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I completely butchered a job interview by phone the other day.
The specifics aren't important, but it was one of those instances of a job description looking like it had been written by someone who knows me and looking like it had been written specifically with me in mind. I was so perfect for this job and the organisation so desperately needed a someone like me to do it that it was all I could think about.
I already had some of the key players in the org in my professional networks so I was networking like a mofo and already had half my foot in the door before even actually applying. One of the people about halfway up the org food chain expressed to me that there was a process involved and I couldn't look like I was taking shortcuts so I needed to go through the screening steps and apply like anyone else. So I did all that and it quickly became evident to me that the screening had been outsourced by the org to some personnel agency and the agency had delegated the screening to a very junior employee.
This junior employee--let's call this person the screener--contacted me by badly-spelled green-bubble text message and set up a time for a phone interview. So I was already off to the snobbery races. Then the screener was a no-show for the call. After sitting by my phone for 52 minutes I initiated the call myself (no answer) then texted the screener to suggest that we reschedule. Then the screener called me back a few minutes later with an amused "OH LOL I THOUGHT I HEARD MY PHONE BEEPING" introduction that had a noticeable absence of anything resembling an apology. Then the screener put me on hold for five minutes, then returned to the call and our interactions from there all had a feeling of talking to a first-year uni student doing the readings while sitting in the tutorial. The screener was obviously scanning my resume for the very first time while talking to me, and was giving me "clueless millennial intern" vibes like they were blasting at 120dB.
And from that moment I fucking destroyed my chances with the perfect job. I couldn't get my dumb offended ego over the fact that I was getting asked questions by someone unqualified to process my answers. The screener was unprepared and obviously had a script to walk through and some of my answers just didn't fit the script. Like, "what are your salary expectations?" - "I don't have any. I literally don't care." Because the job and the requirements were so perfect I would have done it all for free so long as my family stayed fed and housed. But that wasn't a helpful answer.
Now, with a week's distance, I'm detached enough to say to myself "hey you're a literate articulate guy and you're good with words, there's no way you didn't make yourself understood" and I've realised that I achieved exactly what I was trying to do, which was to make the screener feel ignorant. I used words the screener didn't know to show my expertise in a field the screener didn't understand and every response I made must have been subtitled "that is a fucking stupid question and it hurts me to have to answer it".
So of course I never made it to the second round of actual interviews at the org.
Dumb dumb DUMB. OK so the lesson here, kids, is remember to treat every interaction as a negotiation in which success is a win-win outcome. If you can't make the other person come away feeling like they won, you can't really win.
TLDR? Ab does an interview for a dream job, he makes a junior employee feel inferior, that person omits him from the shortlist, introspection ensues.
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