Interviewing Your Friend – Practicing the Art of Interviewing

haha!

My great friend and former co-worker and I were both laid off from the same company at the same time. This had many advantages:

• I knew I had a lunch partner
• we sent each other job postings that were in our respective cities
• we had a sounding board

and some disadvantages

• sometimes we were both woed at the same time
• neither understood COBRA
• neither one of us could bear to look at our resumes

Most recently the advantages of having worked together for so long and to both be going through the interviewing process has become more evident and appreciated. We’ve started practicing our interviewing skills by role-playing: one of us is the interviewer, the other the interviewee. Our job responsibilities were quite similar in our past roles and we also had a pretty good idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses so having this sort of immediate feedback is super.

Some of the questions we have challenged each other with are:

Describing your job role or responsibilities. You would be surprised how much you forget. We both were in our roles for over 8 years and during that time the scope, tools, teams, goals and technical environment changed immensely. Having someone to say, “You forgot about this, or don’t you remember having to present to the VP of Marketing, remember the roll-out of that new tool you helped lead” is really valuable.  Another important advantage is that while you may struggle to toot your own horn, we’ve been really good at reminding the other that “you know, you did a great job of leading that or don’t forget how you had to synthesize all those different requests”.

How do you handle a missed deadline? This question brings up tons of memories and incidences but mostly of deadlines met. The answer we both toyed with was simply accepting responsibility and then figuring out how to fix it. Honestly, we never missed a deadline, even with all the launches, product releases or infrastructure upgrades but things happen and accepting a downturn and moving to resolve it seems like the most honest answer to give.

What did you like about your last job? What didn’t you like? Both of us loved the innovative spirit of the place: new technology, brilliant people and the optimism of working with great technology. We both realized how easy it was to identify what we loved about Sun and to be fair, it wasn’t that difficult to pinpoint what we didn’t like – the year on year layoffs. I don’t think an interviewer could fault someone for revealing they didn’t like layoffs but then if you haven’t been through something like that perhaps it may be difficult to understand. Although, I’ve never had a broken bone (thank goodness)  I can pretty much imagine it probably isn’t pleasant.

Gawd, this is fugly!

The tough part about interviewing a buddy is that it can be hard to get into character and not only remain in character but not laugh and respond with “Did you really mean to say “Um, you know” before answering each question?” The upside is that we can help each other fill out the story of our careers, provide other examples of accomplishment and remind each other that we’ve got a lot of great experience and there are great opportunities out there. We can also compare notes on interviewing attire and if you have been into Macy’s recently  you may understand how difficult it is to find something reasonably professional that doesn’t look like somthing your grandma would wear to church. I mean look at this image to the left, it’s absolutely appalling. I’m not sure what the beads are supposed to do other than offer you an alternative to gassing yourself.

My advice on preparing for an interview – find a co-worker/friend and ask them to sit in as the interviewer and ask you the tough questions.  You’ll get great feedback and become more comfortable answering questions about your past roles and responsibilities and they’ll remind you of some of the great things you did!