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TOP TEN: Interviewing Tips for Idiots

9 Mar

I hire people. Frequently. So I’ve endured a lot of interviews in my day. I’m gearing up for another round of candidates as I type, so I’m sharing this for selfish – not altruistic – reasons. Please forward to any of your friends applying to jobs.

I offer up these tips as a direct result of sitting through the interview in which it happened. All stem from (very sadly) true incidents:

  1. If you have a child, please don’t bring it to the interview with you. Splurge for a sitter.
  2. If you ignore Rule #1 and bring your child to the interview, please do not whip your breast out and feed it while we are talking. (I’m hungry too, but you don’t see me fishing JellyBellies out of my filing cabinet. LIMITS, people.)
  3. Turn your cell phone off. If you forget and it rings, apologize and silence it. DO NOT take the call – unless you are a surgeon or expecting a baby.
  4. If you DO take the call, when the caller asks what you’re doing, don’t say, “Nothin’,” like you’re just sitting on your couch stoned eating Cheetoh’s and watching MTV. You are in an interview and I can hear you.
  5. When asked what your sales strategy is, do not reference the phone book and your feet. Cold calling and door knocking is something that happend in the late 1990s. And even then, it wasn’t considered strategic.
  6. When asked why our company is a good match for you, please do not say, “Because the office has a weight-loss challenge and I’ve recently lost 10 kilos myself, so I think I’d fit right in.”
    • The only response I can think of to that is: Sure! Because our strategic plan for profitability is to be SLIM. Or wait – since we don’t make money by being skinny, perhaps you’d like to interview with Richard Simmons or America’s Top Model? Or, conversely, tell me more about how your weight-loss will translate into revenue for us?
  7. Do not volunteer that you are married, have children, have a mortgage, have a burial expense – or any other obligation that makes your employment financially necessary. We all need to work; don’t burden me with your reason. You made your decisions, I didn’t. Unless it helps me understand your value to my organization, I don’t really need to know.
    • A corollary of #7 is “Because I need to make enough money to clear my alimony and child support obligations,” and my response  to that is, “Awesome. Now that I know what’s important to you, let’s talk about your ability to see a project through to the end. It sounds like you might have some issues there. “
  8. Do NOT pull out a magazine and show me topless women sprawled out on the hoods of cars, even if you DID sell the ad space in that magazine. I think I’d rather see the person in Tip #2 breast feed.
  9. When asked why you left a job, I don’t need to know – in graphic detail – how your boss came onto you at the men’s urinal. I think you can come up with a vague blanket statement (like poor leadership) that covers that base without scarring my brain.
  10. If you are drunk, stay home and sleep it off. We’ll let you reschedule. Attempting to interview – only to A) Miss the chair and sit on the floor, or B) Call us from a jail cell where you’ve been charged with a DUI – is not going to increase your likelihood of getting the job.

And finally, as an added bonus – when asked what questions you have about the position, the Top Five Questions out of your mouth should not be:

  1. How much sick time do I get?
  2. How much vacation time do I get?
  3. Can I work from home or bring my child to work?
  4. When can I take my first vacation?
  5. Are you actually going to call my references?

I work for a very progressive company that actually has great answer to all those questions. But the point is, you probably shouldn’t be focused on how little you actually have to work. You should concentrate on what value you bring to my organization.

Call me old fashioned, but if I wanted to hear about your vacations, I’d hire someone better than you so I could take them myself.

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I’ve got your TPS report right here.

18 Feb

At work a few weeks back, we were discussing creating a document where we store data that multiple people needed to access for responding to RFPs. My colleague – who sometimes mixes up words – ran with the idea, suggesting we create a central suppository.

I almost fell off my chair at the time, but in retrospect, I think there’s something clever about it. At least it would be more polite to direct someone to a “central suppository” instead of telling them directly to shove it up their ass.

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Business advice, free of charge.

9 Feb

I recently got into a discussion with a friend about titles. Not house titles or book titles, but professional titles. As in, what does your business card say?

My friend was bemoaning the fact that her company uses titles that make sense internally, but don’t in any way correlate to the outside world. Namely, to their customers.

“I’m pretty high up in my organization,” she told me, “but my title says manager so whenever I’m negotiating with a client, their response is generally, ‘let me talk to your boss.'”

I can relate. I work for a company that doesn’t place a lot of importance in a person’s title, so we all roll with what we’re handed. For the most part it works, except that I generally am negotiating with Vice Presidents. Little do they know that in my world, everyone is empowered to help them, and “manager” means it’s generally within my jurisdiction to stop the buck.

Anyway. Back to my friend. She asked if I thought she was making a mountain out of a molehill, or if it was a legitimate beef.

My response?

First, I think it’s fine to have TWO titles. To internally have a title that conveys your function and speaks to the progressiveness of the organization, if you work for a flat organization. But when it comes to the outside world? Hell no. You need to speak the same language and translate your competency into terms your clients can understand.

You ask for respect in how you present yourself, and a title is part of that. Poor titles mean you spend a decent part of every first conversation trying to establish your credibility and defend your position. It’s a waste of time.

As I told my friend: “You wouldn’t expect to be treated with respect if you went to the doctor, pointed to your crotch and say ‘my hoohoo is broken,’ would you?”

No? Exactly.

Use words fit within your clients’ vocabulary. Otherwise, brace to have many lame hoohoo conversations.

You’ve been warned.

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Gaining the upper hand in negotiations.

22 Jan

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind on the work front as I’ve done a mad scramble to conduct Year End Business Reviews with some of our key clients in the Midwest. It’s meant a lot of travel and preparation, hence the absence on PithyPants for a few days.

This week I was onsite at a client from 9am-4pm in back-to-back meetings with different buyers and stakeholders from that company. The day was productive but taxing – especially because my normal eating schedule was disrupted. I tried to discreetly sip on a Diet Mt. Dew during my first meeting, but I felt decidedly W.T. so I abandoned the 20 oz bottle under the table and switched to water.

Interestingly, if you are craving caffeine and substitute your beverage with water, you end up pounding it by the gallon because you’re subconsciously not sated. So every time we had a 10-minute intermission between meetings, I bolted for the bathroom.

This wasn’t a big deal until my primary client – the woman who had coordinated the day of meetings and who is leading the charge on negotiating aggressive contract terms – ALSO needed to use the restroom.

You sit at a table and have formal conversations about ROI, cost-effectiveness, partnership. Then you hit the bathroom and continue the business talk, but with the odd accompaniment of bladders emptying.

Sitting on the toilet, I got a silent case of the giggles, thinking how funny it would be to have an “Austin Powers” moment in which I just kept peeing and peeing and peeing, leaving her to awkwardly stand by the sink and wait. Or how it would be awesome if she concluded her business by ripping an audible fart.

Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I just think there’s just something odd about taking a business conversation into a bathroom.

I suppose it could be worse. At least we weren’t using urinals. And we both washed our hands.

 

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Where the strangers are friendly… and pogo sticks are helpful?

13 Jan

Today my work brought me from Chicago up to Milwaukee. I’ve been here two other times, and each time, it has left me wanting.

Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with Milwaukee, it’s just that I expect to see two people (specifically Laverne & Shirley) dancing down the streets on their way to work at a bottling plant. And it hasn’t happened. Yet. (I remain hopeful.)

This morning I was debating between the 6am or 8:30am train from Union Station in Chicago. I harkened back to my last visit, and remembered the odd desolation of Union Station at 6am. I arrived at 5:30am and the place was DESERTED until 5:55. If memory serves, I went so far as to take off my belt in case I needed to clock someone in the head with the buckle.

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