self-sabotage at job interview

Oh, and then crying lots.

However, I run that station now, so that's my ray-of-hope story for you.

BZZT!

Me: staring at the dry-erase board, dumbfounded, stunned, trying to think of a way to hide the fact that most of the stuff Interviewer just said went over my head

Interviewer: "Are you OK?"

Me (to myself): "Oh, fuck."

! So give airplay to the ILX comp, then. ;-)

HER: "So, why do you want to be a prosecutor?"

ME: "...." (i.e. full two minutes of silence, in which I slowly come to realize that I haven't said anything in one minute, then spend a minute coming up with something to say, while at the same time realizing that I don't want to be a prosecutor)

ME: "It's just so, you know, deep within me, it's hard for me to find the words."

HER: "Right."

How could I know she would ask me why I wanted the job?

Also: COMPLETELY SEE-THRU STUCK TO MY SKIN WHITE BLOUSE.

I think if I put on the black blouse, my life would be totally different today.

"It's not exactly rocket science, is it?"

"I'm just here to have fun"

tracer it's been 12 years you either need to start paying rent or find somewhere else to live

"my management style is quite lax"

think i started getting irritated with the interviewer at a recent job, thinking 'why are you STILL asking me about THAT? i already told you in the cover letter that i can do it'. probably not that helpful.

yeah, i remember getting frustrated in an interview because towards the end, the recruiter said i should have told her i had a degree. i DID! it was on my CV and cover letter FFS. and anyway, it was 100 years ago

look let's be real I'm not gonna kick the door in on day one and start telling youse how to run things its gonna take a few weeks

I once interviewed someone for an editorial job on a magazine, put a copy in front of her, and asked what she'd do with it if she had free rein. She froze, said nothing for a second, then put it on her head and said 'turn it into a hat'.

She's hired.

a few years back I was going to an interview and I basically had already been offered another job - this was after weeks of interviews and call-backs etc etc etc and I probably only attended this interview out of some Irish catholic mother conscience hectoring me in my mind and raising the possibility that the job I'd been offered would fall through. that and politeness.

anyway - i did a long tedious writing test, it was with a government sports body and the writing was rewording some awful press release about a school cricket pitch - the building was like a prison, even if i was jobless i'd have been loathe to work there - but i did their test for an hour, then did a pretty good interview, they kept asking those questions with that edge of "this is a shit place to work, will you be bored here" - always amusing when you have to answer those with something that isn't "yes i hate myself, i'm a masochist and that's why i want to work in this dump, so i look as miserable as you".

anyway, i'd done okay and kept them happy and i thought i might even be offered it, which i guess would have been pleasing on some abstract level of achievement, and then right at the end they asked me "can you suggest 3 changes you'd make to improve our homepage?"

and i had done no prep, and i was basically sick of lying, and doing interviews, and it was a friday afternoon. so i just said, to see what would happen: "i'll be honest with you, i've never looked at it in my life."

and they all stopped and were kinda downcast and then one of them tried to throw me a lifeline, like "maybe... you could eh... tell us what you'd generally say are things that could be improved on many websites, or other government sites"

but i wouldn't give in - i just said "unfortunately without having looked at it that'd be neither here nor there, i can't really generalise like that, sorry."

never heard back.

My self-sabotage technique at interviews is to rather than think of an answer to a fluffy question like "what is your passion", is to instead think about how shitty it must look to be sitting there silently without an answer prepared and recited in a natural way. Then, of course, all this time goes by while my brain is kind of pretending I'm just watching this happen rather than actually being there live, so the remaining time is spent rushing a very lame answer that starts with a confident "I don't know" with some stumbling to follow.

I was great at this in the past.

Once I told a public sector job that I thought it would be a "nice alternative" to all the private sector jobs I had applied for. I was trying to convey that I would rather work in the public sector, instead it came out like a backup plan.

Another time I basically dissed my school as an explanation for why I hadn't found a job in on-campus recruiting. I was sort of cornered into it, because there's really no good answer for why you didn't find a job in on-campus recruiting, no matter how much the economy sucked and how few people got jobs in on-campus recruiting. But the interviewer's face noticeably dropped when I said that, I think I was a shoe-in until that moment.

In college I famously wrote on a Starbucks job application that I didn't like their coffee.

I got so sick of being given the right answers by the CEO that I started meowing, under my breath at first as little punctuations to show I was listening the progressively more loudly and in less and less natural punctuating spaces, just meowing at him by the end tbh.

true story

i applied for a job in the kitchen at a pizza delivery chain and i left my phd on the application

lmaoooooo

the sheepskin?

i applied for a job in the kitchen at a pizza delivery chain and i left my phd on the application

― j., Thursday, August 13, 2015 9:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i bet they get a lot like that

are you saying i lost out to a chemical engineering phd or something

maybe the self-sabotage was that i was too MODEST

I did this recently for a major online retailer located in the pacific northwest. It was a marketing position in the books dept. They asked me what I would do if an Author didn't like the book cover we made for them. I said 'have him read the contract again'. Just an FYI, that is not the right answer.

there was a logic quiz on a job interview i had recently. one of the questions was the following. two fathers and their sons go fishing. each father and each son catches one fish. at the end of the day there are three fish. how? the answer is: it's grandfather, father, son/grandson. my answer: they are gay :-/

i did pretty well otherwise and got through to the next round. at one point during an interview they asked me the classic "why should we hire you for this job" and i kind of fumbled and ended up blurting out "if i get this job... i would uh, i would rock it." one of the interviewers let out a single loud laugh, and the other two just scribbled down notes fastidiously

love these stories

i don't remember what the question was or what my answer was so it was probably unremarkable or im just an idiot, but for another job at one point someone asked me a question, and i answered it, and then i saw person who asked it to me write NO on the sheet of paper, like he bolded it by writing over it multiple times with his pen haha

In college I famously wrote on a Starbucks job application that I didn't like their coffee.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Monday, January 19, 2015 9:26 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did this in person

went for a job interview at mcdonalds when i was 16. had drank all night and went straight to the interview from a house party. did the interview, had a discussion about punk with the duty manager who interviewed me, never heard from them again.

was temping in a bank, absolutely despised my job, was looking for a good permanent one. found one that i really liked the look of, that paid well. after the first question in the interview, which i answered adequately, i literally couldn't think of anything for the remaining 5 or 6 questions. like ended up saying something for each of them but literally the answers were grandiloquent, but completely obvious, gibberish. mind just went blank.