Surprise Interview Outcomes – the end to unemployment?
It turns out that like horses and skinny dogs you probably shouldn’t bet on the outcome of job interviews. You may recall that just before we set sail for Darwin I had racked up two interviews, one of which I thought had gone quite well and the second one I thought had gone remarkably crap.
So it has come as a pleasant surprise to be offered the position from my ‘crap’ interview. I haven’t heard anything back from the ‘good’ interview so maybe I’m just a bad judge of interview success. In the mean time I had been contacted for a third interview but since they gave me only 24 hours notice and we were in the middle of Kakadu that was never going to happen. Strangely they called me back a week later to see if I might still be interested in an interview which seems to indicate that the people they had interviewed were fairly dodgey. I’m fairly sure that you wouldn’t go to the effort of lining up an interview panel of four people again unless you had too. I am also fairly sure that the number of interview panellists does not in any way correspond to making a better choice of candidate. I was once asked to attend a final interview for a new manager as a courtesy and apparently I was the only person to see that anyone who turns up for an interview wearing a purple velvet jacket is not your winner. I was also the only person not on the panel (another panel of 4). Purple-Velvet-Jacket man turned out to be a terrible manager. It appeared that he may have read a guide to good management somewhere along the line but possibly hadn’t got around to finishing it. He was ‘made redundant’ a year later.
Anyway, it is fairly interesting that I can stuff up an interview but still appear to be the best candidate. Which makes me wonder what the other candidates were like……..