NTKOG #9: The kind of prissy, perky over-achieving job-seeker who nullifies potential employers with her firm handshake while battening their defenses by chirping passages memorized from a resume book.
I am: one of those people who is hard to get to know, but ultimately worth knowing. This bodes well for friendships. It bodes less well for interviews, at which, despite my impressive background and general loveliness, I tend to fail spectacularly.
I am not: good about pretending to be something I’m not. I get that interviewing is a game, but I have a hard time pretending to be perfect and groveling for a secretarial position when I think the only question they have any right to ask is: “Look, dude, can or cannot you fill the posish?” Oh yeah, the “dude” thing probably doesn’t help either.
The Scene: Last week I received, late on Friday afternoon, a call from Distinguished East Coast University, requesting I interview for a position for which I assumed I was vastly under-qualified when flooding the world with my resume. Working in higher ed is extremely appealing to me, and this particular job, while not precisely Dream Job, did make my mind-knees go a bit weak. So, prepping for the interview, I mined my sometimes-conservative mother for advice, which I compiled with various tidbits I’d acquired from blogs to work out the following chain of totally un-me events:
- Get your hair professionally straightened before the interview (apparently we curly-haired girls get no love in the job market) and SUIT THE FRIG UP!
- Give yo’self a pep talk before the interview (Rocky style! With air punches!)
- Arrive in the waiting room exactly fifteen minutes in advance
- Prepared two brilliant questions for every interviewer
- Send hand-written thank-you notes to everyone involved after finishing the interview
In theory, these are all very simple things that anyone should be able to do: they take a bit of care to get done, but good, because that’s the same care you’ll be showing during every day once you get the job, right? And, to be fair, these are things I try to do: look nice, get psyched, be punctual and interested in an interesting way, shoot a thank-you. I’m not disputing that they’re things I should do 100% of the time. But certainly I’ve let my care waver.
Of all of the tasks, finding a hair stylist to make something of my humidity-frizzled mane prior to a 9:30AM interview proved the least challenging: I finally scratched the effort and found a back-alley Russian cosmetologist to take care of it at 7 the preceding evening, paying through my nose for her to keep the salon open an extra hour while I moved furniture into my new apartment across town, then spent the entire night waking up in an anxious twist every fifteen to twenty minutes, paranoid that a single drop of sweat on my forehead would cause my curls to spring back up in slow motion like a scene from a cartoon. This did not happen. All that occurred as a result was my being very, very tired from lack of sleep.
Got on the bus to the interview at 8am and, through some strange cosmic blip, ended up at the campus exactly an hour before my interview, exhausted and starving with no breakfast in sight. Whoops — should have thought of that. But fertile grounds to test the power of the pep talk!
“Come on, dude!” I told myself, pacing (slowly, so as to avoid hair-ruining sweat), punching one fist into my other palm, “You can do the frig out of this job! Look at you! You have a quarter-million dollar education! You’re wearing A THOUSAND DOLLAR SUIT!”
Ah yes. Perfect way to set the tone for poised radiance. Then switched out my flipflops for high heels and strode FRIGGIN’ MAJESTICALLY (still! not! sweating!) into the receptionist’s office exactly but exactly 15 minutes before the interview. Fifteen minutes being, apparently, the perfect amount of time to chat with the receptionist about the weather, decline a cup of coffee, get jokingly chided by said secretary for being the only non-coffee-drinker to survive past the age of 16, and glance over the ol’ rez. So, dude, resume books, kudos on that one. Very pleasant.
As for the actual interviews — three of them, about half an hour each — all I can say is that they went, to my mind, perfectly. The office in question seems busy, professional, pleasant (all things that I too am capable of seeming!), does work that I feel is important, and does so in a warm environment that emphasizes teamwork. As for my questions, I synergistically parlayed previous opportunities into high-level asks. Er, which is to say. I asked the first interviewer my two actual questions, then asked each subsequent interviewer quasi-questions that were largely paraphrases of points that the interviewer before them had emphasized. Look, don’t hate the player.
Interviews warmly concluded, I took another little saunter around the glorious campus, then rushed home to spend far too long and far too lovely a time picking out thank-you stationery, writing personalized letters of thanks, and then packing up everything I own and moving it into a small but gorgeous apartment. Hey, it can’t all be about the job, right?
The Verdict: I’ve got to hand it to them: those “how to get a job books” (and my mom — thanks, mom!) are absolutely right: the more effort you put into the interview, the more confident you feel, and the better you end up coming off. I don’t know whether it was because I made this one such a rigmarole or whether it’s just because I genuinely melded well with the office and my interviewers, but this is by far the best interview I’ve ever had. I was articulate, insightful, didn’t say “like” or “dude” on accident, and, hopefully, did give them a true (but brighter-than-life, obvi, as this was an interview) picture of who I am as an employee. Total win.
In fact, this one was such a high, that when I got an impromptu interview a few days later, I was only too psyched to suit up and smarm onward with the early arrival, thank-you cards, prepped questions, all that other stuff. Note to self: don’t cut corners when selling yourself. Otherwise you won’t make money to buy stuff for said self.
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