A Job Interview in Shorts and Slippers?

5 September 2009 397 views No Comment

Job interview do’s and don’ts have been written about and reported on for decades. Most of the information imparted to the viewers or readers is really common sense. If you need to learn the things spoken about in these reports you are probably not going to give a good interview. It should be pointed out that the interviewer holds a key veto in the process. You can come across as poorly dressed and not that informed, but for some reason your personality clicks with the interviewer or board of interviewers and you get the job anyway. There is nothing to do to predict this outcome only to go through the usual job interview do’s and don’ts.

When coming to your interview, make sure you are presentable but not necessarily overdressed. I went into a teaching job interview once and the principal practically laughed at me for wearing a suit. Who would expect that? There were others that went into interviews for teaching wearing shorts, but the schools in that area were so short on teachers that they interviewed people in pairs to get them to work as fast as possible. The salary was good but the conditions in the classroom made the job positions hard to fill.

With a shortage of education jobs in the big cities – although the current economic situation causes less of a s hortage – it is difficult to be rejected unless maybe, say… punch interviewer. The questions posed in these interviews for teaching in the big city are so unclear and meaningless that the more confused and meaningless your answer, the better chance you have of obtaining the position. Today though it is a slightly different story due to the shortage of jobs. When the jobs come back, the teachers in the big cities will again abandon the classroom, like rats from a sinking ship, even though the pay is good. With the cut in pensions and other things planned for the future this will add to the shortage of teachers, when the economy does finally recover.

In essence it is understood to come to interviews well-dressed and to know things about the position. But sometimes the poorly dressed individual and the misinformed will end up getting the position. Personality and chemistry are the keys to a good interview, and these things are quite unpredictable as to how they will affect the interviewer. When you wake up on the day of your job interview, just pray that the interviewer didn’t get up on the wrong side of the bed that morning