ever gone through. The latest round felt like a series of successive deaths, but at least I have a pretty good job now as a result. I realize I only had six of them between Dec. '07 and Apr. '08, but because it was for an internship, I had the simultaneous pressures of full-time school to contend with, it felt like I had hundreds of people saying no to me. I'm not good with the word no, or the uncertainty that goes with it. Introverted feeling is a terrible thing to have too much of during this process, but it was all I could draw upon until just a few days before I got hired.
The first interviewee seemed to go out of his way to make me comfortable, and therefore I gave easy, flowing answers. The downside was that we spent half the interview talking about tennis. I didn't get that job, and it took him eleven weeks to notify me of that by e-mail. After about three weeks I just gave up, because I don't like asking for a job twice.
# 2 was for a firm with which I was already employed, lol, so I was feeling rather confident. The interview was only fifteen minutes long, and they never liked me, nor did they ever tell me why. They also told me a rather extravagant lie to explain why I wasn't hired (they "meant to hire me, but accidentally hired someone in my place", which bumped me to the wrong side of the waiting list, so I had to wait for the six candidates to say no.) They could have at least had the balls to say that they weren't interested in me. These settings are too important to mince words. The two interviewers were also a brand of 'fake nice', which I can rarely get an accurate read on in these situations.
# 3 asked me if I could drive. What he actually meant by this was 'do you own a car?'. I failed to read between the lines, and this fleeting awkwardness became the sole reason for not getting the job.
# 4 was honest enough to say she couldn't hire me for about 18 months -- or until after I graduated -- but she seemed very stoic and said things like "that's very interesting" as though she were watching paint dry. And this is when I was coming up with some of my all-time best intuitive/feeling-heavy interview material, which I don't use all the time, even though it was entirely appropriate for the occasion.
# 5, I later discovered, would only hire me if I were over 35 and declared a specifically Christian devotion to God in my interview. I consider myself a spiritual student at best. I can't just pick a faith willy-nilly. I wanted that one so badly, but job # 1 would have been just as good.
By this point, I was showing less of my face at school. My best friend and I both went out for job # 5, and both being NFPs, we each wanted the other to get the job. Eventually he did. The day it was announced, I was truly happy for him, and because he knew what a struggle interviews were for me, he felt devastated. Two days later, the news had sunken in for both of us, and we each did an emotional 180-degree turn. I was in that horrible, convulsive sobbing mode, and couldn't look at him. He must have been relieved to find the job, but was determined not to let me see it. I apologized for not being able to be happy for him at that moment. Everyone knew how much I wanted the job, and he just told me I had nothing to be sorry for.
I didn't book an interview for two months, and instead arranged three mock-interview sessions for myself with the unnaturally perky woman from my college's career centre, my counsellor (i.e.: shrink), and finally with one of my teachers, who was also the department head. During the first two, I couldn't even look up or play the role of the applicant, not even for a second. Those became pure therapy sessions. I managed to wear my pokerface for most of the third, but my answers became increasingly shaky, particularly for the scenario-based 'what do you do when...' type questions.
Now, my department head's a great guy. I entrusted him with a lot of stuff last year, just so that I could make it through the program. He asked if he could be brutally honest with me. I said of course, and then he pointed out my habit of affirming my own answers by following them with "mm hmm", the same way Billy Bob Thornton's character did in "Sling Blade". He said while it was charming, it was a bit bizarre for an interview setting. Of course, it did nothing to help my self-consciousness in the moment, but three days later, I had interview # 6, and after another three days, I had the job. My mind was much more still this time, and the thing I focused on in the moment was not the quality of the answer. It was just trying to hear my own voice.
I had to get out of my own way in the interview process and just trust the answers I was giving without my own child-like affirmations to back them up. My main regret is that I was so emo-kid about the whole process that I failed to return a couple of e-mails from managers who said no to me this time around, those for whom I would still very much like to work in the future. I hope to undo that mistake in the coming weeks.
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