I’ve never been able to tell how I did in interviews. I hate that. It doesn’t help that I have yet to land a job without some kind of inside recommendation of a friend who works/worked at the same place boosting me. Put simply, I think I lack fundamental interview skills. I’ve been assured that if I make eye contact and smile that that’s the most important thing. Thing is, I’ve been doing that. I’m pretty introverted, but I make an effort. The bigger difficulty is in answering the questions. I’m just not very charismatic in those situations, and it’s all I can do to keep engaged rather than just going into shell-shock. Consequently, I can be pretty blunt and/or dumb with my responses, and not the chatty and enthusiastic go-get-em-tiger! that most places seem to look for. If I’ve even applied, it’s because I know damned well I can do the job, and do it really well. But how the hell do I convince them that?
So, I’m going to post-mortem this interview in post form. It was a straight-forward interview for a legal secretary position. Nice medium-sized firm, very professional, friendly even. Definitely a place I could see myself working. There was one interviewer, thank Og. On the pro side, she was very friendly, joking, and seemed genuinely interested in me. She said she was very impressed with my CV, and mentioned a second interview quite positively at first. She even said she’d like to introduce me to the Solicitor I’d be supporting, but he was away in court today.
Now the cons. I said she was positive about a second interview at first, but every subsequent mention was pretty non-committal. “We’ll let you know either way,” that sort of thing. She expressed concern that I might not be up to speed in the specific field the Solicitor worked in; I assured her that I would pick it up quickly, which I’m sure I will. Did she think I would? No idea. She seemed satisfied though, and moved on to other questions. Also, the whole thing only lasted half an hour. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. And at least five minutes of that was her running off to find some documentation for the specific duties involved, which she never did get (apparently the documentation she was thinking of was not a complete job description, but only one set of procedures). The biggest question mark for me, though, is that at the end of the interview she mentioned that legal secretaries were ‘short on the ground’ and that there was no trouble finding available positions. Was she just making conversation? Was she giving me a ‘there there, you’re not right for us, but I’m sure you’ll find something’? Argh! I don’t know, but I find out Monday.