Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Take care with the messages you send job interviewees if you really want to hire someone.

Another job interview, another headache.

Some organizations use this process in a job interview. There are N people sitting around the table. Each person has a sheet with N questions on it. Person #1 reads question #1. The interviewee answers the question while all N people write the answer. Person #2 reads question #2 and on and on until each person has read a question and everyone has written the same thing on paper.

The organization could have given the interviewee the questions ahead of time and let the person write the answers. Well…

What is the meta message? We don’t think often and we often think poorly. Therefore, we use rote techniques so that we act like little cogs in a machine. Does the interviewee want to be another little cog in a machine? Usually not. Sometimes the paycheck is needed so badly that the interviewee will choke on it all and take it.

I once had a job interview where the first two questions were:

• Can you type?
• How many words per minute?

I found this strange as I had a PhD and had written a few books, a thesis, a dissertation, and whatever else came along the way. Drivel.

Another job interview started with, “Have you ever made any mistakes that you’d like to talk about?” Ah! Thought. A good smart person wanting to know something about me.

Let’s consider the meta messages in our job interviews.