A Security Blanket for All Seasons

‘I am very hopeful about interviewing you today; you come highly recommended by a former member of this team. A little about me before we begin: I have been at the company for all six years of my career and, at the moment, lead a team of seven people managing the go/no-go milestones within the quotation/demo stage of the supply/demand anticipation/emancipation curve—a function I see as tangentially related to the groupings of bullet points presently displayed on my screen vis-à-vis your résumé. After my spiel, I will want to hear a thorough, albeit brief, recitation of the aforementioned bullet points here before me, where, in the margins, I am taking notes on your style, delivery, enunciation (by that I mean the proper pronunciation and intonation at a given decibel), and contextualization—but above all, and I cannot stress this enough—your brevity. Brevity is your ace in the hole.

‘Now it would also behoove you to imagine me, on the other side of this phone call, here in the early afternoon, desperate to fill this very important position, talking to my fourth candidate of the day, feeling quite bereft of excitement and satisfaction. And now, having said that, I have the following pieces of advice that—when paired with that visualization—give you a fighting chance at impressing me.

‘First, on the excitement side, I have not, so far today, encountered the certain je ne sais quoi I expect of myself and any other person I hire—not necessarily those who exist now on the team—but a sort of unspeakable, unexplainable quality that, as I mentioned, I myself possess and use throughout every interaction here ordering the widgets we amalgamate—through moxie and know-how—into a sort of super-widget, while churning out leaner, more bespoke features, leading to our launching a super-widget services branch to provide real-time diagnostics and usage statistics to our customers until we’ve created a sort of omni-prescient ecosystem—a resonant super-widget field, if you will. Its own magnetism. You might even say—I might say, rather—that a successful candidate, potentially you, friend, will possess a related sort of magnetism. Put simply, I need to be drawn to you.

‘Second, and this is perhaps more important, you will need to make me feel safe. Reason being: I consider myself (besides magnetic) a move-and-shake risk-taker, whose knowledge of company operations combined with my intuition—a combination which presently affords me a relatively small piece of the company pie—gives me a chance to really shake things in my favor once I advance (or move). I’m sure you can understand why I cannot take the same risks when deciding to whom I extend the conditional offer of an employment-at-will contract as I would in my day-to-day work. In truth, if you were to possess not only the magnetism I require but also that risk-it-for-the-biscuit quality we claim to value in theory, I’m sure you can appreciate, or failing that, at least understand my concern for the double-edged sword of having a risk-taker on a risk-taker’s team, whose good ideas (yours) risk wafting toward those illustrious ivory-tower higher-ups who now see you as a genius and thereafter pull you past me in both compensation and position on the organizational chart—while conversely—and this is far more likely—your many ideas that cannot move upward, as they do not ‘bring the heat,’ so to speak (the metaphor works because of thermodynamics), present greater headaches for me than the shame of being eclipsed by someone who, from what the screen says (and what I’ll be using every interrogative tactic across the rest of the conversation to prove) has twice my experience in this industry. I’ll also try validating what my intuition is telling me—that you are only applying for this role because of the difficult economic times I keep hearing those without jobs consistently complain about—and if, in fact, you are a complainer. In short, novel ideas embarrass me either way.

‘So please bear that in mind as you respond. I will not be made worse off in the eyes of my superiors by the ideas of someone who claims to have this much experience, so the task will be yours to overcome these objections as I spend the twenty minutes or whatever time’s left after you give me the Reader’s Digest sob story of why you left this place and that place despite being the world’s most innovative widget thinker since an Earl was made Sandwich, asking the most pointed, specialized, entrapment-like questions of our confidential, widget-specific daily routines, until your inadequacy takes physical form—providing, at the end, ample time for your questions, which I will answer in generic platitudes. So, with the same brevity I will ask of you, I will state: if you cannot superimpose being both magnetic and safe, this will not be a fun conversation. Otherwise, our job today is to have an informal chat and see if this is a fit for you. Are you about ready to get started? Can you be that mirage I desire, friend? We’ll soon know. Okay, fire away. Let’s hear about you.’

‘Well, I…’

‘Oh, my, speaking of mirage, my colleague in human resources has just pinged me, and an internal candidate has just accepted an offer for this role. I hope you appreciate me telling you this now instead of assuming that we’ve gone in a different direction a few weeks from now, after not hearing from us regarding any next steps. If there’s anything I hate, it’s wasting people’s time.’