I am brutally honest. Do you know that in an interview a few months ago, I straight up said my weaknesses, when they just asked for strengths? Seriously? Who does that?
More than a few years ago, I interviewed with Amazon. Yeah, the Amazon. For some reason, I applied to a job that I was severely under-qualified for. Like, not "Oh you're a girl and therefore you don't apply for things and think of yourself as high worth" I mean I literally didn't understand the job requirements and knew I probably wouldn't get it.
The catch?
They decided to interview me. In person. Paid flight, transport and hotel to California. So I flew to San Fran. got the last rental car out of the lot (It was a mini van) and after trying to park it about 12,123 times in the last spot in the hotel parking lot, made it up to my room at about 1 am.
My interview was at 8 am and was a "15 minute" drive away, so I left at 7:15, as any normal human would. I walked into the room with all the other candidates and... my purse snapped. All my random accouterment (I love this word) fell everywhere. I didn't let that deter me.
But when I walked into the next room, they had us all problem solve some questions like "If you have to get 8 boxes out by Tuesday but 1 box needs to be out by Monday and X is the speed in which you can do Y..." I thought I'd be okay... at first. I love problem solving! I have been literally doing logic puzzles like the one below for 20ish years.
But then, it got more difficult. Calculations required knowledge of trig that I hadn't used in a while and I got fairly frustrated and realized this wasn't something I would like doing... like, at all. I "finished" as best I could and the next step in the interview was to talk to someone about why we came to our conclusions. They said it didn't matter if you were right or wrong, just knowing how you got there.
And in that conversation, I went from "I kinda had a handle on this" to "What's my name again?". I knew I was out of my depth. It kind of went something like this:
Interviewer: How did you come to your conclusion on question 3?
Me: Honestly, I don't know. No idea.
Interviewer: What? I mean you can talk me through what you wrote down.
Me: Honestly, I can't. I am 99% sure I am under-qualified for this job. We can continue the interview, but I don't want to waste your time. I don't think this is the right job for me.
Interviewer: Um, okay what about question 4?
And the interview continued until a very awkward end.
What did you learn from this story? Hopefully, you took away a few key points, but if not, let me TLDR it:
- Emily was under-qualified for the job, and when she knew she couldn't do it, she decided to "give up" on it
- "Giving Up" on something is okay, if you are giving up because you've changed your mind and it's not what you want.
- It's okay to say no to an interview or bow out of a job application. Interviews are a 2-way street. You might be their perfect fit, but they also should be yours.
- Don't bring a very old purse to an interview. It will break. You will be sad.
So I flew back home. Ended up getting another job, doing other things, but I honestly will never forget that interview and my trip to San Francisco in which I saw none of San Fransisco.
And, HONESTLY, remember point number 3. Interviews are for both sides. You don't want to get stuck in trig problems when you actually are meant to write super long "newsletters" aka blog posts.