August 16th, 2008
Job hunting is an imperfect process to say the least. An hour, maybe two, one interview, maybe two, and the panel is supposed to have worked out if you’re suitable for the job, qualified, and not a nutter who will turn up to work wearing only a duvet, throw staplers at people and swig bottles of vodka in the toilets each morning. As an interviewee you’re supposed to come across as calm, authoritative, friendly, whatever else the situation requires, and talk convincingly about your previous experience even if you’re nervous to the point of losing basic motor control and collapsing in a farting, drooling mess.
It starts with the CV. Well, if you’re unfortunate enough, it starts with the recruitment consultant. I’ve met quite a few of these people and can count the number I genuinely liked on one hand. And still have enough spare fingers to count the members of the Sugababes. Recruitment consultants are generally a hindrance to finding a job rather than a help as you’re dealing with a person whose suit is the smartest thing about them, and yet you’re still required to play nice, listen enthusiastically to descriptions of jobs you’d rather skewer your own eye on a rusty tent peg than interview for, and maybe even go to their offices to ‘register’, shake their clammy hands and smile back at their cold, dead smiles before walking away feeling cheap and violated and contemplating suicide in the nearest Wetherspoon.
Now assuming you got past the consultant, your CV had to do a good enough job of convincing a potential employer that you’re any good. In my experience, most CVs are useless. Too long, too short, too detailed, too brief, too bad. Very few have been genuinely impressive. I paid a company a lot of money to write mine and still ended up with a useless CV because a) the ‘HR professional’ who wrote it hadn’t sharpened her crayon before she started and b) she thought that crow-barring words like ‘synergy’ into the CV would have employers wetting their pants and immediately calling me to offer me jobs, fast cars and all the golf weekends I could handle. I’ve recommended people come for interview purely on the basis of having a CV that was properly spelt, not arranged by a four year old, and fitted everything on to two pages.
Then there’s the job description - sometimes a wish-list of skills more easily found in a team of four people or a fictional superhuman than in the real world, and even if realistic, not necessarily the skills that the right candidate actually needed. That’s because the people that wrote the description either hacked it together from the job description of the guy that just left, or they sat around a table in Starbucks one morning and wrote it while spending more time comparing the prices of their holidays or discussing what a twunt that guy off Big Brother is.
So you get to the interview. You got past the recruitment consultant, you ticked enough boxes, your CV wasn’t excessively dire, you managed it. The truth is, the interview was a success or a failure within five minutes of your walking in the room because it’s down to simple chemistry between people, and all the questions are about either making people feel better that they already either chose you or rejected you. You may as well walk in the room and offer your backside for the panel to sniff. In fact, go on, try that. I did in my last interview and it was obvious the chemistry wasn’t right because I didn’t get the job.
A job interview is very like speed dating, except if successful the pay’s better and it’s less messy. Depending on the job. And the date.
The clock on the top right shows the weather and pulls appointments from Google Calendar, the top left menus give links to applications, files and settings, and the dock at the bottom allows me to launch my favourite programs quickly. When I grab a window to move it, it flaps gently as if made of paper or silk. I have four desktops and swap between them by rotating them around a cube, so I can split up email, web browsing, web editing and word processing and don’t have a clutter of windows.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
