Manversation

Preparing for the interview

I recently had an opportunity to interview for a supervisory position in a different department at my job. While I thought I was fairly well prepared for my interview because of the fact that I’ve been on the other side of the table several times as an interviewer for new candidates in my department, there were nonetheless some questions that surprised me and left me stammering as I tried to come up with a reasonable answer.

I didn’t know if there was much I could do to prepare for the interview, but I did find myself reviewing some of my files on the computer at work the day before. Also, the evening of the interview, I brought home my entire hanging file’s worth of past year performance reviews.

I spent the day and the evening preparing to talk in the interview about some of the innovative extra projects I’d taken on such as the rewrite of the written assessment my department uses to further screen candidates who pass the interview part of the process. Whereas before it had consisted of mostly simple word problems and a page full of arthimetic to be done by hand, I expanded it with a scenario in which the candidate had to respond to an angry letter from a customer who had ordered some products from a mock catalog and had things go seriously wrong. It was complete with a phony catalog page, and a mock call log of calls to the ficticious company’s call center. I thought sure I would have a chance during the interview to work in a nice discussion of this project and some other neat ones I’ve been involved in recently.

They didn’t ask the questions I wanted them to

As it turns out, not only did I not have a chance to, I was asked several questions that left me at a loss for words. Now, I consider myself as good an extemporaneous speaker as any when the situation requires it, but some of these questions were just outside of my experience, or concepts that I merely hadn’t considered.

For instance, one of the questions was “Describe a time a coworker give you some negative feedback. How did you react to it?” This is the one that was just outside of my recent experience. On my current team, we’re all way too busy to give each other any grief. If anything, if someone were dissatisfied, he would probably complain to the boss and she would probably talk to us about it.

Another stumper for me was, “Do you usually make decisions quickly and instinctively or slowly and methodically? Give an example of when your preferred methods failed and what did you do to fix it?” I think this one was difficult for me because there are things for which I use both methods, and in reality, I think a lot of my decisions are a mixture of both.

How I could have prepared myself better?

In reflecting on my experience it occurred to me that there were several things I could have done to prepare myself better for the interview. Maybe this list will help you on your next interview too:

• Know your strengths and weaknesses. One question that seems to almost always come up in one form or another is something along the lines of “Describe your three greatest strengths / qualities and how you feel they would be an asset in this position. I was actually ready for this one and I think I aced it. My strengths were extreme reliability, innovation, and willingness to take on extra work/ go above and beyond. Some of the questions I didn’t do as well on had to do with describing my weaknesses or situations I’d found challenging. To help out on future interviews, I’m going to:

• Set up a system for cataloging your accomplishments and failures (and what you learned from them / how you fixed them). I’m going to start taking some time every month to write down a little bit about some of the accomplishments and challenges of that month. One topic that consistently came up in the interview was how I’d dealt with past challenges and I stumbled on some of these. I think that by taking some time to catalog these things on an ongoing basis, I’ll be better prepared to talk about this in the future.

• Once you have identified some weaknesses, take steps to improve them. One of my weaknesses is a lack of personal organization. My desk is often cluttered and I write important memos on easy-to-lose sticky notes. However, I have taken steps to improve. Last year, I went to a Frankin-Covey class about time management and organization. I decided the Franklin-Covey system was a little too rigid for my personal style, so since then I’ve read Getting Things Done, and I’ve had a lot of success with the Hipster PDA as described on Merlin Mann’s excellent website, 43 folders. I can therefore talk about concrete steps I’ve taken to address one of my weaknesses when that topic comes up in an interview.

Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought

It turns out that I made it past that first interview and into the second round of interviews for the position. After much reflection, I decided to withdraw myself from the selection process after the second round of interviews (I’ll write more about that later), but it was a very valuable learning experience overall.

What have your recent job interviews been like? I’m especially interested to hear about how the interview process works outside of the M-F office job world. For example, one of my friend’s wives is a nurse and she says the interview process at the hospital is completely different. Join the manversation and post a comment below!

handshake photo by  A. www.viajar24h.com