Saturday, July 23, 2016

New Job Interview Stuff

INTERVIEW DAY
I had a recent job interview last week to be exact and I thought I would share the experience. It was first thing in the morning at 9 which may have been a mistake. It was a very hot day and given that the business was a 20 minute plus walk from the train station with little shade by the time I got in to the reception area I felt somewhat unpleasant.

I thankfully had some time to freshen up a bit but not really long enough to stop sweating but I was happy enough having spent the day before getting familiar with the role. This interview came with the dreaded task before the actual interview.


THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW
It was a Word and Excel assignment the former being a Mail Merge and the latter a Chart builder. With lots of mistakes and changes to be made such as add this line, make that a fancy table it is way too easy to burn through the precious, precious time. Look below for my rant on interview tasks.

Personally I have a lot of problems with the task based interviews as it is not something that you can adequately prepare for unless you're super lucky. I do office work so my tasks are generally if not 99% of the time Word and Excel stuff. You almost never get enough time and the assignment is broken down in a way which is the most counter-intuitive possible.

The way that instructions are listed in those tasks generally ensure that they take up as much time as possible. You could rearrange them and have them done in half the time. Perhaps that's the point but what does that have to do with a job situation where you've got training on how the company you work for likes to do things. To me it makes no damn sense.

Enough of my ranting about job interviews though don't want to talk myself out of future ones.