Good on Paper: What to do with your foot in the door.
You should be proud. You have mastered the Matrix of job search robots. Running your name through the network of electronic vetting mechanisms, nary a human reading your accolades nor scrutinizing your achievements, you made it! The interview is YOURS.
Phone first, in person phase one, call back possibility, it is all lining up just as the workshops, articles, TikTok teenaged experts said it would. Just think, it is a Fucking Pandemic. There is a Global MotherFucking Crisis and you STILL got the call. A good firm too. Role hardly a lateral move, maybe even that next phase kinda shit ….
Freeze frame - record scratch - mic drop .. You know you actually are to talk to those bastards, right? Choke.
This a pattern for the academic, career overachiever, no? The send, call, and hiccup. A caucus race of sorts this routine - a mystery more like it. Your barometer is off. Interviews come and go and you remain. Just befuddled as you began, four, six, nine months ago. There have been times you felt you f-ed it up, and were rejected. But too, you aced it and still nada. Are you mad? They cannot all be - those folks on the other end of the phone, screen, desk, right? Who is the asshole? Who do you hire to help? What books and blogs are you to be referring to?
Sadly, there are none. The thing about nailing an interview is not about a peg at all, it is about shopping. Knowing what you want to take home and having the long game in your back pocket.
So often I work with talented, esteemed clients who have nary a sense of how they work best. They hold firm that they have and do achieve, but know not why. Most solo workers only develop a meager mercenary sense of the to-do list work through and mitigating inefficiency to varying degrees. (Inefficiency being in the eye of the beholder. Few understand what that word means unless they have been fired for not being it.)
These celebrated career seekers arrive at the offices and ZoomRooms of interview rigor with rehearsed questions, forgetting soft skills (or not bringing them!), unaware of what they want to know from the staffers they speak with.
Oh sure, they could answer the question: What questions should you ask your Interviewer? But that is lip service. There is NOT a set route of ‘asks’ you are to offer. The top three or whatever bullshit you have been told is NOT something I can tell you. It is implicitly personal, sourced from intelligence of NOT what you do or what you have done, but HOW you are to replicate and expand that resume rigor.
Work is not separate from technique. Tutelage in the latter is the leverage you aim to execute. You want a checklist? Well here you are - think of the following as prompts for professional development prewriting:
What circumstances were and are internally and externally applied, recurring in your most successful and unsuccessful experiences?
How are you defining the above - success and unsuccessful? Is it money? Acclaim? The mythos of fulfillment too often courted and little understood?
Think about boredom, where is the pattern there? What does and does not make that and the various levels of that navigable? Work is like marriage or waiting in line at Trader Joes, it is not about the ‘what” but about the “how long”. The minutes, the margins, that is when your maturity is spent -or wasted. What makes the minutes manageable? What worrisome circumstances can and can’t you weather - day to day - moment to micro moment?
Who are you to be known as? What is the person who just left all about? This PostMortem exercise is essential to interview and public success, across the board. Truly. Trust me. Impressions can be craftily crafted by ones who know how they achieve. Go beyond your track record retelling, and do your part to impart your legacy.
A head space indeed, but your lack of existential investment is exactly why you are failing. You expect to be known rather than know.
Want to be seen? View you. Inventory is not to be underestimated. Replicate and build the experience you wish. History is telling as a jumping off point. Use the interview experience as a platform for such. Drive the car. Be a peer, expert in self inquiry and, thus, excellence.
