"Typically during interviews my goal is to make the person crack. No joke. My goal is to see one of several things: sweat on the forehead, shaky hands, sweaty palms, verbiage promoting extreme worry and anxiousness, nervous tendencies like shaking a leg, tapping a foot, or tapping a hand, shaky voice, or simply the person says they can't solve my problems because they can't think straight. I've had each of those happen in interviews over the last year. While none of those are a definite NO for me, I look to see how well you handle the pressure. Can you take an authority figure hammering away at you when you don't really know the answer? Are you decisive? Can you make the quick decisions on the spot with no referencing or research?"
I know I'm stupid to say this, but I hate this aspect of life. I don't agree that putting one under pressure in an interview is quite the same as the prolonged, shapeless pressure one is likely to encounter in reality, but even aside from that, I disapprove. Yes, I am an escapist, and a completely mad idealist, and that is why I sometimes worry about the future. I don't quite know what I expect something like an interview would be in my make-believe world; two people sitting in a room discussing Camus!? Life is composed of so many realities, and some of them are beautiful beyond words, and some, well, some are far more sour. I can't claim that this falls squarely into the latter, but to me, at times like this, it can feel like it's almost as bad. It's mildly off-putting to be forced to deal with them, but I suppose some things can't be helped. Of late, I find that I want to treat the sour as some banal triviality when compared to the sweet - I can't say that I deny the existence of the bad, but rather I feel like it pales in comparison to the true purpose of everything ("What is that", you say? Ahh, an earlier post holds the answer!). Whether or not this is delusional, I am uncertain.
2 comments:
why don't people in the interviews ask "are you trying to make me nervous to see how I'll handle it?"?
I suppose because it runs the risk of the response "Uh, no, it was just a simple question...", which would result in more undue stress :) And even if it were the case that the whole thing is just a test, the interviewer might not appreciate being "found out"; it's all one big power trip, ain't it? ;)
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