Let’s face it: no one in their right mind likes having to go to an interview for a job or internship. You have to quickly acclimate yourself to an environment that you may or may not be working in, you have to make sure that you’re dressed nicely (and not too nicely) and you have to present a façade that the interviewer likes, one that may or may not be true to the real you. Overall, it’s an exhausting process, but in our society, an interview is a necessary part of any job, despite how annoying they can be.
For that matter, consider how an interviewer actually feels about interviewing a new person gunning for a position at their company. An alien presence shuffles into their cherished workspace, with that foreign body totally unaware of their own surroundings and it begins to ask questions that common sense could easily answer if they worked there, “I have an appointment with Tracy Halapat, where can I find her?”
The interviewer has to make the poor soul feel comfortable by cordoning them off from the rest of the office, a practice that rarely achieves this goal, and then has to ask a laundry list of questions that could be altogether avoided.
No, that interviewer does not care about where you went to college, nor do they care about extra-curricular activities from ten years ago, they’re making conversation so the interview doesn’t last for five minutes. The interviewer sincerely is uncomfortable as well, they are required to ask questions, be good judges of character and try to make an effort to really figure out if the nervous, well-dressed individual in front of them can use Microsoft Word, Excel or the Internet.
Interviews really are not fun, I think I’ve made that abundantly clear and I think that you, as a reader, probably don’t need to read anything but the title to get the gist of what I’m saying here. Interviews simply put everyone in positions that they don’t enjoy.
From what I know, meeting new people is one of everyone’s least favorite activities and it’s especially difficult to do when the person you’re meeting could very well be your boss in a few short weeks. It’s also not fun to have to present a version of yourself that is overly dressed, overly humble and generally kind of a killjoy—this is doubly true when the environment you’re vying to work in is casual and full of twenty-somethings.
The changing work environment is one that I don’t believe I’ll ever really understand and I think with that in mind, I doubt that anyone really will. Based on the interviewer, an interview could be casual and relaxed but could ultimately go south because the person didn’t really want someone so uptight or professional. Conversely, an interview could be rigid, cold and sour from the very beginning but may actually work out because it was meant to test the candidate’s mettle.
Simply put, no one will ever be great at job interviews.
