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March 11, 2009
On Interviewing
One of the funniest blogs I read on a regular basis is A Gentleman's C. The Angry Professor reports on abnormal events in academia that just may be all too normal. Yesterday she told us of a graduate school candidate who didn't quite get the point of an on campus interview. Among other things, this savant told graduate students with whom he hoped to be a colleague that their work is boring and he (I'm fairly sure "he" is correct) told "sexist and off-color jokes to the female graduate students" after they had politely indicated that they didn't want to hear them. The Angry Professor has a more complete, apparently growing, list of this budding genius's blunders.
But truthfully, I wasn't surprised about this kind of behavior. In the course of my career, I interviewed hundreds of candidates, some to work from me, some to work for people who worked for me, and some to work for my boss or my boss's boss. And about 25% of those who I interviewed to work for my boss or my boss's boss found some way to make me mad, often very mad. One candidate, a person who hoped to be a colleague on my boss's staff, told me that based on his learned analysis of our company's marketing endeavourers that the marketing manager was an "idiot." I was the marketing manager at the time and the candidate's agenda for the day said I was. Now he may have been correct about the marketing manager but you'd think he'd have found some more diplomatic way of putting it. If I may be a little defensive, we enjoyed around 70% market share at the time and that was no secret. Everyone in the industry knew it or could have easily known it. This candidate told me that by adapting strategies that he wouldn't explain to me unless he was hired we could get our market share to 40%. I believed him.
One other candidate, who made a very big, totally unsolicited, deal of his personal integrity, told me, in response to a question, that one of reasons we weren't doing as well in Europe as we would have liked was that we didn't have the words "printed on recycled paper" on our literature. I noted that, while I was pushing for it, our literature wasn't currently printed on recycled paper. He replied that that wasn't nearly as important as saying that it was. The interview was effectively over. For the record, we did begin printing on recycled paper. Another candidate told me that his first goal if hired would be to get our mutual boss to replace a well respected colleague of mine with one of the candidate's friends from his current company. He had just spent a half hour with that colleague who later reported that the candidate wanted to get still another colleague fired. And the person who interviewed him after me told me that he wanted to have me replaced by one of his friends.
All these candidates looked great on paper and they all had positive interviews with my boss who was surprised at what the rest of us told him. None of these candidates got the job. I'm not sure what motivates this kind of behavior. I do know that it assumes two things. First, it assumes that interviewers will not talk about the candidate among themselves and, second, it assumes that the boss will not be interested in what the interviewers have to say.
Posted by Duane Smith at March 11, 2009 2:22 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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