Q: David’s character, Boris Yellnikoff, is sort of an Allen anomaly, no? He’s downwardly mobile, and his cynicism is self-destructive.
A: First off, I never consider these people cynical. I consider them realistic. I will say that I do agree completely that too much realism is self-destructive.
I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I’m drunk and dirty don’t ya know, and I’m still willin’
If you’re a genius like Mozart and you’ve got a 1000 IQ in music or whatever your specialty is, then you can distinguish yourself by doing things that other people are simply not capable of doing.
Lucky you!
On the other hand, if you’re a person of moderate intelligence like me, you’re going to have to distinguish yourself by doing more than other people are willing to do — not more than they’re capable of doing, but more than they’re willing to do.
We were interviewing candidates this week for a web editor position. One of the candidates brought in some mockups he had made to illustrate how we could incorporate social networking elements into our web site.
Were the ideas groundbreaking in any respect? No. Could the other candidates have done the same thing? Probably, if they’d been willing to put in the effort.
But they didn’t.
I have to assume that you’ll approach the job the same way you approach the interview. Are you willing to do more than what’s absolutely required?
If you want to pull a rabbit out of your hat at the interview, first you’ve got to put a rabbit in your hat.
In fact, given the high degree of uncertainty, you may want to put 10 rabbits in your hat and be ready to pull out whichever one you need.
At the very least, you must be absolutely prepared to answer the question, “What makes you the best person for the job?”
Even if that question is never explicitly asked, everything you say and do must be targeted at answering it.
Put together a list of the unique contributions you’ll make to the job and the company. Brush up on a few stories that show you at your best in the workplace.
In politics, these are called “talking points.” Politicians don’t try to think up answers on the fly to every question someone throws at them. They have a prepared list of points to make, no matter what you ask them.
So do you!
Don’t forget Step 3.
IndyMac, my former employer, laid off another 3,800 people this week, more than half the remaining work force. I got the axe myself almost exactly a year ago.
Prediction — at job interviews, these people will hear something I heard a lot during my own interviews: “We’re seeing a lot of applicants from the mortgage industry.”
Yeah . . . tell me something I didn’t know.
The Elite Mortgage Daily Blog has helpfully provided a brief history of IndyMac stock:
After three months on the dole, I got a job offer from the IT director of a local non-profit healthcare association here in Orange County. I start next week. As Gerald Ford used to say, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
It’s a small IT group — 8 people, including the director. I’ve got to admit I’m a little burned out on big corporate IT shops.
I got out of hands-on programming and into leadership roles because I thought I could do a better job than the people I saw doing it. I wanted to develop teams that got things done using their skills and their collective intelligence, but in practice, you typically get locked into some corporate process standard.
A process may be good for delivering consistent results, but they may not be consistently good results. Like at McDonald’s, every Big Mac is just like every other Big Mac because they have a process for making Big Macs. But is a Big Mac a high-quality dining experience? Not really . . .
A friend and former colleague, who was also recently let go by a local mortgage company, emails to say
I’m doing well… still spending a lot of time in Bakersfield, spending time with my parents. I’ve been looking for jobs, but haven’t applied for anything. I guess I actually need to apply.
She’s single, she can afford to be sanguine.
I was in contact with at least 100 companies in one way or another – sent a resume, called, phone interviews, in-person interviews – and got two job offers. So the upside with her approach is that I could have avoided 98 rejections.
Did I mention the job is with a healthcare organization? I was laid off from my last job, with a mortgage bank, when the mortgage industry tanked. Prior to that, I was laid off from a dot-com consulting company when that industry imploded.
I’ve got a knack for getting into industries at their absolute zenith, then riding them down the drain.
But healthcare — it’s recession-proof! Isn’t it? You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.”
As I arrived for an interview today, the hiring manager asked me, “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”
As it happens, I did not have any trouble finding the place and said so. I had printed out a map from one of the numerous online map sites and the building was right where it was supposed to be.
But even if I had had trouble finding it, my answer would have been the same.
“Some people have trouble finding it,” he told me.
Interesting. As an IT person, I consider myself a problem-solver — actually, I could make a case that any person in any job is hired as a problem solver — so I wouldn’t start out an interview by admitting that I got lost on my way over.
“Don’t hire anyone who can’t find the building,” I said.
Since I’m currently unemployed, my friend GL asked me to write something about the job interview process. The problem is, there’s already so much written about the job interview process, it’s hard to think of anything to add.
Which brings me to my point: It’s easy to overprepare for interviews.
For example, we have a book here that my wife bought called Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions.
Two problems:
But wait! It gets worse! If you go to Amazon and look up this book, you’ll find a list of similar titles like
Clearly this notion of preparing answers to all possible interview questions in advance quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns.
Here’s what I’d suggest instead: Write up a list of the key points you want to make about yourself in the interview, the unique contributions you’ll make to the job and the company. Brush up on a few stories that show you at your best in the workplace.
Then — no matter what the interviewer asks — respond with your points and stories. We’re in the midst of a political season, so it’s easy to observe this technique in action. Politicians are not out there to think up answers to every stupid question someone throws at them. They have a list of points they want to make. So do you!
This list is mostly for your own reference, but you may want to go ahead and put together a nicely formatted version, print out a few copies and bring them to the interview. That way, if the interviewer asks — and they often do — “What makes you the best person for the job?,” you hand them a copy of your list.
Bonus: Most of what’s said in an interview is quickly forgotten. What remains is a general impression and of course — documents!
I hobbled into a job interview today like a man whose shoes were too small for his feet.
No, wait, let me back up a little bit . . .
I can never find anything around the house because people keep moving my stuff. Why everyone can’t keep their hands to themselves, I don’t know, but I don’t even try to keep track of things anymore. I just look for something in the last place I put it, and when it’s not there, I ask someone.
“Don’t ask me. I didn’t touch it.”
So I look some more and it always turns out that my camera is in my son’s room, or my keys are in my wife’s purse, or the important document is in the trash, and everyone still maintains that they have no idea how it got there.
Living with people is a mixed blessing, I’ll tell you.
So I was leaving the house for a job interview, nobody else was home, and I couldn’t find my black oxfords.
I was able to find my son’s black oxfords, but his feet are a little bit smaller than mine . . .
In 1960, Douglas MacGregor of the MIT Sloan School of Management developed two theories of workplace motivation, Theory X and Theory Y.
I come down strongly in favor of Theory Y. I don’t feel like I’m an inherently unmotivated person, that my boss has to keep coming up with new ways to get my head in the game, and I don’t find that most other people do either. People want to do good work. They want the opportunity to do good work.
The key, really, is not to motivate people, but to avoid demotivating them. A lot of managers haven’t figured that one out yet.
This was posed to me in an interview. I don’t know if there’s a “right” answer, or whether it’s just intended to probe the thinking process of the applicant.
You have 50 white marbles, 50 black marbles and two bags. Your task is to arrange the marbles in the bags so as to maximize the probability that a person making a blind selection from one of the bags will select a black marble.
The Programmer has been out of work for more than two months now . . .
A recruiter called me the other day, and in the course of our conversation, he asked me which “business requirements methods” I’ve used.
I said, “I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that.”
After a pause, he said, “I’m not really sure what it means either. I’m kind of new at this.”
“Well, go ahead and read the next question, then . . .”
Thus spoke The Programmer.
