Interview FAIL

I was very excited to be starting last week off with an interview at a very cool, trendy, marketing agency in downtown Minneapolis. Then things went miserably and I've spent the last week thinking about what went wrong and doing research on the whole job interview thing. I consider myself as being quite good in interview situations, but the last two have proved otherwise. So what's my deal?

The position was that of Account Director for a very creative internship program that, rather than dispersing interns throughout the agency, kept them working together on assigned projects as if they were their own mini-agency.  I had done my research on the company and it seemed great, some of the work they had online had me laughing out loud. I prepared my resume, printed off work samples, and arrived just about 10 minutes early. I was feeling great, the location was awesome, and the offices looked fun and open.


The interview however, was anything but great.
I have a long list of grievances (ranging from the continual yawning and shifting of the interviewer to the fact that she had not one answer to any of the questions I had regarding the position). I left the interview feeling miserable: she completely disregarded the two jobs that I actually felt were relevant to the position, she showed no interest in anything I said, and seriously, yawning the whole time?  I was frustrated that, while I felt I was perfect for the position, I didn't have the opportunity to actually speak to the reasons why. She so greatly put me off my balance of confidence (oh yes, I was also expecting to have more people partake in the interview, or to even know the role of the lady who interviewed me--she told me nothing, plopped down in a chair and said "lets get started") that I didn't feel I acted myself at all. I paced my way around the tunnels that connect all the buildings in downtown Minneapolis before settling down at a local bar with a beer to contemplate what went wrong.

I definitely could have handled the situation better.
Though I'm still frustrated with the way the interview was conducted, I'm appreciative of the challenge that it presented. Can you imagine if that was the actual setting for the interview; if she had intended to make me feel that off-put and, well, crappy as a test of my ability to handle the job?  It would be an excellent challenge and a sure way to weed out candidates who may have to spend lots of time working with challenging clients in their role. While I don't think that was the case, I look back and realize that I should have embraced the challenge and taken the direction of the interview into my own hands (as she very obviously had no direction or idea what to do anyway).

Preparation with concise examples
Anyway, it also made me realize that, though I did a lot of preparation for the interview, I need to better describe the positions that I've held and the skills that I have because of them. And I need to do it in very short, concise terms. This article's second point, about formatting accomplishments really hit home with me.  I've since worked on it and in a phone interview today I believe I did a better job concisely explaining the work I've done as it was relevant to the position.

Lodging a complaint-Constructive Feedback
After the interview, I always send a thank you note via email. I know some people still say it's good to send an actual thank you card, but for me that doesn't seem like part of my strategy for this day and age (check out this interesting post from US News on sending a thank you note). In this thank you note though, I took it to another level and expressed (politely) some of my concerns from the interview and asked if there might be an opportunity for me to come in and speak with her or her coworkers again (I did site her behavior was another condition of why a re-interview was reasonable to ask for).

Well, she didn't respond and later that day her company posted a Tweet that said they had chosen their interns who were to start the following week. As of Friday I had received no response from her. Now in my opinion, this one lady with whom I had interacted was making the entire company look really bad-and strangely I felt bad about it. I decided that it was in their best interest to let them know about my experience. If you were the COO and one of your employees created this negative impression of your company you'd want to know, right? So I emailed one of their officers and explained in great detail the experience that I had, the impression that I was left with, and let him know that while I appreciated much of the work I had seen from their team, this ordeal gave me a negative perception of the company-something they surely wouldn't want. At this point I wasn't so much angry about the injustice of the interview experience, but felt it important to let this fledgling company know that one of their own was making them look so bad. What was great is that after I sent this email, the COO responded within the hour. He expressed his apologies for my experience and let me know that my input was appreciated and would be taken very seriously. He even asked for other suggestions that I may have had after the experience.

In conclusion
The interview sucked. I felt horrible afterward, but after taking some time on the matter maybe it was best that it went so poorly. I realized some key things I needed to work on for my own interviewing habits and I've now read a ton of articles that have given me insight for future interviews. Everything is a learning experience right?