Interviews galore

Just a few moments ago, I walked into the Career Management Library and a classmate said he almost didn’t recognize me without my suit on. I have had an interview in school every week for the past four weeks. Yesterday I had one with a computer hardware manufacturer that is in the process of moving its company to the Research Triangle Park area. I struggle a lot through these behavioral interviews and oftentimes I find myself walking out of one with the feeling as though I have just been beaten up. Yesterday was no different.

 

I mentioned last week that I am going to tell you about the two types of people you will meet in an interview. When a company sends representatives to Kenan-Flagler for an interview, the people they send will be either from human resources or from the actual department the company is hiring for. It is to your utmost advantage to find out before hand who your interviewer will be because your strategy will vary depending. Someone from human resources will ask you only behavioral questions while someone from the department may ask you questions pertaining to the actual position or the industry. Usually I prefer someone form the department because I can attempt to impress the interviewer by asking questions to show that I have done research on the industry and have thought about some of the issues the company has to deal with.

 

Last week when I interviewed with the credit cards division of a major financial firm, the firm divided the interviewees into two interview schedules, one was with someone from a vice president of the department and the other with someone from human resources. The night before, both representatives hosted the interviewees for a reception and dinner at the Sienna Hotel. The meal was fabulous but I found the conversation to be a bit intimidating. When I got to the hotel fifteen minutes into the reception, all the interviewees andthe two representatives were standing in the giant circle in the hotel lobby. It looked and felt like a mass interview where the representatives would ask questions such as “what do you do for fun” and “who did Carolina play last week in football?” During the dinner, there were two tables and I sat at the table with the vice president  and during the entire meal I felt as though I was under the gun, being interviewed. The most bizarre moment hadto have been five minutes into the dinner when he asked me to talk about my summer internship and I noticed that as I prepared to launch into my schpeel about online marketing and minimizing our clients’ cost per click, I folded my hands on the table in front as though I was going through an actual interview. I had this great question that I wanted to ask about which electronic network was used to process the credit card transactions incurred by that company’s private label credit cards but I decided to hold off and save the question for the actual interview.

 

The next day was the interview and it went well. I was interviewed by the woman from human resources. When I asked my question about the electronic network that processes the transactions, she gave exactly the answer I had expected, which was to email the vice president and ask him. That’s another thing, by the way, asking someone from human resources a question about the company’s business will sometimes result in the interviewer not giving you an answer.

 

The end of the interview season is nowhere in sight. I have been invited to a second round interview with the credit cards division of the major financial firm. I will have three one-hour interviews back to back, all behavioral.