If I may digress for a post, this sort of thing illustrates the truth of the other side of this coin:
Interviews are a terrible way to choose who to hire.
My father told me that 30 years ago, and I didn’t believe him, but my personal experience and study since then has proven his correct. This isn’t just his opinion; study after study has shown interviews are laughably pointless. (Nor is this personal bitterness; I am extremely good at job interviews, far more so than I have ever been at any job I got as a result.) People are much, much worse than they think they are at judging character when they meet someone; it’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in miniature. To the extent interviews work at all, all you can really tell about the interviewee is how good they are at doing job interviews.
As a job seeker, one should be concentrating entirely on how to game the process, which means a good resume and interviewing skills. A good candidate can absolutely win jobs against an even better candidate if they can ace the interview. It’s stupid, but true. It is MUCH more important to be liked than to be the most objectively skilled candidate.
If you’re running a business, though, you should simply abandon job interviews, or use them only to simply confirm the person is who they say they are. They are, arguably, WORSE than nothing; they may distract you from the truth with things that aren’t relevant.
I agree that interviews require skills that may be totally unrelated to the skills jobs require, but I disagree they’re worthless. It’s easy to make yourself look good on paper (or the digital equivalent) or have someone else do it for you. And the way people appear and act during an interview can tell you a lot, regardless of how poor on ia at judging character. I remember a candidate for a position as principal whose resume looked golden, but in the interview, he kept hitching up his pants and answered every question with how much he loved coaching football. Then there was the admin assistant candidate who reeked of alcohol. And the social worker who when asked about her experiences working with indigenous youth replied that she’d had plenty of experience and knew just how to handle such lazy and dishonest people.
Interviews don’t necessarily indicate who’s good, but they can indicate when a candidate is wrong, wrong, wrong for a job.
You say this like it’s a bad thing. From my experience, the difference between the best candidate and the 10th best is almost nothing. Just a whole bunch of interchangeable parts. Pretty much the only thing I care about is if you will fit in with the culture and not cause issues. The output of the best candidate vs. the 10th best will never be so great as to make up for a bad attitude, bad moral, an expensive HR issue.
I hear comments like this quite often, but I honestly don’t know what a better alternative would be.
At least in all the hiring I’ve participated in, the interviewees for a particular position tend to be pretty uniform in terms of basic qualifications. If a person gets screened in for an interview, that means their resume has convinced the hiring panel they have what it takes to do the job. Really the interview just allows us to find the candidate who performs the best under pressure, which ain’t a trivial thing. Someone who performs OK under pressure will be able to handle phone calls without freaking out. They can run meetings and do presentations without freaking out. And being able to regurgitate key words and phrases shows that the candidate knows the lingo and won’t have to be trained in the fundamentals. I don’t think they indicate a person’s “likeability” as much as their “fitability”. Being able to fit into a culture isn’t the same thing as being liked.
I agree with this (I can very much relate to nellybly’s examples). I also think, when done well, interviews are an important part of on-boarding: you can establish expectations and norms much more forcibly when someone is hoping to get a job than you can after you’ve hired them. On a really practical level, it’s an important time to tell people about duties or responsibilities they may not consider inherently part of the job. If you make those responsibilities clear before they take the job, there’s a lot less tension and resistance and reluctance later. Less tangibly, it’s a great time to convey the tone/culture of the job and establishing basic relationships. IMHO, far too few employers think of interviews this way.
Interviews are not just important for the managers, they are important for the candidates also. Through networking I once got an interview at a big electronics company. I discovered that the job involved a lot of responsibility with no authority. No thanks. Plus, the place was the Dilbert kind where the managers had offices and the workers had cubes.
I told the HR person no thanks.
Plus, for good candidates, interviews are a way of selling your job. I often interviewed candidates who were also interviewing with a bunch of other groups. I made sure to get the last slot for the day so that if I liked the candidate, he or she would leave hearing my spiel last. It worked pretty well.
Dude, slow your roll, lol. You only graduated in March. Fancy bragging from colleges and universities aside, plenty of people don’t land that entry level job right off the bat. I graduated in 2006 - I only just got my first real job in my field (also communications, but also graphic design and writing) this last October. I was demoralized about it too, until my mom (who I greatly admire and is one of THE hardest-working people I know) told me she had to wait even longer for hers. For the record, I’m 31 now.
I’m not saying you should deliberately wait years, of course, but don’t feel like a failure that you haven’t gotten a job when it hasn’t even been a year since you graduated. The deck tends to be stacked a bit toward newcomers, I feel. In the meantime, build up as much work-related experiences you can. Even if you’re not in your chosen field yet, what you learn from whatever job you do have or have had can be even more valuable than what you learned in school.
Good luck! I think you’ll do fine, but don’t sweat what doesn’t need to be, er, sweated.
^^
I appreciate the encouragement, but I actually graduated in 2017, so I am coming up on being almost three years out of college. It’s still quite demoralizing, unfortunately.
Well, I had the interview and I genuinely felt like I crushed it. Surprisingly, it actually seemed easier than some of my prior interviews, even though the length of time (about 90 mins.) was longer than any interview I’ve done before. I felt like I received some genuinely solid feedback from one of the hiring managers (e.g., I was thanked for doing my research, using jobs-specific terms that other candidates hadn’t used before, and asking good questions). The format included a writing assessment and a panel interview, and afterwords I was asked to provide my references and college transcripts.
Now, I have been through this process enough times to know not to forecast the likelihood of a job offer, and I just will not do that anymore. But, I left it not second guessing anything, & that’s about as good as I can do at this point.
I was given a conditional job offer for the agency position and I am currently going through the myriad of hiring hoops that accompany state/federal employment. I admit that I am taking a slight pay cut to do the position, but the long term salary outlook is much, much higher than my current ceiling. I am still just gobsmacked that this appears to actually be happening.