Write Market

I was recently reminded of how at this time last year, I was unemployed.  It kind of hit home with a really loud thud as I became mildly annoyed at being asked by a friend to look at her resume for the 99^th time… then I remembered that she had been laid off before me and was still out of work.  I now need more than two hands to count the number of friends who are out of work, some of whom for more than a year.

I am, in a word, lucky.  Very lucky.

Being the relative success story in the group makes me the number sounding board, I guess, and I will gladly do it.  I listen to many conversations about how interviews went, help tweak many cover letters, and read email after email about positions they’re interested in – and should they go after it.  Yes, go after it.  What do you have to lose?  As someone who had been there, let me tell you – you have nothing to lose.  Your pride?  Get over it.  Your time?  Well, that’s the one thing you have plenty of.

But I’m not writing to provide what is probably the opposite of the advice I had read (“target your search, blah, blah, blah”).  I wanted to rant about something I think all of us have come across: the pumping-you-for-information interview.  You know, when you apply for a position, get the call for an interview, and then spend an hour with several members of that company’s team asking you questions that have everything to do with your previous employer and their products, services, marketing practices, etc. – and nothing to do with your qualifications.  Sometimes they even give you scenarios and ask you to provide ideas.  Ideas that they hastily write down, unless they’ve asked you to write it down for them.

Now, many jobs will ask you to do some problem solving to ensure that you have an understanding of the job, but you can tell which ones are legitimately testing you and which ones are just using you to steal information or ideas.  The most telltale difference is that the former will wait until round 2 or 3 in the interview process, after they’ve determined they’re already interested in you –and you’re interested in them.  The latter springs it on you in the first meeting, before you even have a chance to think about it.  Also, if they never ask you about other jobs, or have even printed out your resume, those could be bad signs.

I’ve been on those interviews before, and I always come out angry and wondering if there was even an opening.  Now able to recognize these interviews fairly early on, I usually shift the conversation away as much as possible and try to redirect as many questions back to them as I can.   But I’ve decided that if  I’m on one again in the future, I hope I have the balls to tell them this:  If they’re this hard up for new ideas, then maybe they should dump some existing employees and actually hire new ones.

Tags: humor, interviewing, job, unemployment