Friday: Job Interview

Funny. I never thought I'd be sad about a job interview.

I went to an interview for a web developer job at South Essex College. The job title was actually "Informations Service Analyst", but you read the job spec. and it was HTML, ASP, JavaScript, VBScript, etc. and Oracle. None of these skills I have in abundance, other than a bit of Oracle I did many years ago when I was a contractor. How I managed to get an interview I don't know, but the money was a bit low (£20k) for anybody experienced.

So if I got the interview, why was it sad? There was another candidate for the job, a chap called Frank. He was about late forties, early fifties, a bit dishevelled, hadn't shaved properly, so nervous his hands were shaking and was generally a bit of a mess. As we talked throughout the day (the interview process lasted about three hours) it turned out that he'd been made redundant from some firm that specialised in pharmaceutical software about two years ago and hadn't had an interview since November.

It's the first time I'd been interviewed like this, at least as far as I can remember. Mostly, you are interviewed on your own and, although you are aware that you are not the only candidate, you don't normally see the others face-to-face.

We were both shown around the place, although the job was in Thurrock, not Southend, and given a technical test. Most of the SQL was straight forward enough, although there was some Oracle I just guessed at. There wasn't really much web stuff, no HTML for example, and there was some basic object-oriented design questions I could do in my sleep, but obviously no Delphi or Java. We were sent to lunch while they marked the test and then afterwards they told Frank that they wouldn't be interviewing him. Why they couldn't have done so, I don't know: it wouldn't have cost them anything other than time, and he may have shined in the interview.

My interview went OK, but was over in about twenty minutes. They asked me a few stock questions, actually written out in front of them. Although it was all very professional, it did seem like they were going through the motions: I clearly wasn't the guy they wanted, but I was the only to survive the technical test.

The punchline is, I didn't get the job. It did strike me that Frank was me in two years time, assuming that I don't find anything. He'd worked faithfully for a firm for twenty years and here he was scrabbling around for a job. A sobering thought.

On a different tack, I re-applied to the FTSE, but instead of doing it through the job site, I did it through the company web site. This gives me a bit of feedback.