Someone close to me has just gone through the obstacle course of a job interview. All the usual ingredients were there – excitement, fear, anxiety, ambition, fury, the agony of what to wear. And as I kept telling her, “everyone hates this. Only weirdoes enjoy job interviews.”
An interview is speaking to an audience, a guaranteed critical audience. Public speaking is close to numero uno in people’s fears – recent academic studies of whether this is still the case found out it remains true, such as in Dwyer and Davidson’s 2012 paper, ‘Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death?’ (The simple answer was yes, though death won out in the end.)
I wonder what you think out there? Do you enjoy a job interview? The only circumstances I can think for that would be the case where you know it’s your job, one hundred per cent, so the interview is just the opportunity to dress up and tell the panel how really fantastic you are. Oh, and how the organisation should re-configured according to your ideas.
But that might turn out to be a bridge too far, the tide turns against you, someone on the interview panel takes it as criticism. Your goose is cooked ….and other cliched metaphors.
My real thought here is what a nonsense so many job interviews are. The fact that I never did particularly well in interview, getting nearly all my jobs through word of mouth, is irrelevant(!) Everyone knows the drill, the layout devised by some well-meaning fiends back in the day when human resources was called “Personnel”. What are your strengths? And what are your weaknesses? How do you think the company could do better? Where do you see yourself in five years? Describe an incident where you showed leadership.
Oh the anguish. And the artificiality. I propose that job interviews be held as discussions about an aspect of the work, which the candidate is informed of in advance. The setting should be informal, definitely not the traditional firing line with all the people deciding your fate lined up on one side of the table, and you squirming on an exposed chair in open territory on the other.
Zoom has made it less arduous. Or has it? Now you just have to worry that your cat filter isn’t turned on, you aren’t upside down like this US Congressman, your wifi doesn’t go on the blink, or your three-year-old doesn’t burst in shouting she wants her potty.
Sometimes society can’t see the wood for the trees, and the imperative to do what we have always done is strong. After all, inertia is the most powerful force in the universe, etc. But now that work is being done in new ways, it could be the right time to question some of the conventions of the workplace while the world is remodelled.
· K.K. Dwyer & M. M. Davidson, (2012) Is Public Speaking Really Feared More than Death? Communications Research Reports
Comments
Post a Comment