The Lost art of Interviewing

I don’t know when this might have been but I have to think there was a time when interviewing for a job was a simple affair.  Perhaps, much like when people think of the 1950s, there never really was a time when it was simple but I prefer to think there was.  I like to think there was a time when you saw an ad in the paper or perhaps a Help Wanted sign at a place, walked in, filled out an application, talked to someone and walked out with a job offer.  These days that just doesn’t happen. 

Part of the problem has to be that people are crazy, of course.  Too many people are walking around trying to get into offices so they can eventually go crazy and do harmful things to as many co-workers as possible.  I personally know several people who apparently either doze through or choose to ignore the sexual harassment seminars that everyone at every office has to sit through at least once a year.  There are those who have rather grim criminal records and you don’t want to give them jobs doing important things.  You do not want the convicted child molester working as a school crossing guard, for example.   

So, companies have orchestrated these elaborate interviewing methods.  I think the point of these is to somehow weed out the chaff from the wheat or something like that.  Most places require you to keep coming back time and again, like a contestant on some reality show, talking to higher and higher leveled people until you reach the top.  In some ways it is also like a video game.  You keep getting to each level and the monster at the end gets bigger and more intimidating.  Of course there are countless books that try to teach you techniques you can use to get through these various levels.  I think of these like those cheat books you can get for those video games. 

The problem is each company has different standards.  They may question you six hundred times but people who are constantly looking for new work become masters of the interview.  They have a store of stock phrases and answers.  They become almost telepathic when it comes to reading the room and thus adjusting their answer so that they can give an answer they feel is what the people in the room are looking for.  They treat each interview like it’s an acting audition and they act their respective asses off. 

How do I know?  Because I do it all the time.  I have become quite adept at creating these long-winded answers that really go nowhere and really answer nothing but sound like they do and appear to give some kind of impassioned answer to the questions asked.  I think this is why in every single job I have had there has always been this nagging doubt.  No matter how well I have done I am always convinced at some point everyone is going to find out I have no idea what the hell I am talking about and that I have BS-ing my way through it.  Thankfully I think most workers feel the same way and are doing the same thing so really we are all wallowing in the same BS pool. 

There is nothing worse than what I have come to know as the “Firing Squad” interview.  Perhaps you have been on one of these.  You walk into a place and look around at the dull gray cubicles and various offices and people running hither and yon in their ties and dresses acting professional.  The places somehow manage to all smell the same.  It is that mixture of hope, business and crushing despair that I think must come in a bottle or some kind of spraying device and is used by offices all over.  Then you are lead into a room where there is a rectangular conference table.  As soon as you step in there the Firing Squad is formed. 

You sit on one side of the table.  On either side of you, seemingly stretching for miles, are the other empty chairs where, promptly, no one else sits.  Instead everyone else sits directly across from you.  They all have copies of your resume.  They all carry folders.  Sometimes they have pre-printed questions.  They all have note pads.  At some point the leader of this group smiles and nods and explains who everyone is and that they are all going to ask you questions.  Sometimes this is followed by a long and lengthy explanation of the company and what the job is.  Most of the time this is a big giant tease to make you think that no one would possibly tell you this much inside information without wanting to offer you the job.  This is a ruse, of course.  For all I know all of this information is entirely made up.  Then the questions come. 

They come fast and they come furious.  I have become good at the long answers.  This seems to stem the flow and fire of the questions because eventually I have talked so long they are ready to ask me anything simple just to get me to shut up.  One after another they fire.  Some fire more than once.  Sometimes they reach the end of the row and then just start over.  At least if you are the victim facing a firing squad the guns fire and it’s over for you.  These go on forever. 

Once it is done they ask you if you have any questions.  This comes in almost every interview.  They always wait until the end for this.  I have a very good friend named Tim who does so much research about the company he is interviewing with he could probably recite the entire company history to them and ask them questions about business decisions made during the Reagan administration.  I don’t do this.  Most of the time the people doing the interview spend forever telling you all about the company and the job anyway, thus making all of your research rather pointless.  Also, by the time they get to the part where I am supposed to ask questions I am so exhausted from answering and deflecting questions I can barely remember my own name.   

So, I never have any questions.  I am wiped out.  My only question is really where the hell is the bathroom and when the hell can I get out of here.  Instead I usually come up with some kind of lame question about the job or the predicted timeline for the interview process and then I try hard to get the hell out of there. 

If I were a company I would definitely dispose of the Firing Squad interviewing.  I really have a hard time believing it is the best way to pick the best candidate.  I had one not too long ago but I couldn’t honestly remember anything of what just happened.  I could barely walk to the car and drive home.   

How about just an actual conversation between two people?  Is that too much to ask?  Maybe some actual honest questions and some actual honest answers?  I think this is probably too much to ask in the modern business world. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.

What’s Wrong with Corporations

Over the months that I have been writing I have talked before about my problems with management.  Over the past couple of days I have had talks with friends who have had to deal with managers.  This has only managed to successfully prove that companies are evil entities, managers are idiots and out of touch with reality and that people who devote themselves to companies have problems.

 

I think the problem has to be that when you work for a company eventually you come to the realization that everything that has been worked for so far is turning into a great pile of meaningless dung so rapidly that it’s like watching one of those time-lapse films showing a dead mongoose decomposing over several weeks.  It is the realization that what you thought was the Great and Terrible Oz isn’t even really just the doddering old man, but something far more hideous, soulless and evil behind the curtain.

 

I think it all depends on what a person wants to do with their lives.  Are you willing to work and slave for years and years and years, following orders, towing the company line, kissing the right asses, year after year, selling yourself here and a principle or two there and a part of your soul there all for the hope that you kissed the right asses at the right time and when the axe comes down, maybe it doesn’t cut you too badly?  Sure, you are willing at that point to sacrifice your friends and colleagues, because by then the giant vampire that is the company has sucked so much life and so much soul out of you, you can’t even feel it anymore.  You tell yourself night after night, as you work long hour after long hour, that it all means something and that there will be some great reward once the sunlight comes up again, and that the parts of your soul that are being cut away are really just extra bits you don’t need anymore.  Then, after 30 years or so, you get to the end and you find your reward is a box full of nothing.  That you basically made some richer people even richer and now you have a 401K and company stock and maybe a gold watch and now there’s nothing.  What have you done to make anything in any part of the world any better for you having been here? 

Oh, sure, there’s your family, but your kids barely know you and your spouse doesn’t know how to talk to you because for 30 years you were sacrificing huge parts of your life to the machine, in the hopes that in the end, there would be something worthwhile there.  So, only then, do you realize that all those years have flown by and that somewhere about the time you went into high school someone hit the fast-forward button on your life but you were too busy moving paper from this side to that side and trying so hard to look like a good-worker-bee in the hopes that maybe you wouldn’t find your head on the chopping block to even notice how it was all flying by. 

Oh sure, you could use your downtime to become involved, try to make a difference, but instead, the company is not just asking, but now DEMANDING that you sacrifice more and more and more and more of that precious free time to feed its constant hunger.  That hunger that sucks you dry slowly, leaving you exhausted and battered and standing outside the doors with your pension and a gold watch and nothing to look back on and nothing to look forward to because it took everything from you. 

If you’re lucky. 

If you’re not, then you find that when the axe comes down, all that ass kissing just gave you chapped lips and you see the monster for what it really is.  You see that all those hours meant nothing.  All those hours you sacrificed, all those long nights, all of those endless days and lost weekend, all amounted to a number that some manager somewhere or some consultant somewhere decided they didn’t like.  No gold watch then.  Nothing. 

No, what should happen, is that the company should not demand people work extra hours.   

What I love are the ridiculous attempts to boost moral.  One company I worked for found out a way to try and reward people for working countless extra hours.   A sticker and a plastic toy!  Does a sticker and a toy make up for the hours of your life that were sacrificed?  Those are hours that you can never ever get back?  If companies want to compensate, then they should give those hours back.  How about days off?  How about letting someone go home early?  How about at least letting someone come in late the next day if they had to work until 3 am? 

What most companies that rely only on are metrics and numbers and continually write people up for making mistakes create is not a feeling of teamwork.  What they create is an atmosphere of fear.  Fear that you won’t meet a metric.  Fear that a chart won’t get turned in on time.  Fear of making a mistake or having to tell your boss you might make a mistake because every moment and every detail of your life is plotted, charted, graphed and analyzed by the monster that lives behind the curtain.   

People can’t work in an atmosphere of fear.  It wears on them.  It breaks them. 

In the end, all of the hours worked don’t matter.  It’s is a job.  It pays the bills.  When you stand and look at the unpleasant atmosphere, ridiculous demands and every moment is utter hell you soon discover the compensation just isn’t enough.  It isn’t enough to match up against the parts of you that you sacrificed to make it.  It isn’t enough to give you back the hours you wasted.  It isn’t enough to make up for robbing the person of the hours they could have been using to try and make something of their lives, and maybe leave a little bit of an impression on this world. 

Sacrificing your time, your family, your health, your sanity isn’t worth the plastic toy, the sticker or even the compensation.  Finding solutions that allow people to put in a relatively regular working day is the route to go.  Instead of cutting to the bone and expecting people to sacrifice even more, find a way to make the increased amount of people more efficient and cost-effective.  You don’t put out a fire by taking people away from the hose or the line of buckets.  You put out the fire by bringing more people in. 

You give people back the time they sacrifice. 

You don’t demand that they sacrifice it. 

You create a working environment free of lies.  Free of smoke and mirrors.  You treat people like adults and you compensate them and reward them fairly and then you find people willing to go the extra mile when it is needed.             Let’s wake up and act like adults.  Find a way to actually make a difference.  Find a way to actually make things work and listen to people who have ideas on how to make things work and let’s make sure it all really does work before putting things into action. 

Let’s try to make at least one aspect of working worth doing.   

Right now, there’s nothing. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.              

Attack of the Buzz Words

Something needs to be done in the business world and it needs to be done now.  The business world has gone so crazy with the buzzwords that they have started to make things up that have no relation of any kind to business.  I can thank my good friend Tim for pointing this out to me by providing me with one of the most ridiculous cases I have ever run across.   

You know what I mean about “buzzwords.”  These are stupid words that really have no meaning and that managers at companies far and wide like to throw around to make themselves seem more important and more intelligent than they really are.  It is my theory that they learn these words through special classes that they are force to take on the island that the managers are genetically engineered.  I imagine they have classrooms as large as those hangars they use to store blimps if the sheer number and volume of middle-managers in this country is any indication.  The childlike future managers sit there, heads planted firmly up their kiesters, and have headphones placed over their heads and are then forced to watch video screens where these words are flashed across the screens and pumped into their heads. 

In the example given to me by my friend the subject of altitude was brought in for no conceivable reason other than the recruiter must have thought it sounded cool.  In the end the examples and comparison makes absolutely no sense.  I am thinking there must be a separate island where recruiters and salesmen are created.  They have their own way of talking, baby, and it seldom makes sense to anyone with half of a working brain.  Rain Man would look at a recruiter and ask what the hell he or she was talking about. 

These days interviewing appears to be an art that is not taught on any of those islands anymore.  Not too far into my past I had an interview where the person doing the interview immediately seemed antagonistic.  The interviewer seemed to think she was a reporter for “60 Minutes” and that I was attempting to commit some kind of great fraud and she was going to be the one to bust me.  Accusatory questions were flying along the phone lines like arrows in the movie “Braveheart.”  My question to her was, if you thought I had these problems, why the hell did you want to set up the interview in the first place? 

Anyway this time my friend ended up doing one interview and apparently did a great job.  This is another thing every company in the world does.  You simply cannot fill out an application and then have an interview with one person and then get the job.  These days getting to the final level of a “Final Fantasy” game takes less time and fewer twists and turns than getting to the end of the number of people you have to talk to before you either do or do not get a job offered to you.  You talk to a recruiter.  Then you talk to manager.  Sometimes you talk to a potential co-worker.  Then you talk to the janitor, the security guard, some guy they found sleeping on a bus bench that morning and the CEO’s grandfather.  You do all of this on separate days spaced roughly four months apart. 

So, anyway, back to my friend.  He was called back for this second interview.  While in this second interview he was told by the recruiter that the first interview had given him and overview of the job from 50,000 feet and now this second interview was from 30,000 feet.  I am not making this up.  At least, my friend says he wasn’t making this up. 

What?  Huh?  Unless you are applying for a job as a pilot or possibly an air traffic controller the subject of distance from the ground should not be brought up.  Now, keep in mind, this is just my opinion, but when you really think about it what does that even mean?  When you are trying to compare thousands of miles what possible difference would 20,000 miles mean when you are still 30,000 miles above the surface? 

See if you can follow me here.  Unless you are a pilot could you really tell if you were 50,000 or 30,000 miles above the ground?  Everything still would look very, very, very tiny.  You would still not be able to see any details.  Unless you are a pilot with radar and GPS you probably wouldn’t even know where you were as far as the country itself goes.  So, in short, regardless of whether you are 50,000 or 30,000 miles above anything you would really have no better idea of what you were hurtling towards other than a rather general idea of “ground.” 

What would a 50,000 mile overview be?  Yes, this is a job.  It is a job in a building.  Thanks for stopping by.  And at 30,000 miles would that overview then become something just slightly more detailed?  Yes, it is a job, and it is in a building and it is this building right here and the company has lots of people working for it.  They tend to stand right about here.  OK, don’t call us, we’ll call you and thanks for stopping by. 

What comes next?  Does he get a 20,000 mile overview?  Does he jump right to 10,000?  Will he get to plummet all the way to 5,000?  When does he finally get the ground-level view of the job?  After they have hired him and he’s been working there for six months? 

It just goes to show you that when you really don’t have the details or a clear idea of what to say you can say pretty much anything.  If you have the balls of your average recruiter (and I am including female recruiters with that) you can generally sell your B.S. to whomever is buying as well and some portion of it may sound legit.   

If I were a recruiter I would take it to the next level.  I would start with the entire universe and work my way down to galaxy and then planets.  If I were really pressed for time maybe I would start at the level of Pluto and then work my way inward.  I would then start throwing around the words stratosphere and troposphere and such.  Then I would start talking about miles and then feet. 

The need for buzzwords needs to stop and it needs to stop now.  At some point managers, recruiters and salespeople are going to just run out of words.  They are going to be forced to make up words.  Eventually we will be required to lock them all up somewhere where they will be able to jabber incoherently just to each other and we can get on with actually getting work done and running things.  In fact, that idea may have merit even now.  An ounce of prevention, as they say. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.