In which I’m almost afraid to be excited about it.
I just got home from a second interview here, this one with both the HR manager and the CEO, for an office manager position. The CEO is very sharp, mellow, and nice, and I liked him as much as I like the HR woman.
They talked with me for 35 minutes, asked me all kinds of great questions, and laughed at my jokes. I’m a little worried that I may have come across as too chipper, though… I wasn’t nervous, but I was “on” anyway. (Probably because I was so discombobulated from getting up and being somewhere, with makeup on and everything, so early in the day. I don’t think I’ve stepped foot out of the house before one in the afternoon in months.)
One of their questions was, “If you were training a group of people to use, for instance, a software program, and some of them weren’t so sharp and just weren’t catching on, how would you handle it? Would you be frustrated?”
I answered that when I taught voice — which really wasn’t very often, but whatever, it worked for the question because I’d already talked about being a corporate trainer at 7-Eleven — I always felt that if the student wasn’t getting it, it was a problem with my teaching. That a teacher’s job is to figure out how to package information in a way that will enable the student to understand it. “If I’m training and my trainee isn’t getting it, that’s my fault.
“Unless they’re just belligerent and don’t want to be there and they hate me. Then it’s a whole nother story.”
“That’s a great answer!” the CEO said. “So you’ve taught voice, too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A little. I sang opera in high school and junior college. Voice students, like any students, increase their knowledge for awhile and then hit a plateau where they can’t progress any further… until you can somehow almost trick them into an ‘a-ha!’ moment. I think the challenge is to figure out how to help someone understand what you’re teaching, to discover their learning style and not to assume that everyone learns the same way you do. I can learn from reading a manual, but lots of people who are smarter than I am don’t learn that way. Each style is valid.”
(Yea verily, people, I doth rock at the ol’ thinking-on-one’s-feet interview process.)
(At my interview yesterday I was asked, “Would you rather be a lamb or a tiger?” Seriously. I said, “On first blush, I’d say a lamb, because I’m a vegetarian and tigers eat raw gazelles for breakfast. And also because I knit, and lambs make wool! But seriously, I’d say I identify with lambs because they’re herd animals, and I’m very much a networking person. I like to work in an environment where people help and support each other to get the job done.”
Yes, I really did say that. But then I followed up with, “Uh, is that question for real? Or are you testing for psychosis?” Because I cannot be serious. Ever.)
I’m excited because I had given up hope of finding a job I actually want, and was just hoping to get a job. Any job. But now I want this office manager gig, because the company culture really seems great. They’re into cross-training, and they actually encourage initiative, and there are, to quote the CEO, “plenty of open doors for the person who looks for them” in terms of advancement. They have free coffee! They test applicants to see if they can actually do what they say they can, and that leads me to assume that the people working there wouldn’t fill my days with inane and time-consuming questions like “How do I make Excel total this column?” and “Doesn’t Word let you make words in bold face?”
The two people who’ve interviewed me are smart. Erudite. Nice. They asked me how I’d deal with annoying, rude, stupid customers and liked my answer (which was, “I’ve found that most problem people want attention even more than getting their problem solved. So I give it to them. Make them feel important.”)
The HR woman said they’d decide by the end of the week, and would let me know either way. I sure hope they hire me.
