JOB INTERVIEWS

“The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.” - Oscar Wilde

I had a very long day at work and much of it was spent interviewing people for jobs. This is a very demanding and responsible task and one has to be extremely conscious of the way that the whole process is carried out. One has to be fair, yet exacting, careful and cautious, yet not too tense so as to put the candidates off. The process has to be completely transparent and the panel must be careful to work together in order to get the most information out of each candidate. We had a good panel collaborating well and we were able to get through the interviews without too many problems.

However, we were all quite exhausted afterwards and with some people we interviewed, getting the information out of them was like drawing teeth out of their mouth. When an applicant was rather more communicative and voluble it made such a difference in the process… The hardest was when we knew the persons interviewed and while they had all of the qualifications and abilities to do the job, some of them interviewed very badly.

Other people are so self confident and have such an inflated belief in their abilities that they spend hardly any time in preparing their interview, so when they are asked some questions (the answers of which are staring them in the face in the job description!) they make a thorough mess of the answers. Definitely ones to avoid when appointing.

What is your experience of job interviews? Either being the interviewer or the interviewee?