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We interview for shop floor and office staff and I would certainly agree that there is a difference in approach between the two we would all automatically expect a bit more in the way of presentation from office staff. But there are still a long list of things that I had major issues with from any interviewee.
(1) Being difficult about interview times: Yes, good staff are hard to come by but no harassed manager is going to be impressed at being told to suit the time to the interviewee.
(2) Constant requests to change the interview time will fail to impress as much as being late on the day itself. If someone has that much trouble from their car, their dentist, their child minder to even get to an interview, it hardly portends the greatest reliability at work.
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(3) I have an instant horror of the interviewees that turn up with their wife or mother. We have always had a lot of these for some reason and it nearly always portends that they will have to ask the missus before they can breathe. If I wanted to hire two people, I would have done.
(4) I worry less about bad dress codes for the shop floor but it makes a huge difference if someone says they will be coming straight from work and would it therefore matter if they were in work clothes. Scruffiness for an office job is still an instant turn off. The message comes over loud and clear that they cannot be bothered.
(5) When I used to interview with someone else, it never ceased to amaze me how many people ignored basic manners and cut the manager interviewing with me. This is especially stupid as in most cases they immediately upset their potential line manager.
(6) We attract a lot of people in terms of jobs. But I have often asked myself why applicants give it away so easily, by failing to ask anything about the job and only producing questions about holidays and pay especially if the latter has been in the advertisement for the job anyway.
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(7) At the other end of the scale, there is a fine line between enthusiasm and desperation. I’m a sucker for a sob story and it is sad but true that there is, 99 per cent of the time, a reason why people are that desperate. Only the odd one is genuinely capable of changing their stripes and becoming a worthwhile employee.
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(8) Some of those include the stories of how ill-done they have been by every ex-boss they ever had. Each brief employment history is accompanied by a yawn-making tale in which it was never their fault. This group are always the victim.
(9) But in bitching the ex-bosses, there is also the group that tell you a similar tale but from a different stand point. Mr or Mrs Arrogance propound at length how they have known better than their old bosses and from their shelf stacking vantage point had total knowledge of how the company should have been run.
(10) Arrogance is one of my major hates at interview altogether. Within certain trades there are the hard core, know it alls. They have never been taught anything, never need to learn anything, because there is nothing (in their esteemed opinion) they do not know already. They treat the interview as a personal favour that they are deigning to give you.
(11) Then there is the over-sharing of the personal stuff. I always did, genuinely, want to know a bit more about the prospective employee. There is a fine line though, and I was never sure if it was because I was a female or just had the dubious knack of over-relaxing an interviewee, that I was often treated to details of their private lives from their wives affairs, to their vasectomies that I was not entirely sure an interview merited.
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(12) Call me old fashioned but I am entirely with my HR when he tells me that his jaw was on the ground earlier in the year when an applicant took a call from a friend, with no excusing himself, in mid interview flow, and then proceeded to turn the air blue with every swear word under the sun as they discussed their evening out.
I supposed I should be grateful that I never made the error of saying impress me in an interview where, so the story goes, an applicant set fire to the interviewers newspaper while reading it.
Meanwhile, that a London PA conned her employer out of 17,000 after failing to disclose a previous workplace fraud, has raised the question of whether employers are far too trusting during the recruitment process. But four CEOs have claimed their interview methods has led to “hiring success”.
