This is great, I think. What an awesome place that I'll be working at! I'm planning, silently of course, what hours I'll set up with her. I'll be able to schedule my workday so I can be home in the morning to get our son on the school bus and can maybe even be there when he gets home.
She asks if it's all right if she brings another person into the interview. I tell her that's fine. Her friendly demeanor and easy manner has really put me at ease. I'm sure she's going to fetch the Human Resource person who will bring me in my employment papers to fill out.
As I wait, I wonder if I'll get an office or a cubicle. It doesn't matter to me. If I get a cubicle, I just can't bring as many family pictures with me. No problem. I wonder if they'll want me to start the next day and I try to remember what my husband's work schedule is for the rest of the week.
The manager returns to her office with not one, but two, women. She introduces all of us. I don't remember what departments they were from but it wasn't Human Resources.
One woman is, as in the previous interview, an older, stern looking woman. The other is closer to my age. She smiles but it's not a warm smile. They both appear very serious and just professionally polite. Neither one are bubbly and friendly like the manager. They each pull up a chair and the kind, warm, friendly manager recaps my skills and experience to them. The other two nod and dryly ask me a couple questions to clarify my skills. I'm getting a little nervous now, just because their demeanors are slightly intimidating.
Then, those “Get Inside Your Head” questions start:
Knowing that I had owned a company and had employees of my own, the older, stern looking woman asked,
“How do you feel about not being the boss anymore?”
“Great! I love not being the boss anymore!” was my immediate response.
Thinking back, I may have said that with a little too much enthusiasm. It was my gut response though. After running a business for 11 years, just being an employee was what I was looking for. Not having the stress of supervising everyone and having to deal with the day-to-day employee drama and decisions would be great. Letting someone else worry about paying the bills and if there's money in the bank would be great. I knew that with a larger company like this one, though, you basically just ran the checks. The higher-ups worry about when and where the money is coming from.
Possibly, though, this position did require some “boss” type supervision of co-workers. This position also could require filling in for the manager and helping her with those types of tasks. The ad didn't really state that but it's possible. This may have been the first of many mistakes I made at this one. Read on.
I think I got too comfortable with the warm, friendly manager during the first part of my interview. When the two intimidating women joined us, their demeanors threw off my rhythm. My plan for interviews is always to not babble on and on. I would just directly, professionally answer the question, no more, no less.
I found myself rattling on and on each time they'd ask me a question. I also even found myself projecting personal opinions.
Here's an example:
“What was the biggest challenge you faced running your business?”
This was not asked by the manager but by the younger of the two new, unpleasant women.
My immediate response was, “I think the biggest challenge I faced was being a woman. Believe it or not, today women still have to prove themselves twice as much as men. The industry I was in has, for the most part, been a male dominated industry.”
Babble, babble and babble. On and on I went. I recited an anecdote of a particularly unpleasant phone conversation I'd had with a male attorney from a large metropolitan area. I recapped how I finally had to get firm with him and inform him that I was the one in charge of this particular situation and he had to handle it my way. I showed him, didn't I! I even went so far as to add that most people, especially the attorneys, from that area are hard to deal with, snobbish and lack the compassion of us small town people. In hindsight, I'm sure I sounded like a psychotic woman's activist with a small town chip on my shoulder.
