Gathering Intelligence
In my last post, I suggested that recruiters and candidates both would be reluctant to conduct interviews using instant messaging technology. I must admit that I wrote that without doing the proper amount of research. To remedy the situation, I address the following questions to you, dear Blog Reader:
a) Have you ever been interviewed over IM? Would you go along with that?
b) What was the strangest interviewing situation you ever encountered?
In the spirit of giving-to-get, I'll share two awkward, if not strange, interviewing scenarios from my past life as an academic.
First, I interviewed for a job at a university in Alabama via the phone from my girlfriend's garret apartment where the ceilings were uncomfortably low for me. (I'm 6 feet, 7 inches tall. - fyi) To make matters worse, I had to conduct the entire interview in German (not my native language) and ended up getting in an argument about language pedagogy. I did not get the job.
Secondly, you may or may not know that most initial interviews in the humanities are conducted in hotel rooms during the Modern Languages Association's annual convention. Sitting in one such room with five faculty members from a university in North Carolina, I foolishly mentioned that I had once met Timothy Leary. One of the faculty members asked, "Did you take LSD with him?" I responded that I had not and, since he seemed to be unaware of the fact, patiently explained that such an act would have been against the law, as I understood it.
I did not get that job, either.
