The interviewer showed me a website (not one done by the company) to explain what they were interested in doing. They explained how the job fit into the department and what they hoped it would do with external clients.
Then the interviewer asked me what I thought. I responded with the pathetic "It sounds very interesting." ... Chuck
----------
(So, good luck Kel. After years of hearing these stories from you, I am very glad you finally hit. And move out here for chrissakes. The east is bunch of class ridden snots...)
God damn it Chuck. I have been there (not as fancy).
When I got the what do you think question, I stopped talking and realized the interviewers (two) were asking me to tell them what I thought my job and approach was going to be---in order to judge whether or not I had the combination of skill, creativity, and background to do this job. I was lucky I saw this in a flash. So I took a long minute to think this through and decided the best approach was to think out loud and said that's what I was going to do, think out loud. At issue was the translation of Caltrans technical data on mass transportation into easily understood graphics for presentation to the funding sources and later to the public hearings. I knew immediately they did not want pie charts or line graphs. I decided the best graphic approach could be modeled on signage like those that signify gas, hotels, resturants and other facilities seen on freeway off ramps---and commerical logos designed for a specific product line. I speculated that this was pretty corny stuff from a graphic arts point of view, but the point wasn't great design, it was communication. This turned out to be a pretty good take on what they were looking for. They liked my portfolio and asked me to leave it with them (which scared me). After a relatively short presentation on how I would approach the project, they took me over to one of their dual screen Mac based graphics work stations and pulled up an Adobe Framemaker file and opened it. Framemaker at that point was not entirely point and click the way Quark was. It used an intermediate interface (for style sheet modifications) and then a separate GUI to see the finished page layout. I sat down and told them I used Quark on a PC. That didn't phase them a bit. They happily gave me a quick features tour on the spot and watched as I learned on the fly. I realized they were watching my learning curve, which at that moment was in high gear and was in pretty good form considering the context and pressure to perform.
But I didn't get the job. It came down to two candidates, me and a woman with more background in web design. They had compared portfolios and liked mine better. So it was a straight up and fair judgement. They called me in briefly to pick up my portfolio and told me they had picked the other candidate and thanked me for my interest. They said they would call me after the probation period, if the other candidate didn't work out. Shock. They were nice and did their jobs well. We shook hands. Going out I thought about them, and realized they were both older guys running a big project and probably preferred having a woman around the job site. Easy on the eyes, Less ego hassles, more friendly work environment, less tension, etc.
``If you get 200 well-qualified applicants and can't settle for one, then you are obviously looking for God herself to work for you...''
I used to think this. But now I am not so sure that's always the case. I think when some huge number of applicants don't seem to fit, the problem is that the employer hasn't defined the job well enough to know what they are looking for. What they get in interviews seems wrong not because the applicants are bad or they are looking for god, but because the employer's job concept isn't sufficiently refined to know how to appraise the applicants.
I actually ran into this barrier in another interview. It was new position at UCB in the alumni funding dept. They were looking for someone to teach their office groups how to use windows to get unix files and process them in a windows office environment. There were something like seven people on this panel: dept heads who were going to run these trainings on their staff, along with the high tech unix guys who managed the file servers. As they explained, the unix guys had been a total failure at teaching the office staffs how to deal with windows---far too technical. They were looking for somebody who could put these technical details into regular language.
This was another of those interviews where I was asked to explore the problem and come up with solutions. So I took a deep breath and started in. The interview was very long, about an hour and half. It turned into a round table discussion. I felt great, trying to make my contributions as best I could. At the end, they asked me to wait outside while they discussed their decision. About fifteen minutes later, one of the women from the office side of the panel came out and told me, they decided I wasn't what they were looking for. I asked her why, and she said, they hadn't quite agreed on the best solution and whether it needed more experience with windows or more experience with unix.
This sounded like polite bullshit to me at the time. But as I reflected on it later, I thought the problem was they hadn't decided on what the position should actually do. Anyway I saw the position re-named something else with a different set of experience and skills need in the UC job listing a few months later.
A couple of years later, after I had put together a unix plateform, I realized why the unix guys had asked me about handling email. My answers at that point were too elementary for their taste. Meanwhile the office heads probably thought I was too technically minded to satisfy their people. I had mentioned that windows didn't do email very well, but that I could show office people how to configure their stations and get the mail system to work. But otherwise, I would follow the unix guys and their lead on that system. I had a UC shell account and could manage the user level configurations to set up a shell account and was familiar with the various email user interfaces. In other words I was probably just about right for the job.
After a few more of these `good' interviews I started to turn sour. I can only take so much rejection before I start getting hostile. I knew that was the end of my days looking to get out of a trade I had been stuck in for years.
CG