When a Job Interview is Neither

Okay, I admit it.  I was once as naive about the job search as everyone else.  I foolishly thought that when you saw a job ad online that it meant there was an actual position behind it and that, if you were qualified and presented yourself properly to the hiring manager, you might have a good chance at landing the job.

Boy, was I wrong.  That's like thinking you can drive NASCAR because you played a lot of "Pole Position" at the arcade during your teen years.  (If I can date myself any more with that video game reference - either for the game in question or the use of the word "arcade" - don't tell me; I don't want to know...)  The reality is so far removed from what you thought you knew, it's difficult to know where to begin. 

 

So, let's start with what appear to be some of the actual and more common reasons for job interviews.  These are based solely on personal experiences friends and I have had and is in no way intended to be an actual statistical representation of the job market.  (Yeah, go ahead and insert your own legal jargon here - I was a business major in grad school, not an aspiring lawyer.)  In reverse order -

 

3.  The market research interview.  This is where the interview isn't being done to fill a position but is instead part of a company's desire to gather intelligence before crafting a new position that they intend to fill internally all along.  For instance, earlier this year I interviewed with a well-known wine distributor for a training and learning position.  Like any job seeker, I spent a few days researching the firm, learning about its business model and competitors, rehearsing my answers for the most likely interview questions ("Tell us about yourself and why you want to leave your current job and why we should hire you and how you handled a setback and dealt with a difficult coworker while managing a team and produced something successful and profitable in 60 seconds, please."), and signed out for a half day's leave to make the interview 25 miles away.  About halfway through our talk, the manager told me, "One of the reasons I ran the ad for this was to get a sense of the compensation levels people were expecting.  What is your salary range?"

 

Again, in my naivete, I didn't translate this fully until several weeks later:  "I'm just talking with  you to get a sense of what I'm going to have to pay the person I already plan to hire for this job."

 

I'll spare the extra details here, but suffice it to say I sent the interviewers three handwritten thank you cards a few days and never heard a word back - no offer was extended, no courtesy reply thanking me for my time and interest, no acknowledgment of any kind.  However, the same ad did run again several weeks later - with the same range I and others requested. 

 

2.  The free consulting interview.  This is more common but no less frustrating.  Here, the company isn't trying to hire someone so much as it is trying to use the job interview process to gather free consulting advice it can use to help it improve different aspects of its business (online image, market practices, etc.).  One nonprofit I worked for made it a practice of having applicants edit article submissions from the slush pile as part of their evaluations - it was a good way to get free labor out of candidates while testing their skills.  The managing editor even laughed about it as a source of pride.

 

But back to the present.  Last week, a good friend of mine received an invitation to interview for a position with an Internet management firm for a marketing position.  The interview would consist of an actual discussion about her background and qualifications, discussions with various employees at different levels from the firm, and a presentation where she would need to address the following:  "What 3-5 things would you help us do to improve our Web site's search ability?"

 

My friend hit the ceiling and called them back right away.  "Look," she said.  "I'm very interested in this opportunity, and I'm happy to talk to everyone and do a presentation if that's part of the evaluation process; but there is no way I'm giving free advice to an employer who hasn't even hired me yet.  That tells me you just want to take my input and everyone else's to make improvements to your Web site without even hiring somebody." 

 

She went ahead with the interview, but the requirement put her in the perfect Catch-22:  If she gave them full input on what they were doing, there was no need to hire her; but if she kept it high-level without going into sufficient detail, the firm would conclude she wasn't knowledgeable or forthcoming ("she's not a team player") and not hire her.

 

So what did she do?  She decided to focus on the company's strengths and gave a few high-level suggestions on some possibilities it could explore but left the finer details out of the discussion.  "If they want to hire me, great," she told me.  "But there's no way I'm giving away the store to somebody for free."  (The jury is still out as of this time.)

 

And the most common practice -

 

1. Talent pool updating.  I've written about this practice before, but the sad fact is that it's not a rarity; it's standard in today's job market.  Once upon a time - see the "arcade" reference earlier - companies could never afford to keep and track hundreds (if not thousands) of paper resumes in a giant vault somewhere that they would pay low-level HR staffers (or interns) to venture, torch in hand, down a winding stone staircase to explore the catacombs where the resumes of qualified applicants were kept.  With the PC revolution and explosion of the Internet in the '90s, however, this quickly became easier and cost-effective.  Now, instead of running ads any time a company needs to fill a position, they can simply run advertisements year-round to be ensured of a current supply of qualified candidates' resumes, salary expectations, experience levels, and so forth.  And the best part?  They can do this even if they have no plans to do any hiring of any kind. 

 

Let's say, for example, that Company X wants to make sure it keeps a current resume pool so it can always have access to available talent.  They run an advertisement on Linked In, Career Builder, or any number of job sites every 2-3 months to ensure a steady influx of resumes from eager job applicants.  Those on file more than 90 days are tossed so only the most current resumes are kept.  This ensures that the company always has a current database from which to pull a resume if it ever wants to fill an actual position, obtain some market research on age, experience levels, and salary expectations, etc.  And the best part?  They don't need to fill a position or conduct an interview to get any of it.

 

Does this sound good?  Well, from an employer's perspective, it certainly makes things a great deal easier, but it doesn't come without a cost, and that cost unfortunately has to be born by the job seeker.  Mainly, s/he now has to spend more time chasing down advertisements in hopes of finding one that has an actual opening behind it vs. one that is simply being run as part of the latest talent bank update.  That, in turn, makes the job search process all the more difficult and requires significantly more time before a matching position is to be found.  When politicians and researchers talk about why unemployment is so persistent and hard to bring down, practices such as these might be worth taking into account.

 

But to put this in immediate perspective, I recently attended a local job networking event where there were probably over a hundred people in the audience.  (Again, this is all based on personal experience, not scientific research.)  An interviewer asked how many people found positions via advertisements they answered online.

 

Exactly three people raised their hands.