elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

The day before yesterday I sat down with an interview consultant through WorkSource. This is a free service in the state of Washington, and you don't have to be on unemployment - there are no restrictions at all for using the service. We spent a small amount of time going through existing material that is probably new for other people: how to prepare for an interview, general tips, and nonverbal cues. What's nice about a one on one session is you can skip right past materials you are familiar with, and get to new ground.

The interesting thing about this discussion was that neither I nor the consultant knew what the new ground was going to be.

In talking very broadly and openly about how my past interviews have gone, I concentrated hard on the disconnect. The disconnect is kindof like an algebra problem:

Good Performance + Disconnect = No offer

I understood the good performance, this is the sum total of my resume, the phone screen, and the interview itself. So that is a known quantity. The no offer is as well a known quantity, it's quite straightforward. Since obviously a good performance equals an offer once you have hit a statistically significant number of interviews (and I believe I have), then something must be creeping up on the left side of the equation. It is completely unknown. But like an astronomer studying red shift, I'll try some theories and see what sticks.

In my discussion with my consultant, we first started on the theory that there was something I was doing that was poisoning the soup, but could not in and of itself be called a bad interview. For example, if a person asks a question such as "what is your worst quality" or "talk about a project that went badly" I strongly believe in answering the question directly, rather than faking it with "I'm a perfectionist" or "Let's talk about someone else's bad project that I saved." I felt despair at the thought of encouraging my storytelling nature by setting up a new rule to never talk about anything bad. I'll call this the Pollyanna theory.

Then there was another theory. I realized there was a point in the course of the interview where the interviewer displayed some puzzling things to me, such as a) explaining why I don't want the job, or b) talking about their dog, or c) taking a phone call when it rings, or d) shuffling through papers looking for more material to talk about. I thought that this was just because the interviewer was incredibly busy and not very well prepared. After more reflection with my consultant I realized there was one pivot point where all my interviews with this dynamic shifted subtly, and that's when the interviewer asks "Do you have any questions for me?" The trick is, they ask it EARLY. I call this the Early Closers theory, and it's the one that's sticking.

Now, why would someone in an interview setting ask a candidate if they had any questions early, effectively cutting short the entire interview. They could be tired. They could be nice people, and want me to have a rest, and by theoretically asking them questions I would get that rest. (In actuality, this "what questions" stage is the hardest part of the interview, and the most challenging part for the candidate, which is why if you give it more time, there is more room for error). When I think back on all my interviews, the ones that have gone the best is when the interviewer forgets to prompt me at all for my questions. When I get the prompt at the end, the interview tends to go OK. When the interviewer attempts an early close, that always goes poorly. And it's tricky, because you might have done the first part of the interview really great. It's a fallacy to think that your material will be judged on that part of the interview only, and the candidate-driven questions will be a break for you. The candidate-driven question period is when you are in charge of the interview, and the material must be good, good enough to be relevant to the job, perk the interviewer's interest, show your background in a good light, and make the interviewer not want to change the channel. Because that's what they just did: change the channel, to the YOU channel, and it had better be riveting.

Granted that this is the hardest part of interviews, and that's a way of explaining why you might have tripped up and not noticed. However, the other dynamic involved with early closers is, they are doing this because THEY HAVE CHOSEN ANOTHER CANDIDATE ALREADY before you even walked in. It's like planning to watch Lord of the Rings and a classic Seinfeld that you've already seen comes on. There is no way you're going to stick with Seinfeld.

I'm still looking for a remedy for the early closer situation that would result in a job offer. Right now, all my ideas center on, well, it's not my fault and better luck next time. Or I can deal with the situation straightforwardly and say, let's save us both some time and talk about Halo2 or something else amusing. This seems crass to me. I would love to recognise the early closer situations, and be able to turn the decision around back to me being the prime candidate. No ideas for how to do this without knowing my competition.