Day 178 - Jobs, Lies, and Videotape

          I scored an interview last week, the first one in this area. It wasn’t a recruiter either. It was a real job. There have been no listings for controllers or CFOs in this area. I decided to lower my sights some. Now that we have offloaded so much of our stuff and cut our living expenses to the bone I can actually get by on a lot less money than I’m used to making. The job I interviewed for was an assistant controller position for an outfit that publishes contract bid lettings for construction contractors. The salary range is less than half what I used to make, but realistically that’s still four times what I get in unemployment benefits. It’s amazing to me how many different ways I’ve had to adjust my thinking.

          The HR manager called to set up the appointment. She e-mailed me directions to the office. Included in her e-mail, which I didn’t actually read until it was too late to respond, was a request to reply to her explaining why I was willing to work for so much less money. I figure this has to be as problematic for potential employers as it is for me—maybe more so. Anyway I went to the interview without responding. The interview was with the controller, a pleasant enough young man probably 20-25 years younger than me. His concern was whether I would be able to adjust to working for him when I had obviously been used to having a lot more authority and autonomy in my previous positions. This is a good question, one I wasn’t really prepared for as I hadn’t really thought about it. I was more hung up on the money issue.

I think I answered it pretty well. I told him that I was all about the work and that as long as I was engaged and making a contribution it didn’t matter to me who I was taking direction from. Besides with 30 years experience I wasn’t going to need very much direction, a happy circumstance that was going to free up some of his time that would otherwise be applied to managing me. This seemed to satisfy him. We got along very well. He told me the office was full of women—the whole office, not just the accounting department. He said that in terms of men it would just be him and me.

I told him about the question the HR manager had asked in her e-mail, and that I hadn’t been able to respond. He said they were worried that once the economy had recovered I would bolt for a better paying position. I knew this. It’s certainly a legitimate concern. The truth is that of course I would. Who wouldn’t leave a junior position for more than twice the money?

I knew I had to lie. The controller knew I had to lie, else he would have asked the question right away. It was the only thing either of us really cared about.

I did have a pretty good story though. I told him about Nelson. I told him that I knew I was going to be settling for less money when I decided to move down here to take care of Nelson, that money wasn’t the issue anymore. I was here because my family needed me to be here, and I had altered my lifestyle and my expectations to make it work to everyone’s benefit. I wasn’t about to change all that for more money.

It was a good lie because it was almost true. He acted like he believed me, but I didn’t get the job. The HR manager e-mailed again on Friday to tell me they were going with another candidate.

Here’s another problem with the economy. How many people besides me are regularly put into positions where their only logical recourse is to lie? I’m guessing millions. And why is that? We’ve got this whole shell game built up around the process of finding a job to the point where everybody is spinning everything on both sides of the desk.

Employers are spinning stories about the health of their company and the nature of the workplace environment. Candidates are spinning stories about their experience and its relevance, about their willingness to do stuff they’d really rather not. The interviewers are asking questions calculated to determine the best liar from among the candidates that were chosen based on how compelling the fictions were in their résumés.

If they videotaped the process and hooked everybody up to polygraphs, no one would ever get or take a job. Is it any wonder, given the nature of the selection process, that we have the occasional crisis of ethics in the business community? This is how it is in the best of circumstances. A recession just exacerbates the whole mess.

Day 15 - First Interview

          The phone interview was interesting. It’s been several years since I looked for a job, so I’m rusty at the processes. Still I think it went fairly well. The man I talked to in Tulsa was engaging, had a lot of good things to say about the company, and didn’t ask too many hard questions. I hate it when they ask you stuff like ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years’ and ‘what are your 3 best and 3 worst traits and why?” To my thinking there’s no useful information conveyed in the answers to questions like that. If you manage to answer well it’s because you have heard the question before, anticipated it, and formulated an answer in advance. Then you have to act as if the answer you give is spontaneous rather than rehearsed. The interviewers know this—or should. Certainly all the candidates know this. So the best that an interviewer can hope to gain is some sense of how well the candidate prepared. In other words they’ll know that they’ve got someone who is good at interviews, but not necessarily if they’ve got someone who is good at the job.

          Thankfully this guy did not ask any questions like that. Perhaps he wasn’t prepared for the interview. I was because I have good answers to those particular questions. They are bald-faced lies, but they are good answers. They are calculated to make me seem smart, thoughtful, industrious, team centered, ambitious (but not overly so), and sensitive (but capable of being a jerk when required). That’s a lot of information to pack into a couple of sentences. I try also to be a little funny. I don’t want anyone to think that I take myself too seriously. I tend to draw the line there. I’ll pretend to be anything they want me to be to land the job except someone who takes himself too seriously. If that’s what they are looking for they will have to keep looking because that’s not me and never will be.

          Oh I suppose I could pretend to take myself seriously if I was of a mind, but you have to consider the consequences when you undertake a deception like that. If the company is looking for candidates who take themselves seriously, then chances are pretty good that they are already loaded up with such individuals, and that just sucks all the joy right out of a workplace. Those are the kinds of places where you could die, find yourself in hell, and never know that you weren’t still at work. I just escaped two such places in a row. I’m not going to volunteer for a third by making stuff up.