CoSMI - 1.0.1.22 - Authenticity - True Self - job interview tricks
In a long lifetime, with many career changes, I have spent far too much time in job interviews. I have also received a great deal of advice on job interviews, and how to affect them in your favour. I have come to believe that an awful lot of this advice is absolute nonsense.
A great deal of advice that people give you about job interviews and about preparing resumes turns on the proposition that you should present yourself differently than you actually are. People will tell you that companies are on the lookout for go-getters, and so, regardless of what you are actually like, you should present yourself as a go-getter! Of course, if you present yourself in this way and the company hires you, thinking that you are a go-getter, then when you get the job, the company will expect you to go and get, regardless of what your skills actually are.
It's basically the same as if the company wants a morning person because they need somebody for the early shift. You get the job by presenting yourself as a morning person, even though you are really a night owl. On the job, you are continually coming in late or being absolutely useless for the first few hours of your shift because you are absolutely exhausted from being up late the night before. It's not your fault that you are a night owl. That is the way that you were made. But it *is* your fault for presenting yourself incorrectly. You're not happy, and the company's not happy.
One aspect of this problem is that it is not just the candidates for the job who are being told tricks for job interviews. An awful lot of the job interviewers are also being told that they have to have tricks for the job interview. They have to have group interviews, or confrontative interviews, or trick questions to fire at candidates at random times during the interview. Tricks are always shortcuts, and a form of cheating, and cheaters never prosper. Using interview tricks doesn't work any better for the companies than it does for the candidates. It just means that you end up with the wrong people in the wrong jobs, and then nobody is happy.
Really, this is just another way of saying the same thing that I have been saying all along. Be yourself. Be true to yourself. Don't change just because somebody says you need to be something else. If you need to be something else in order to do what you think you want to do, then you shouldn't be doing that.
CoSMI series:
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/05/cosmi-00100-introduction-and-table-of.html
Next: TBA
No comments:
Post a Comment