Job Interview Questions

I was helping my daughter prepare for a job interview this week and I reminded her that this was bound to be a question she would have to answer. The dreaded, "So, tell me about yourself?" I told her she would be asked to do the impossible. In thirty seconds or less she needed to be able to give a brief synapsis of her life, tell why it had led her to this interview, and why she would be the best candidate for the job. A hefty order for the best of us.

I am in sales. I make a good living asking people questions that will help me get the information I need to make the sale. Some questions are simple and easy to answer, others are loaded with nuance and innuendo, but few are as devestatingly contrived as the one above.

This question is difficult because it sounds, on the surface, like a very simple request. Of course, it is anything but simple. Its nearly impossible to condense 20, 30, even 60 years into a 30 second nutshell. But that's the easy part. What is hardest is looking back on the decades and seeing how little we have accomplished in those years.

At best, most of us have little to be proud of, and the things we are proudest of probably aren't the things that the interviewer wants to hear about. My oldest son is deaf, or as he would like to say, hearing impaired. He has remarkable communication skills for someone with his hearing loss, and with the use of hearing aids he is able to communicate with most anyone. We tried for years to help him learn to use the phone but with no success, his hearing loss was simply too profound to allow him that luxury.

Then one day I got a phone call at work, "Its from your son," I was told. This was not unusual, my second son calls all the time, but the voice I heard was a strange one. I got goose bumps when I realized who it was. It was one of the great days of my life and I will remember it always, but I can never use it in a job interview.It is a moment of quiet victory, of singular accomplishment that will forever remain, personal.

I guess that's what I'm really getting at. Our lives are filled with moments of quiet victory that have great significance to us and perhaps to no one else. Interviewers ask an intensely personal question and then expect us to answer it in a business manner. Filter out, they say, all that is personal and give us the greatest accomplishments of your business life. For most of us our business life exists simply to finance our personal lives. Unless we have cured polio or are putting a dent in world hunger we probably have little we can crow about.

I've decided its a trick question. Ask them to go first next time.

Latest Messages

Conversations

Subscriptions

Friends

Fibber has no Friends

See all Friends

Followers

Fibber has no Followers

See all Followers

Bookmarks

This user has no Bookmarks

See all Bookmarks