Just how good are job interviews and CVs at finding the right candidate for a job? Not very, suggests Elspeth MacLean, a veteran interviewee.
It was an email offer more tempting even than get-rich-quick schemes, weight-loss remedies, and things to cure my cellulite and/or erectile dysfunction.
"Our Diplomas/Certificates are recognised in most countries. No required examinations, tests, books, or interviews."
This might have been my chance for a well-paid job.
Nothing involving medicine where shortcomings would be revealed in a string of dead bodies, but perhaps an obscure PhD which could give me a cushy government desk job with a six-figure salary.
Then I went back to the start.
"Bacheelor, Masteer MBA and Doctoraate diplomas available in the field of your choice that's right, you can even become a Doctor and receive all the benefits that comes with it!"
Ah yes, punctuation, grammar and spelling are wonderful things when there is a large malodorous rat radiating from the centre of the computer screen.
Faking qualifications is clearly wrong, but is there a danger that sometimes there is such snobbery over qualifications that employers overlook other more important things?
Which is truly worse - the person who has a (non-life-threatening) fake qualification or the person who claims at the job interview to be sweetness and light and God's gift to communication and team-work but, within weeks of starting the job, has co-workers either threatening to inject themselves with ball-point pens, or scaling the walls, threatening to jump or escape?
As someone (without a PhD or even a university degree) who has been a spectacular failure at the formal job interview, I have often wondered whether modern practices are any more successful at finding the right person for the job than those previously used, or if it comes down to choosing the best actor?
Most jobs I've had involved a direct approach by an employer, or me replying to an advertisement by letter and having a brief interview, often by phone, for the employer to clarify a few points and make an offer.
I have yet to come within cooee of a job from a formal interview where half a dozen earnest types with clipboard questions have lined up to grill me mercilessly.
In my experience, most such interviews are littered with questions you either can't answer or think you have already answered before you arrive.
In each one I would have written a letter explaining why I wanted the job and thought I would be good at it, but I could guarantee, after a little awkward small talk, the first inquisitor would say, "Can you tell us why you think you would be the best person for the job?"
Replying, "Can you tell me why you are here if you haven't read my application - are you taking this task seriously?" always seemed deliciously tempting.
Instead, I would provide an expanded explanation of my original, properly succinct, statement.
In the 20 minutes before I stopped, each panellist would have had time to come up with 100 inventive euphemisms for garrulous.
In an unsuccessful panel interview seven years ago, one of several odd questions was "on a continuum with reactive at one end and proactive at the other, where would you place yourself, and give an example".
Afterwards, when I wrote suggesting this question was virtually impossible to answer, the reply was that I should have asked them to rephrase it.
Ever the fast-learner, in 2006, when I was going through another pointless torture, a man on the panel asked a question I didn't understand, so I sought clarification.
The question was rephrased as, "If you had a pavlova in the oven and you were told you had to be in Temuka in three hours, how would you cope?" Without thinking, I said (quite truthfully), "I don't do pavlovas."
That would have been bad enough, but I had to add, "Was it in the job description?" His lack of amusement told me humour is clearly a misplaced participant in such events.
Only once in a job interview (not a panel situation) has my curriculum vitae been called into question.
Towards the end of the discussion the employer said, "There's something important you haven't told us."
"No, I don't think so," I said, hastily scanning what I had written.
"No, there is something you have left out," he said several times, while I, feeling like St Peter, continued to deny it.
Surely he hadn't discovered I used to help myself to the afternoon-tea biscuits and dangerously attempt to repair my own vacuum cleaner in my after-polytech cleaning job at the Dairy Board in 1972.
Eventually, he gave up.
"You haven't told us you're a mother!" he said triumphantly.
It would have been unkind to point out motherhood was a job which required no qualifications. I just smiled and meekly accepted the low-paid job he offered.
