I'm talking about the job interview. You know. When you are expected to dress yourself just so in something conservative but "nice" that you are never likely to wear at work should you get hired and you put on your best face and you do your little song and dance to try and convince the unpersuadable that you are the one, the chosen employee, the new co-worker from heaven, the boon and blessing that will bring only good fortune and prosperity to the firm, the company, the society, the agency, the organization.
This is theatre. It has really nothing to do with your new job and nothing to do with your duties and expectation as a staff member. They want to gauge you, to sniff you out, to decide if they really want to spend eight hours a day with you. This has little to do with skills or experience or education. Someone has already looked at your resume and now they want to see what you're like.
Without admitting it, and without even necessarily knowing, you are going to be judged by your looks, your race, ethnicity, accent, your age, youth, sex appeal, personal appearance, grooming, fashion sense, hair, make-up, footwear, body language, personal gestures, smell and choice of cologne and deodorant. This is like high school all over again, like being chosen in gym class to play on the team and you are going to be shown no mercy. You will be picked last. Pure social Darwinism.
Still, it is also useless to blame not getting hired for one single attribute or quirk because the candidates will be carefully scrutinized for the whole picture. For example, I recently did an online search to see what material there is out there about men being discriminated against in the workplace for having male pattern baldness (guess why this might be important to me?) and I watched a video featuring a man with a thick southern accent griping about how he was discriminated against in the workplace for being bald. What he didn't mention was that his being turned down might also have to do with his having the personality of a turnip.
I have also participated at times on interviewing panels and it hasn't always been easy making selections or agreeing with others on the panel about the potential of some candidates. Sometimes they were all equally bad more or less but there was no one else applying for the position so we simply held our noses and tried to go for the least evil. Other times they were all so good that it was like drawing straws or flipping a coin. Even when this happens the winning candidate is going to be praised for being just a little bit better than the competitors, but for no other reason than that she is the one who got picked.
I have never done well at job interviews which is strange because my employment counsellors have tested my interview skills and I have been told that I am very good at interviews. In my current career, mental health peer support, I was interviewed for only one position I got hired for. Everything else has occurred through networking or through the back door, or through reputation, or should I say from WHO I know. I was actually hired at one of the mental health teams where I still work one year after I was turned down for the position in an interview. Some time later I was hired through the back door. I was selected to work with a particularly challenging client and the rehab therapist who first refused to hire me decided that he liked my way of working so much that he wanted to keep me. A few months later the fellow who was first hired instead of me resigned because of his recurring mental health issues. A few months later I encountered this fellow as a client in a small psychiatric facility that hired me also through the back door. I took him out for coffee and he admitted to me that he was hired instead of me because he had massaged some of his personal facts and exaggerated his qualifications. Of course I accepted his apology.
The job interview has become so competitive that it would often appear that they really would rather not hire anyone at all. So it would have to be the best of the best, the crème de la crème. Or perhaps the best liar? This much is certain. The most important quality for being a good employee is the one that gets sacrificed by the very process of interviewing. That quality could be called integrity. It's all smoke and mirrors. A dog and pony show.
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