This has got to be the only form of hunting in which the hunter is more freaked out than the hunted.
Luckily for me, my dream job has become available. I got my resume and cover letter in last week, well before the deadline. Friends had looked them over and said they looked quite good. I called after the resume should have been recieved, and got confirmation that they got my mail. Now I’m just on pins & needles waiting for an interview. I’m going to call them tomorrow morning, but I think that’s about all I can do. It’s driving me crazy, though, I just have to know!
Any advice for the waiting part?
Or for that matter, for the interview?
My state of mind: :eek: :smack: :eek: :smack: …wash rinse, and repeat
I give you my highest sympathies! I just went through that and I am not finished yet. I was surprised to get called in for an interview. I was surprised it went so well so you can imagine how stunned I was when I was leaving and the interviewer said, “Don’t worry, we will definately be calling you back midweek.”
Then came the week of waiting. No call. I had sent a follow-up email, then another a day later with alternate contact information, then…nothing. Nothing… …nothing…nothing… Lather, rinse and repeat for 6 days.
So this week I have begun to accept the decline of an offer. I am confused and very dissapointed since everything had gone so well. So, back to the drawingboard. BUT WAIT! What’s this? An email asking for a salary range so they can extend an offer with XZY Company?!?!?!?!
Hot damn! Back in the game! 'Course, that was yesterday at noon so I gotta obsessively check my email every 2 minutes now but it feels pretty darned good. I am smiling at everything now! I can take the craziness here! I am almost gone!!! Wheeeee!!!
Hang in there wevets! it will all work out. Good luck!
My advice for the waiting part (I work as a Career Counselor, so I get paid biiiiig bucks for the advice I am about to give you for free ): Don’t stop searching. In fact, the more offers you can have simultaneously, the better your position. Call or email everyone you know who might have a contact in this company and see if you can get both some inside info and someone to put in a good word for you. Prepare some questions/statements in case they call do a phone screen first—nothing worse than being caught ill-prepared.
As for the interview—do as much research as possible about the company, the industry, etc. Do a web search for news stories and press releases. Familiarize yourself with the names of key players in the organization. Again, prepare some key questions (and NOT about the salary or benefits, but about the position, the company, etc) so that you will actually have an answer to the dreaded “any questions?” question from the intervew. Also, practice some answers to behavioral-type interview questions—i.e., “Can you give me an example of a time you showed intiative in your job and it resulted in increased productivity for your employer” or something like that. Potential employers want to know your skills, sure, but they really want to know what results you can achieve with those skills.
Yeah, I’m still searching (sent out 2 new resumes & cover letters today) but the fire’s gone out of it because I already know which job I really want.
So far my network has turned up a couple of tenuous contacts with the organization, so I’m hoping it pays off. On the plus side, I chatted with one of my network members over coffee last week & she’s on the hiring committee… not the interviewing committee though, and unfortunately she doesn’t know me well enough to be an advocate. But still, it’s something!
One of the things that makes me really nervous is that the organization has a new Executive Director who knows very little about education (one of my areas of expertise), so that worries me.
Thanks for the advice about the possible phone screen - I didn’t think of that!
The timeline is apparently notification about interviews next week, interviews at the end of April, and hiring ASAP after that. Jeez… another week of waiting!
I’m now in the painfull waiting period myself. They wrote me Monday and I am still waiting today. I have sent a few more resumes out but jobs in my field are scarce. I am telling myself that they will make the offer on Friday but it doesn’t stop me from peeking in the email every 10 minutes.
I start a job in a couple weeks. I sent my resume to them on February 5th - the first day the job was advertised in the paper. I think I interviewed towards the end of February. I didn’t hear back from them until the end of March. I start at the end of April.
Longest time between advertising and job start I’ve ever experienced. I’m hoping this isn’t an example of how everything works over there.
I’ve sent out six resumes and have had three call for interviews, so I’m pretty happy with my call-back ratio. I’m currently waiting to interview (scheduled but I have to reschedule due to a family funeral) for the one I really want of the three, but I’m holding up with the other ones just in case.
Thanks wevets! I hope for the best for you and interface2x.
I can tell you something I have picked up in the last decade from my own experience and from watching how people get hired at my current place - follow-up, follow-up, follow-up. It can be a fine line between annoying and gentle reminder but email makes it easier to remain in contact without over-stepping the boundaries. It’s always better to seem eager for a job.
Another thing I have noticed is the importance of cover letters and the personalization of them. Now that millions people do their job search on the web, milliosn more people are responding to every ad in an attempt to shotgun the market. This is a bad thing. In my field (art and creative) I am used to being one of approximately 300 (legitimate) resumes for any given position. I have been in charge of sorting the resumes at my current job and I am wading through twice that many but I am interested in less than 25% of them. However, I will give consideration to a clever or well written cover lettesr that address the actual specs of the job.
Unfortunately, the attitude of the resume sorter is completely unknown to you most of the time so you’re back at crap-shoot odds.
Good luck to all the job hunters! You just never know…
Yeah, I’m keeping it up. I’ve called the Executive Director twice in the last two weeks and I’m probably going to call again tomorrow.
I was really excited to see messages on the answering machine today, but it was an interview for a different job - one I don’t want nearly as much. Silliest thing is, it’d probably be much better pay; it’s just not really what I want to do.
I called the person responsible for arranging interviews & left a message for him. Then he called me Friday evening, left a message with my roommate that he would try again Monday.
Then he called on Monday twice, but didn’t leave a message! I only know from the caller ID. Phone tag stinks.
Congrats on the job offers and interviews; I’m kind of in the same boat. I finally quit my job because it was just making me miserable. I had a verbal offer from another company, which made me comfortable enough to quit, but based on their unresponsiveness, it’s looking like that’s going to fall through.
That could’ve been source for panic, but I’ve suddenly gotten a couple of other tentative offers, one of which sounds so appealing that I was saying the only way it could be more my dream is if it somehow involved Clive Owen and Colin Farrell wrestling each other naked. So now I’m in the same position – waiting to hear more details and trying to keep myself from getting so excited about it that I lose all sense of reason.
The only advice I could give is so straightforward as to be worthless as “advice”: just be yourself. Don’t focus on giving a good interview, just focus on communicating. I know that when I’m trying to give a good impression, or making myself sound better than I am, or just plain being tactful, I give so many pauses and stutters and delayed responses while I try to think of the right thing to say, that it becomes obvious I’m not saying what I mean.
And it actually ends up being calming – once I realized that I suck at being anything other than totally direct, I can just be completely direct, put it all out there on the table, and not worry about it. If you’re worried about saying the right thing at the interview, then you’re going to have to be worried about saying the right thing all throughout the job, and your heart will explode from the stress. Just relax, and keep in mind that the interview is as much for you to get information from them as it is for them to “judge” you.
Also, I’m pretty fortunate in that I’ve gotten my absolute perfect dream job before, so I’ve seen that there’s really no such thing as the perfect job – every job has its upsides and downsides. So even if it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world.
Send a thank you note. After I was hired for my previous job the people in charge of hiring later told me they were very impressed by my follow up response. Apparently I was the only candidate who had sent one.
The job was completely wrong for me but I still consider that a solid piece of advice.
:eek: :smack: 
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