Day 715

Aka Tuesday 15^h January 2019

Today I had an interview at the Food Standards Agency, and I don’t think it went very well. Today there were no problems with the trains, and I had no trouble getting to the interview. But once there it went oddly. I was collected from reception and asked to wait in internal reception/kitchen area and when the guy came to get me, he didn’t come into the area and introduce himself to me (and vice versa), he stood at the door, half hidden by it and asked me to follow him. Once in the interview I was asked to sit down and the parameters for the interview were read out to me, almost as if I was I an exam and the invigilator was reading out the instructions, rather than an interview situation. None of the three interviewers offered to shake my hand, it all felt very cold and almost like they were going through the motions, with no desire to engage with me. 

All my previous interviews had felt more like a dialogue, a conversation, where both sides were getting to know the other, both in terms of ability but also personality (or how-will-they-fit-with-the-rest-of-the-team-ability). But with this interview, within a few minutes, my main thought was ‘If this is how these guys normally act, I don’t want to work here’. 

And I don’t think I will, as it was not a good interview. My big take away is that I let them set the agenda, the feeling, for the interview and I didn’t make myself comfortable (for example, I didn’t take out my notes or the interview bumf), which meant that I didn’t feel confident and did not give a good accounting of myself and therefore did not give a good interview. 

For example, I think that they had different interview bumf from me, as I was asked which job description intrigued me most, but the bumf I had didn’t give job descriptions. It gave generalities and that they were interviewing for three roles but didn’t go into detail for each role. But I didn’t feel comfortable/confident enough to challenge on this and tried to bluff my way through. Also, I was asked how I would try to change someone’s view, and I explained that I would first try to see the situation from their point of view and ask they to explain the reason(s) for their position, bit one of the interviewers misunderstood me and thought I was asking them for their reasons for ask this question. And I had to cut them off and explain that I was talking about what I would do and not actually asking a question. Not sure if that went down well or not. But I kinda don’t care as I don’t think it’d be a nice working environment.

…on the way home, I picked up the latest 2000AD partworks, covering the more recent ‘ABC Warriors’ stories…

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

…and things perk up as I only needed to cheat on a seventh of the clues (three out of 21). The majority of the answers were at my fingertips and required little of the little grey cells and I learnt that ‘Patois’ is a ‘French regional dialect’ and that ‘Eritrea’ is a ‘country on the Red Sea’.