Missus went for an interview today, had a chat with the people in charge (hands on folk) cup of tea, no catchy out questions about targets/performance figures/standards/’what would you do if…’.
Just pretty informal but chatting about work history & experience in general. (for an hour)
She got the job.

Good stuff.

I have a PQA interview next week 🙄 for the job I’ve been doing for the last 6 months. I can barely contain my enthusiasm.

Good luck Bruneep, If youv’e been doing it for 6 months then you can obviously do it FFS! I hope the interviewers can see that though.
The missus has been doing hers for 32 years!

My last one was a couple of chats over coffee & lunch then off we went.

what you going for bruneep, crew manager? watch manager? higher? 🙂

when I was applying for university places, one of the departments was quite famously up itself (they started the day congratulating the assembled candidates just for being invited for interview 🙄 )and had a reputation for really hard interviews.

When my turn came I was led into a panel interview with 5 members. To break the ice, they asked me whether I’d been to any other interviews yet. Said that I had and that I didn’t really rate that dept, thought the (hilltop campus) uni was isolated geographically from the town and insular in attitude and I couldn’t see myself studying there.

Turned out the external interviewer was from there and the others spent the rest of the time taking the piss out of him. No hard questions for me and eventually an offer … which I turned down because they fancied themselves a bit too much.

My last, and thankfully successful, interview process involved a phone interview, followed by three separate one hour phone interviews with potential future colleagues, followed by another HR phone interview, followed by a day trip to the US (Flew out on a Sunday, home on the Monday night) to have four back to back in person interviews.

I was rather tired by the end of it.

you must have REALLY wanted that iPhone.

😀 and more 😀

(Well played, sir, well played!)

In the near-ish future I’ll be getting interviewed for an internal vacancy, by the 2 bosses I like and get on with, who I know rate me, for a job I really want and am pretty well qualified for. So obviously I’m shiteing it. It’s bizarre, I’ve never felt nervous about a job interview in my life. You stay out of this, brain!

My interview for the current job was odd, we did a wee bit of application-talking, I was asked “This is a career change for you- what directly relevant skills do you have” and I said “Directly? None at all”. Apparently that clinched it- everyone else gave them bullshitty answers to all the questions, I gave them a self-destructive true one.

Got a competency based interview for a sideways move coming up Thursday. Might lead to something better in a year or two, but I’m struggling to be very excited about it. Just fancy doing something different for the next 27 years before I retire. 🙄

And I have a feeling one of the interviewers may be the **** who was asking me about using C2W to get his kids bikes for Xmas 😥

Mrs Gruntfuttocks was for a nursing job on a childrens ward, talking about SCBU’s & Vapotherms, & other stuff I don’t understand as well. 😕

sadex WM

SM before I retire would be good for the gold plated pension. Not sure if I’m that much of a yes man for that 😉

Good many years ago rumour had it that the garage I worked in was going t**s up. The local college apprentice coordinator came in and told me to go to another garage and speak to the service manager about a vacancy. Went along the lines of ” can I speak to Mr ?” Hi says Mr?, so you are John. Me “yeah” Mr?, when can you start……

Trek steer Jnr seems to be following a similar path for the second time. The place where he served his apprenticeship was restructuring and he had moved away to live with his now wife. He started to look for work nearer his new home but was not experienced enough for the jobs he was applying for. With hindsight this was a good thing, the places have since closed down!
He got a call from the agency he had registered with to go for an informal meeting with a company interested in his skills but which were unrelated to his trade, electrical engineering vs structural engineering. Long story short they were interested in his CAD skills, he got the job and payed for his degree. Circumstances a few yrs on post crash and slow down in the building industry and some internal issues he started to look for another job.
Having kept in touch with his old bosses and work mates he has since been offered and moved back to his old job but on his terms and has been allowed to make various changes and has the ear of the local MD 😀

Daughter is a teacher and has been approached by other schools who would like her to move

Proud parents 😳

Congrats CFH. That sounds like a tortuous process, but not uncommon for merkin organisations.
Onwards and upwards! 😀

We went for a run in the middle of my last one. Before that I’d been jumping through all sorts of hoops for daft HR type reasons.

Were you on the Apprentice last year ?

My last interview was in 2 stages…first was fairly informal and just a get to know you/us to see if we were all on the same page. I already knew a few of them from being on the same and opposite sides of the table on various bits of work over the years.

Second was with a couple of the board and head of legal and someone from HR from one of our other offices in europe. More formal, but got a peach of a question from the HR person towards the end:

“On X deal last year, you were on the other side of the table to us and I understand that you didn’t handle X issue very well and we were not particularly impressed by that. Would you mind talking about that for a moment?”

Silence.

“My client got what it wanted and you didn’t, so I handled it correctly. It’s irrelevant whether you were impressed or not. I’m a bit surprised by this to be honest.” (it probably wasn’t as abrupt at this though, I was still trying to be nice so maybe dressed it up a bit, I can’t remember exactly but that was the jist)

I was really pissed off and a little shaken (although I immediately thought that’s what they were trying for)! Interview had been going really well until this point.

Silence. Everyone except the HR person looks at each other really sheepishly then the head of legal pipes up:

“Sorry. HR wanted to see how you would respond to criticism. Maybe if HR is done now they wouldn’t mind leaving us to sort through some finer details?”

HR person gets up and leaves and everyone apologises and looks very embarrassed. Apparently he was new and didn’t even last until I started a few months later!

My last interview started with us popping round the corner to buy cake…

The lovely Mrs B has a massively important interview in about 20 minutes time. This is the fifth stage of a seven stage process which could put her on a totally new career path.

I’m more nervous than she is I think!!

I had several interviews this year. All were reasonably tough. The worst was the one that turned out they were going through the motions of interviewing me because, by chance, I had selected the final interview slot – interviewer liked the first person he saw, so decided she was the right candidate. Which is fine, but I’d rather not have wasted a day’s holiday going to Crewe….

Best interview was being offered the job during the interview.

It’s my turn to do some interviewing soon – I have several roles to recruit for. I won’t waste people’s time….

Being interviewed for a Chef job years ago and 1 of the 2 interviewers asked ” have yo got any experience of ice carving ?” I told him I had as much as most people , ie none . Got the job though .

I thought this was going to be about Martin Castrogiovanni 🙁