• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

"The Interview: What I'm really thinking"

Laika

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
Edit: This is in the "literature" sub-forum as a piece of (semi-accurate) creative writing. ;)

I have a long, silent dread of walking into a job interview. It feels more like the anticipation of being interrogated by a parole board, the constant threat of extended unemployment silently hanging over me as you pass sentence.

I was not the success I hoped I would be and I am an embarrassment in a society that lies freely for its own advantage. I can't compete against the smooth, talking lairs that come before me or will follow after. I have not their ease and confidence that can seduces on command, but am the prisoner of my honesty and my mistakes. I am both repulsed by their seduction and would jealously covet it in equal measure. Imagine having the charisma to get hired and laid all in one! You call it unprofessional, yet I sit here prostituting myself until I meet your satisfaction.

Frightened of the questions I never thought you'd ask and the ones I dare not answer, I force a smile. Trying to mask rage and fear, I hope for some primal force to intervene that will bury me alive, or decapitate me and spread my internal organs and blood spatter over a wide area. Now, spontaneous combustion would make for a lasting first impression and still be a true reflection of my life experience and potential. The years of therapy you'll need afterwards is just the foreplay for what's in store.

But then, I remind yourself, you're all ******s. Statistically, masturbation is practically universal and the graphic image of you pleasuring yourself, embarrassed by the vulnerability of your own desire, makes this weird performance review absurd. We all want to be loved in the end, hoping for one more moment of ecstasy as we travel to the grave, where neither wealth nor power matter beyond the eroding real estate of remembrance for the living.

It is just theatre. What can anyone learn by a brief dialogue and a two page CV? Am I supposed to tell you where the bodies are buried? Or would that be impolite on a first date? Should I wait until you already despise me for failing to meet you expectations to confide my secrets?

So here I am, with only the dark honesty of my entrance in your domain and the promise of competence to come to justify my presence. I need the money and I need the self-respect an income will bring. If I must sell myself, let it be the real me, and let my fear of your insults be your epitaph as they are obscured by time and, I hope, success.

[ @Rival may enjoy this. :) ]
 
Last edited:

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
I do sympathize and empathize much with that.
My case management job, so in need of doing things different I basically created an interview gimmick/persona, and I still shudder that I lowered myself to common American plebeians who runs in fear of basic of math amd joked along with the interviewers about it being hard (it quickly showed on the job, however, I'm actually good at it). It was manipulative and deceptive, an opening I saw to exploit in making myself appear more "common" and "relatable" in order to ease any would be suspicions. It felt gross, being someone I'm not to get a job I'm actually very well suited for as I am. I just never passed the interviews as I am.
**** job interviews and CVs.
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
@Laika , I had a number of thoughts and feelings about your post.

The first is remembering this Bored Panda piece on bad interviews People Are Sharing Their Job Interviews That Didn’t Go Well, And Here Are The 26 Worst Stories

The next three are all related - they're about honesty and integrity. There are people out there who value that - I tried to be one myself when I was a hiring manager. The related incidents:

Second is a boss I once had who had been trained to do interrogations by the military. He could chop up a resume into tiny pieces. I once sat in when he interviewed someone who tried BS. At the end, it was clear that the applicant was being rejected for lack of honesty. I never forgot that lesson.

The third is that managers are not all alike. I once hired someone (female actually) for being utterly honest with me during an interview including describing how she had ****ed up at a phone operators job due to something I can't mention on RF. She seemed to have the technical chops so I hired her believing she'd never try to BS me. She was a wonderful hire including telling it just like she saw it and she remained a friend after she left.

The Fourth is related to #2 as well. It is remembering my job interviews when I was on the "other side of the desk". I was in a group interview and was asked what I knew about "CORBA" (computer geek acronym). I new almost nothing and said so. And then I said how I'd learn more. The second or maybe most important question was "if two people come to you and say they have a truly urgent thing and ask you to drop everything to work on it, what would you do"? My answer "ask my boss". Bingo, I was hired.
 

Laika

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
@Shadow Wolf and @sun rise I did put this in the literature sub-forum as a bit of creative writing. So I am exaggerating a little bit to create a more expressive character, but it's not by that much. :D I hate and loathe the idea of a job interview, so thanks for being supportive.

The third is that managers are not all alike. I once hired someone (female actually) for being utterly honest with me during an interview including describing how she had ****ed up at a phone operators job due to something I can't mention on RF. She seemed to have the technical chops so I hired her believing she'd never try to BS me. She was a wonderful hire including telling it just like she saw it and she remained a friend after she left.

Good for you! :) I hope I get a job interview like this as I will need someone pretty understanding. I've had a very long period of unemployment because of depression, so that's the "pain threshold" of having to disclose it and say things haven't worked out quite the way I hoped.
 

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
@Shadow Wolf and @sun rise I did put this in the literature sub-forum as a bit of creative writing. So I am exaggerating a little bit to create a more expressive character, but it's not by that much. :D I hate and loathe the idea of a job interview, so thanks for being supportive.
I did notice that, but that's basically been my life.
Often times the best workers simply don't have the skills to look good in an interview. It's a fact of life. I came to learn a range of facial expressions and vocal tones amd gestures that are expressed when people are expecting more. I've never seen these expressions in any other area of my life than job interviews. And that's because when I'm on the job I go beyond standards. No one complains of the job I do. They just object to hiring my normal me self at an interview.
 

Evangelicalhumanist

"Truth" isn't a thing...
Premium Member
Edit: This is in the "literature" sub-forum as a piece of (semi-accurate) creative writing. ;)

I have a long, silent dread of walking into a job interview. It feels more like the anticipation of being interrogated by a parole board, the constant threat of extended unemployment silently hanging over me as you pass sentence.

I was not the success I hoped I would be and I am an embarrassment in a society that lies freely for its own advantage. I can't compete against the smooth, talking lairs that come before me or will follow after. I have not their ease and confidence that can seduces on command, but am the prisoner of my honesty and my mistakes. I am both repulsed by their seduction and would jealously covet it in equal measure. Imagine having the charisma to get hired and laid all in one! You call it unprofessional, yet I sit here prostituting myself until I meet your satisfaction.

Frightened of the questions I never thought you'd ask and the ones I dare not answer, I force a smile. Trying to mask rage and fear, I hope for some primal force to intervene that will bury me alive, or decapitate me and spread my internal organs and blood spatter over a wide area. Now, spontaneous combustion would make for a lasting first impression and still be a true reflection of my life experience and potential. The years of therapy you'll need afterwards is just the foreplay for what's in store.

But then, I remind yourself, you're all ******s. Statistically, masturbation is practically universal and the graphic image of you pleasuring yourself, embarrassed by the vulnerability of your own desire, makes this weird performance review absurd. We all want to be loved in the end, hoping for one more moment of ecstasy as we travel to the grave, where neither wealth nor power matter beyond the eroding real estate of remembrance for the living.

It is just theatre. What can anyone learn by a brief dialogue and a two page CV? Am I supposed to tell you where the bodies are buried? Or would that be impolite on a first date? Should I wait until you already despise me for failing to meet you expectations to confide my secrets?

So here I am, with only the dark honesty of my entrance in your domain and the promise of competence to come to justify my presence. I need the money and I need the self-respect an income will bring. If I must sell myself, let it be the real me, and let my fear of your insults be your epitaph as they are obscured by time and, I hope, success.

[ @Rival may enjoy this. :) ]
As a professional in the field of recruitment, I can and do teach people how to interview better. There are many people who can do this. You can find them in all sorts of charitable organizations that help immigrants, unemployed and so forth.

Mostly, they would teach you not to lie -- you will always be found out by a really competent interviewer if you lie. Instead, they help you review the things that you yourself feel were successes on your part -- or on things you worked hard on but weren't always successful. Then they'll teach you how to frame answers to interview questions as "stories from your own past," rather than trying to answer closed-ended questions, or hem and haw over open-ended ones.

For example, sometimes an interviewer will ask you something like "how do you handle conflict?" Well, you could try to lay out a formula (and their isn't one!), or you could remember a situation in which you actually did try to mediate between two people arguing, or when you yourself were involved in an argument. Then you would frame your answer along the lines of: "Well, there was this time when I disagreed with a co-worker about setting up tables, so I asked her to explain why she thought it should be her way. Then I pointed out that..." You end up with what the result was. And it doesn't matter if you won or lost!

You see, as long as it's a true story, no probing questions will ever catch you out. And I guarantee, a good interviewer will learn something real about you.
 
Last edited:

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
You see, as long as it's a true story, no probing questions will ever catch you out. And I guarantee, a good interview will learn something real about you.
The issue is sometimes those true stories may only be a brief sentence or two. Honesty alone isn't enough. You need to possess a certain level of social finesse or you get stuck working the crappiest of jobs who hire anyone with a pulse.
 
Top