Page 320 - Marky Stein - Get a Great Job When You Don't Have a Job-McGraw-Hill (2009)

Fearless Interviewing

She smiled the moment she walked in the door, extended
her hand for a handshake, and said, “Hello, Mr. Gandy. My name
is Sarah Auschansky. Thank you for having me today.”
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine, but thank you.” She waited for a moment.
“May I sit down?”
“Of course, please do.”
The first 20 seconds had just ticked away and Sarah was still
smiling! She sat down, tilting her body slightly forward in the chair.
She resisted the impulse to put her purse on his desk and instead,
put it on the floor at her side. She placed a notepad on her lap.
The interviewer was shuffling through some papers on his
desk. “Sorry. I think I must have lost the résumé you faxed to
me. You don’t happen to have another one, do you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Here’s a fresh copy along with
some letters of recommendation you might want to see.” She
handed him her presentation package.
He glanced over the résumé for just a second. “Hmm . . . very
thorough. Tell me,” he said, “something that’s not on your
résumé.”
“What my résumé doesn’t say is that I’m incredibly persistent.
I can troubleshoot Ethernet, token ring, LAN, WAN, and frame
relay. I don’t stop until the problem is solved and the job is done.
Once, at my last job, the whole system went down right on the
last day of the quarter. Some of the other networking people pan-
icked. I just stayed flexible and tried several different tactics. I
ended up getting the system up and running within 90 minutes.”
“Good.” Mr. Gandy quietly took a few minutes to look over
the résumé more carefully. “Your résumé looks good. Tell me,
what would you do if another employee told you he had stolen
something expensive from the company?”
“I think that first I would have to confront him face to face
and try to persuade him to return it. If he said no, then I would
have to let him know I felt obligated to tell the boss if he didn’t
return it. If that didn’t work, I would probably have to have a
talk with my supervisor about it.”
“What development applications do you know?”
“I’m adept at Fortran, C++, COBOL, and SQL. I also have
experience with Visual Basic and object-oriented programming.
I actually trained ten of the other IT specialists in SQL.”

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