Of course, going back was never really an option - I am too heavily invested in my new career, and I am too far out of touch with the changes that have happened in IT. But even if I could change all that I still wouldn't go back to my previous career because of one incredibly huge factor - interviews.
Now I realize that somewhere in the neighborhood of everybody hates interviews. I like to think that I hate them even more than most being that I pretty much hate talking to people in nearly all circumstances, but even if I don't have a privileged level of interview hate, for much of my life they were my bane.
In all the years I was in IT and also in all the years before I was in IT I had a horrible conversion rate of interviews to jobs. I didn't track my employment searches back then the way I do now, so I can't say with certainty that my numbers for that time aren't tainted by bias, but I feel pretty sure that from the moment I actually started working for a living till when I decided to go to NAIT I averaged about one job for every ten interviews.
There were some stretches where I did somewhat better, and others where I did far worse, but overall I always seemed to be hovering around that 10% mark.
Since I graduated from NAIT and have been applying for Mech Tech jobs, I have been averaging one job for every three interviews. In fact, in that stretch of fifteen months where I was so frequently unemployed I was doing slightly better than one in three.
Why was there such a drastic improvement? Obviously there are a lot of factors that are difficult to measure, such as:
- I am seeking higher level positions than I used to.
- The candidate pool in the jobs I apply to now is generally smaller than it was for other jobs I applied to before.
- HR trends vary both over time and by industry.
- I am better educated in my current field than any previous one I worked in.
But I am going to say that I think these are not the primary issue; the primary issue is that there is one type of question which was unavoidable in the interviews I used to do, and yet has almost never comes up any more. That question, which was the bane of my existence for so many years goes like this
"Tell me about a time when x happened and how you dealt with it."
I am not much of an oral storyteller, and I tend to forget most of the mundane things that happen in my life; actually, I think part of how I was able to survive for so long in call centres is that my brain would so quickly purge the details of these meaningless calls. I can remember a number of calls from my first couple years on the phones when everything was fresh and new, but I couldn't tell you about a single call I took in the last five years I was on the phone; and most of those forgotten calls were forgotten before I started my next shift.
So interviewers would ask me to remember a story, which I couldn't, and I'm an even worse liar than I am a storyteller (so there was no point in trying to BS them). So I would often spend a long time trying to come up with an answer that would be very underwhelming. In one particularly bad interview there were multiple times I sat in silence for two or three minutes trying to come up with an answer before admitting "I don't have an answer for that."
I don't know if its because of the level of the positions I am applying for or if its because the positions usually are not ones with a lot of customer contact, but only twice in all the interviews I have done for Mech Tech positions has that question ever come up, and both times it was "Tell me about a time when you had a problem with a co-worker and how you dealt with it."
So that, in a nutshell is why I think I am getting more jobs now. But even with the success I have found, I still hate them and will happily quote to anyone who cares to listen studies that have shown that interviewing is pretty much the worst way possible of determining the best candidate.
No comments:
Post a Comment