That depends on the company, some insist that HR cull the applicants with interviews before the hiring manager even gets a chance to see resumes. That’s where networking really shines, because if I know someone who works/has worked with that manager or someone in their realm, I’ve got a much better chance of being considered seriously.
This. So much this! I speak as one who was being considered and one who was hiring.
Well, it looks like I have a 48 hour marathon of interviews (weather permitting). A half day for an engagement manager job with a software company today, then off to Chicago for a director job with a mid-level management consulting firm. So hopefully all that goes well.
Kind of reminds me a bit of “old school” interviewing when I graduated college in the mid 90s. I remember travelling all over the New York and Boston area, mostly on the company’s dime for various interviews. Price Waterhouse (pre PwC) flew me down to Virginia for an interview after I applied to a newspaper want ad. Because who would apply to a job with Price Waterhouse unless you had some interest and qualifications in the, at the time, esoteric job of “advisory consulting”.
Now all these companies my friends and I worked for in our 20s and 30s like Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, EY various tech firms that are all now subsidiaries of a global mega digital advertising and PR firm called Publicis are all on various “Top Hot Companies to work for” lists, mixed in with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc. I just remember them as dull as shit accounting and tech firms that worked their people to death.
Companies have to. Any job posted online will probably have a hundred responses. Many times that if it is a “hot” company people want to work at.
I’ve got an interview Tuesday. Fingers crossed. It’s contract-to-hire. I’m pretty sick of contracting without the hire part. But because I’ve had so much practice due to contract jobs, I’m pretty good at interviewing. Fingers crossed for you too!
Sucks donkey balls for those of us who want that job, and are highly qualified. I’ll probably never give my money again to one company that ghosted me … and even my hard-on-myself self knows I was a perfect fit, shit probably that company’s unicorn, and I had a connection. Tenuous, but it was something.
Crickets.
I actually like interviewing. Helps me make sure I only work with competent people who I like working with.
You’ve had a charmed career. This is the second time I was interviewed by one person who said I’d be reporting to him, only to start the job and learn that there’s been a re-org.
I like interviewing. I don’t like setting everything up for my group and going through stacks of resumes.
BTW, in Ask the Headhunter this week there is the story of an ad writer who fed up with job board rejections, wrote a cover letter for a job application to an internet pet food store consisting of
Woof, woof, woof
Arf, arf, arf,
Bow wow, bow wow. (letter shortened.)
He got a standard rejection back.
My favorite one of these from my career was a job I made it through the hiring process for and was told a job offer would be coming on Monday. I hadn’t heard from the company by Friday so I called over and it turns out the hiring manager had left on bad terms with the company so they were freezing the hiring process until they hired a new manger and he redid the process. About a year later a recruiter called me up asking if I’d be interested in the position. I told her that I was and was in fact quite excited for the job. This time when I talked to HR for the preliminary interview I told them I’d already been hired once at which point she told me everyone that the previous manager liked had been let go and stopped the interview on the spot.
Yes, it sucks very much. Honestly, I just want a regular fucking job where I go to work, do what my boss asks and then go home at night. I don’t want to deal with this hustle-culture, personal branding, everyone is their own CEO bullshit they keep feeding people so that they are ok with being treated like disposable temps while companies perpetually interview in hopes of landing some “10x unicorn” employee. I have no idea what people “do” for corporate work now. It seems like it’s all building web/mobile aps and consulting on how to get those aps to show up in Google searches. Like why would someone ever fucking hire you to make a PowerPoint deck about migrating to the “cloud” when they have to go hire someone else to actually do it?
That’s the reason you have people like Elizabeth Holmes. Because corporations are run by idiots who are willing to believe anyone who can sound “smart” and feed them an idea that sounds like it will make billions. So that’s what they look for. If I were in college, I’d drop out and start telling people I needed VC funding for my damn time machine I invented in my dorm room.
Right, because someone just clicked “reject” (or maybe just didn’t click “accept”) and the computer sent the standard rejection letter.
That’s been my life for the last 12 years. I got laid off from my ‘permanent’ job in 2007 and have been working contract jobs ever since. The older I get (I’m 57 now) the more anxious I get when my contracts end and I have to find work. It took so long the last time that the forced 6 month break between contracting at the same company had elapsed and they brought me back for another stretch. I’m going to start looking after an upcoming deadline and I fear it will take longer than ever and we have very little cushion. If I’m unable to find something before my contract runs out (if it even goes the full two years) in 2020 I’ll be 58 :rolleyes:
My last couple of jobs have been through networking, although nothing active on my part. Just my boss asking someone I worked with at the same company about me and the interview consisting of when can I start. But that was after months of sweating out the job search with maybe a couple dozen phone screens, a handful of face to face interviews and zero offers, either perm or contract.
Well, I failed the job interview. The commentary came back that I acted too casual and familiar. FWIW, I took my cues on how to act from them. On the bright side, though the job was right up my alley, the company is not so I’d not be at all torn up about the loss except that I need the income and health insurance.
What kind of work do you do?
I’ve tried to avoid “contract” work as much as possible so I don’t get stuck in the contractor trap. I kind of feel like once you start down that road, it can be difficult to get a full time permanent job again.
I’m still trying to figure out how my career has seemingly turned to shit. The first 12 years were ok. Even with a couple of setbacks, I managed to change careers, get an MBA and then work my way up to a mid-level manager job and six figure salary at a top 50 Manhattan consulting form where I worked for 4 years.
That ended around 2008.
Since then, it’s been mostly bouncing around a bunch of shit jobs at really well-know companies. The money was ok and they sounded interesting at the time. And they were still “manager” level jobs. But there was no longevity, let alone upward mobility (maybe a no-increase title bump if I was lucky). Not a lot of guidance or direction from my usually absent boss (typically a director or VP). And usually it was either sitting around idle with no work or total chaos with way too much work. And either way, the projects tended to be so random and esoteric that I wasn’t learning anything I could take with me to another company.
To be honest, I’ve always had some anxiety about the job market since I was in college in the early 90s. You had concepts like “Golden Handcuffs” where people got trapped in jobs they hated because of their pensions and the salary financing their lifestyle. Or ending up in some dull Office Space job with an annoying boss. Or getting laid off and unable to find a new job in your 40s or 50s and going insane like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
Of course, tech companies have made it so the job market and careers in general are far worse than I could have possibly imagined 20 years ago.
Sorry to hear that. 
It sounds like a “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” type of situation. It’s generally considered a good thing to be friendly and confident in a job interview. Only someone looking for a reason not to hire a person would turn this around to supposedly being “too casual and familiar.” :rolleyes: Maybe the job was already in the bag for someone else.
Who knows? Interviewing is very subjective.
A big thing now is apparently answering interview questions using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Results). Basically, you tell a story by S) setting the stage T) describe what you looking to accomplish A) tell what action you took and R) the positive results on how you saved the company.
STAR is fairly popular because the current belief is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. And with STAR it’s important that the candidate makes sure answer the question completly. Give me a situation or task, an action, and the results or you will have failed to answer the question and I won’t even give you a 1 out of 5. But I’m not necessarily looking for a positive result. I usually try to ask at least one negative question during an interview. “Can you tell me about a time you were unable to meet a deadline?”
Yeah I suppose I’m pretty stuck in the contractor trap. I interview occasionally for permanent positions but the only offers I get are for contract work and I can’t really be picky. I work in clinical data management for pharmaceutical companies. Most of the day to day stuff has been outsourced or off-shored but they still need us around for oversight, clean-up, and older projects among other things. I generally like the work and the people I work with and the money’s good, so there’s little impetus to change careers. If I could just plan my life for more than 6 months in advance…
Wow, I missed this post the first time through, but I feel like I have to respond.
You don’t hire an overqualified candidate for a lower-level job. “Everyone knows” an overqualified person is still looking for a better job (never mind that the recent graduate is also looking for a better job), that they don’t fit the company culture, they think they know more than their supervisors, etc., etc. If you’re desperate, you* might *hire them for short-term contract work.
What “everyone” forgets is that there are people like me in 2008 (and I’ll bet several people in this thread,) who’d be perfectly willing to take a step or two down on the career ladder in exchange for a reasonably permanent, full-time job with benefits, that allows them to keep paying the mortgage, and, we hope, might even have a matching 401K program.
Not to mention that over the years we’ve learned to not fight the company culture so much, and sometimes it’s good to have someone who knows as much as the supervisors, for when the supervisors quit.
Now if any potential employer had asked me flat out, “You’re overqualified for this job. Why do you want it?” I would have been happy to tell them exactly that, and I would be their loyal servant for years to come. But, of course, you never hire an overqualified person, so why even interview them?
I think a lot of it depends on what industry you’re in. I think most places I’ve interviewed at were content to consider me for a roll appropriate for my skills and experience. Like one large consulting firm, I’ve been interviewing at for 4 months. Initially it was for an industry specific strategy job, but the practice lead wanted 10 years of specific industry experience (which they could have figured out on the first phone call, but I digress). But he liked my background for their digital strategy practice so sent my resume over there. Surprisingly, they called, but the hiring manager thought I’d be a better fit as a Senior Manager instead of a Director (less of a sales target, which is fine with me). So now I have to wait for those roles to open up.
Another firm thought I’d be a great fit for a Principle Account Manager role…except I have zero devops or AWS cloud experience, which is their primary business. Ironically, I also interviewed at AWS, but they didn’t seem to care about experience.
The point being, you can have a lot of overall experience, but not in a specific technology or methodology. So do you come in at the senior level and train or come in at the junior level and work your way up?
WHY would a company care about that? What about the qualities and skills you’d be bringing to the company? If an interviewer said “He was qualified, but he brought a water bottle and loosened his tie, which by the way was a Jerry Garcia and those were played out a decade ago and did you SEE his shoes?” I’d fire the interviewer and call you back in for an interview by someone without a stick up their butt.
Now, I might be biased. At my current job, they never stop reminding me that, in the middle of my interview, I put my foot up on the edge of the coffee table. hey, I kidded around, too, I was trying to lighten things up.
Well, they’ve been making fun of me about that for 22 years now, so I guess if it counted against me, I’d have heard by now…