Job interview today - wish me luck!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I’ve been working for my current employer for ~10 years, but recently have decided to explore some other options; both for some increased job satisfaction and opportunity for increased compensation.

I applied for a job as a product manager at a software company, passed a screening interview two weeks ago (with the person who would be my direct boss), and have a follow-up with other team members this afternoon.

I’ve done one or two interviews in my life (literally one or two), but have basically never gone through a traditional apply/interview process for a job before.

I believe I’m qualified for the position, and that I bring unique perspective/value . . . I’ve just got to hope I can communicate that well to a group of folks who are going to want to understand if I fit.

So, good wishes and/or tips are appreciated!

I’ve got a few examples/stories ready about how, in previous positions, I’ve accomplished some of the things this new job requires. And, I have a few questions about how they work and organize as a team. Beyond that, I’ll just try to represent myself as much as possible.

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Good Luck.

I’ve been told I’m a lucky transferring person of good vibes. I send them to you.:upside_down_face:

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Good luck!

StG

4

Knock 'em dead!

5

Good luck!

Been awhile since I did a job interview, but I used to be pretty good at them…on both sides of the table. Tips, hmmm, let’s see…

  • Firm handshake
  • Make good eye contact but don’t stare
  • Speak confidently; watch modifiers and qualifiers (‘I believe’ or ‘I know’ instead of ‘I think’)
  • Having stories ready about how you have accomplished the same things as the job requires is great; you are convincing them you are the best fit for the job.
  • Likewise questions are good. You want to appear interested in the job and company, not as if you’re doing interview practice or haven’t done your homework. When I used to hire people (for a graphic design dept.) making sure they were highly interested in the job was as important to me as the fact that they were qualified.
6

This is really good advice. Get some stories together about “how you solved a problem at work” or “how you worked together with a team” or “a time when you dealt with a difficult person” or “what are your best qualities”

Practice telling these stories OUT LOUD. Like you’re practicing for a play.

7

Yeah, I always considered myself to be acting when I went on a job interview. They say “just be yourself” in situations like dating and job interviews. Heck no. Act like the most confident, likeable version of yourself. Unless you’re already lucky enough to be very confident and likeable by nature; then, just be yourself.

8

The weird thing is that I’ve always done best in job interviews when I don’t try very hard. It’s counter-intuitive, but weirdly true.

A decade ago, I was working at a terrible job. “Terrible” isn’t even the right word; you could actually call it “dangerous”. The organization was about to self-destruct, and I could tell that I was being set up to be the scapegoat (they fired almost everyone else in my department and I was trying to juggle duties that a half dozen people used to manage, of course with no change in compensation, title, or authority). I’d already suffered through one long FBI investigation at my work after we had been targeted by hackers. So, I quit before the hammer fell on me.

I struggled to find a job for months. I was not eligible for unemployment, so it was urgent that I find something. I maxed out my credit card keeping the bills paid. I finally got one awful temp job that was low-paying, but better than nothing, and while it was supposed to transition to a permanent (and much better-paying) position and they liked me (they even extended my contract a couple of months) they eventually decided they didn’t have the budget to keep me.

I then got another job working for a furniture company as an IT guy. In that job the pay they offered was so low, I literally warned their HR department that they probably didn’t want to hire me, because I doubted I would stay for very long there. I didn’t want to start out a job under false pretenses. Shockingly, they said they wanted to hire me anyway, and assured me that I’d like it so much that I would stay. At around the same time, my wife gave birth, so I now I had an extra child to take care of.

About a month into this new job, I got contacted by a state government agency that I had applied for months earlier. It was a fantastic job, with great pay, a ton of benefits, and it was exactly the sort of work I wanted to do. And it seemed like it was way too good to be true; the only places that had offered me a job recently were these lousy places. I figured it was a long shot, and I had just started at a job anyway. I almost didn’t even bother to go. But I decided that it wouldn’t hurt. The worst thing that could happen is that they don’t hire me, and I already have a job so no loss.

I headed to my interview on an extended lunch break from my new job. I dressed nicely but not over-the-top. I went into the interview with a real relaxed, “I don’t care” attitude. Don’t get me wrong, I was courteous, I acted professional, I made sure to not come off like a jerk, but at the same time I didn’t put a ton of effort into it. I just treated it like any other social interaction, like maybe I was meeting some people at a party and chatting with them. Because, again, there was no way these people were going to hire me.

That same afternoon, one of the people at the interview said I had done a fantastic job and everyone loved me. He was excited. He said to get ready because they were going to call me back for a second interview. I thought he was pulling my leg and didn’t get my hopes up. But sure enough, I did get a second one later that week, and that interview really only consisted of going over the details of how the job would work, and confirming that I wanted it. (Ironically enough, that second interview was one I was extremely anxious about, because now this was real.)

I recently had my 8 year anniversary there. I’m planning to retire from this agency in around 20 years. And it all started with me going into an interview not giving a crap about it, because I assumed I had no shot.

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Ok. Things are “getting real”. The interview went well, and I’m going to be hearing from the hiring team in the next few days about an offer!

I have never in my life quit a job to move to another one, and there are all kinds of anxieties. What if I take the job and it turns out it’s secretly an awful place, or a bad fit? Am I really ready to develop a whole new set of relationships and work habits/skills to fit into a new environment? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stay where I am- I may not be thrilled about it, but at least it’s familiar?

Ok, that last one and how that fear motivates a lot of decisions in my life is maybe something for me to unpack with a therapist :stuck_out_tongue: . That said, presuming the offer makes sense for me financially and benefits-wise, I’ll be moving on to a new company after 9 years here.

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It’s only natural that a big change produces anxiety. Just relax and go with it. I’m confident that you’ll be fine! :slight_smile:

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That has never happened to me. The closest I can think of is that I took on a job that started out pretty good and turned bad later, in which case I moved on. But that has always been something that took a long time and only happened after something dramatic, like a big change in leadership or the company failing financially. And those things don’t happen all at once.

But I’ve never once left a job to go to another job and regretted it. I doubt you will either. How do I know? Simple… You are changing jobs for a good reason.

Just looking at your posts, I can tell you are not making this change flippantly. You didn’t see something on a spur of the moment and switch jobs. You didn’t have one bad day and decide to burn bridges. You wanted more job satisfaction and compensation. This new job is offering those things, or you wouldn’t have gone through with it amidst all the anxiety you’re having over the job change.

You went through an interview, and it went well. If this was a bad place, you would have gotten a sense of it. I think that you’re just experiencing natural anxiety as @Jasmine suggests and once you get past that, your new job will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Let us know when you get the offer and start, and how it goes.

12

Then you look for another one I suppose.

I’ve been in a lot of interviews (on both sides). I’m a consultant by profession, so aside from job hunting every few years, I’m always in interviews with potential customers, hiring new employees, interviewing staff to see if they will fit my project, interviewing vendors, etc.

My general experience has been that the best judge of whether the job would be a good fit is if I feel like I’m having an honest conversation about whether that person can solve some real problems.

IMHO too many people are trained to interview based off of a stock list of questions they don’t know how to evaluate and too many people are told how to give bland, stock answers to those questions.

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I have a (maybe?) funny story to relate. (It’s a bit long, I apologize.)

I do IT work for state government. I was in a position where I was undervalued, though in all honesty I wasn’t completely unhappy. I was still making more money than I had made at any previous job, I was doing the stuff I loved to do, and everyone respected me and appreciated my work. The only reason I was a bit unhappy was because of the job title/pay I had. In state government (at least in my state), the legislature sets the pay range for a job title and that applies everywhere. There is a little wiggle room but not much. Basically, if you want to make more money, you either wait until there is a general wage increase for all workers or you get a different position that pays more money.

The field offices for my agency are divided into regions which serve different parts of the state. I was in the most populous and stressful region of my state. My workload was crazy. I was doing the same work as the other regions were; actually a bit more, because I was also the only IT guy who did all of the web design for my region’s web site. (Everyone else just let someone at HQ do the work and just emailed changes to them.) Despite all of this, I was in a lower rank than everyone. And that was only because that was what my region had been budgeted to have.

Anyway, my supervisor (a higher-ranked IT person) went on temporary leave for a number of months. I was asked to temporarily fill in her position. That also gave me her pay for that duration. At the same time, since my position was vacant, I was tasked with hiring someone to fill my position for one year’s time (longer than my supervisor would be out). It was a wacky scheme to finagle an extra body that we really needed for a short time period, and it also meant I wasn’t stuck by myself for too long.

It was a big job. Suddenly I was a supervisor and had to hire someone. And I had to come up with everything myself. What to put in the job posting, what questions to ask in the interview, what sort of things to look for in a candidate. In the past we had some kind of terrible, generic questions and they wanted me to scrap all that, and as a person who had been doing that job for almost 5 years, they saw me as the person best qualified to define all of that.

So, I did. I came up with a mix of fairly generic questions, but also some specific questions. Questions that showed real-life scenarios that we dealt with regularly, and that someone with experience and skill should be able to come up with a solution for right away. Other questions dealt with how a person puts their priorities (basically, there are 3 things going on, you can only do them one at a time, in what order do you do them and why).

We did the interviews, I hired someone, I was their supervisor temporarily. My supervisor came back, and I went to my old job and old pay, and worked alongside the employee that I used to supervise. Back to the same old. Oh, and to make matters worse, my primary work location that I was expected to be in most days, which already was over an hour commute (each way) on most days, it was moving farther away and the new location was going to add more than 30 minutes to my drive. I’d been saying for over a year that I was not going to stick around if they insisted on my continued schedule for the new location, and I was ignored.

Well, after a few months of being back in my lower position, someone in another region retired. This was my chance to finally make a change. It was a shorter commute, it was a much less stressful region (much quieter), and I would finally be at the same rank and pay as my colleagues. So naturally I applied. (At my agency you can’t just change from one job to another, everyone has to apply and interview the same way someone from the outside would.)

I went in to interview, and all of my questions were the ones that I had created myself months earlier. Apparently, since that region had to hire someone, they asked around the other regions for some good interview questions and were provided the ones I wrote. :laughing: Naturally, I was very prepared, interviewed well, got the job, and was quite happy. (It almost felt like I had interviewed myself!) Oh, and the guy I had temporarily hired in my last region permanently filled my old position, and he was happy about that too.

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Thanks for the stories and thoughts everyone.

Update: I took the job!

First day is a week from today. I’m pretty excited. Once I got over the 48 hours or so of panic and made the decision/gave notice, it was easier to settle into all the positive things that this job will bring.

In their offer, they explicitly said that I seemed like a good culture fit- hearing that from them helped make my decision easier.

Also, as I wind down at my current employer, I’m finding myself both more sensitive to the things I don’t like here, as well as relieved that they’re actually not my problems anymore.

Anyway, I’ll definitely let you all know how it goes. Right now, I’m still getting paperwork done and just doing preparatory stuff. They run a background check on me, which is not something I think I’ve ever had happen before. I’m not sure what they’re looking for there, but it seems like an… overly-cautious sort of procedure. I wonder if that’s just par for the course for a large company?

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IME Nebraska experience it is par for the course and very common for most jobs. I recently had a background check for a volunteer job.

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Kindasorta similar experience with another state agency. When I was getting ready to retire, my manager asked me to come up with some technical questions to supplement the stock interview. I came up with a few, one of which was how to program a scrollable list on the IBM iSeries (it’s a technique peculiar to that operating system). Per policy, they were submitted to HR — and they all came back with a request to rewrite them because HR didn’t understand them.

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See, it worked! Congrats!

And yes, crap you’ve HAD to put up with at your present job will stand out as stupid now that you don’t have to take it anymore.

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I once asked an HR rep at a technical company why my student was not shortlisted for an interview. He was absolutely qualified and perfect for the job.

They replied that he was screened out by HR because the student did not have “Squills”. It took me a while to figure out the student had lots of experience with SQL, and had put that in his resume and cover letter, but the HR person was confused, and did not understand that SQL is not written or pronounced “squills”.