My experience applying for the organization I currently work for was fairly smooth. After graduating from Oregon State University, I was participating in MECOP, a program that sets students up with two 6-month-long internships in their field of study. My second 6-month internship was coming to an end and I needed to find a full-time job as soon as possible. The HR manager at the company I was interning for had just taken a consulting job at a company I had never heard of, and an industry I had no experience in. I decided to reach out to her and see if there were any opportunities at this company that she thought I would be a good fit for. Within a few days, I had an interview with the company and I immediately loved the office culture. I remember walking in and being greeted by friendly dogs (yes, many employees brought their dogs into the office every day) and noticing that there were no cubicles or 1-person offices. The people in the office produced an atmosphere of fast-paced, vibrant, intelligent, and passionate employees.
Going into the hiring process I knew this was a young startup but after doing a little research it seemed as though an abundance of people believed in its bright future. I went through 4 or 5 different interviews, each with only one or two people in the room with me. I remember thinking to myself that the structure of the interviews was somewhat chaotic. Since taking this exact course as an undergrad, I remember Jay teaching us about effective interviews and he would definitely not like how this organization interviews! It was very unstructured; everyone was asking me different questions, some seeming very random. Having more of a conversation than an interview didn’t deter me because I wanted the job, and I could tell that culture fit was very important to this company. However, working for this organization for over two years now, I believe I can take what I already know about interviewing and selection, apply it to how we currently hold interviews and find that we are not doing as well as we could be.
Hi Mackenzie,
I really appreciate how you explain all the things about your experience regarding your job and I found quite a few points that were interesting. As you mentioned, culture is very important because if the culture of a company is strict or where favoritism is common working in this kind of organisation can be energy draining and have negative psychological effects on a person. You also mention that the process regarding the interviews were chaotic which can bring negative results as if the interview is not structure and if the interviewer doesn’t know what to ask from the candidate how can one measure the skills of the candidate.I do agree with you that an interview should be structure and in a refined manner to make sure that the questions and the activities are in line with the skills or the demand of the post. In my view too many interviews are nothing but creation of lot of confusion .It’s best to have limited interviews but structured interviews so that it won’t be too much time consuming since we live in a fast pace world our processes should be according to that too.
Hi Mckenzie,
I enjoyed reading your post and found that part of your interview process was similar to my interview in my current organization. Chaotic would be a great way to have described it. The process of interviewing bothered me a lot, and had I not believed that the culture of the organization would overcome the ineptitude of the interview process (not recruiting–that was easy and straightforward), I would have pulled my application.
Making sure that we hire the very best employees possible starts with the forward facing recruitment, application, and interview. If any of those come across to potential hires as “smarmy” or difficult, we may lose the best potential employee available. In my case, I found that the decentralized nature of our HR division allowed people with almost zero knowledge of HR best practices to set up interviews in ways they thought were best. Getting past the lack of HR experience and seeing the job, people, and culture is what one me over.