I have 7 years of experience in a major organization and decided I needed new experience, new challenges. I came from the Healthcare field and want to try the Financial Industry. I am an experienced Executive Assistant. I have gone to 3 interviews this month. All of them gave me great comments about my qualifications. One even praised me for knowing how to do pivot tables on Excel. In all 3 instances, I was interviewed by Administrative Staff (HR generalist, Admins). They were all women.

I also noticed that each of them seemed unprepared to interview me. There was no structure nor criteria. Except for the HR generalist, the other two did not take notes. No behavioral or situational questions. Not even questions about my skills or examples I can give. Almost all of them talked about themselves and the people they worked with.

I also realized that these folks have less skills (the interviewer didn’t know if she’s using Lotus Notes version 2 or 6) than I have.

The right fit for them has nothing to do if I’m the right person for the job but only if I look and talk the way they do. My husband even goes on to say that they might have been intimated by the fact that I know a lot more.

Maybe because I look young or maybe it’s because I’m short and Asian. Maybe I just didn’t look like trendy enough. Ah, the power of cliques. I thought we over that in high school. As a woman, it hurts a bit that other women cannot see the impications of hiring someone just like them or think like them rather than hiring someone who is different, confident, skilled, and can adjust to change.

Thank You =>

SMB IT Consulting is a stressful, low reward and time consuming business. We have had people work for us for 3 or so years then go to an Oil company that doubled their salary – How could we compete.

After all, life goes on.

I must agree with Vlad on his comment, not being an overly big fan of a tonne of processes and rather shoot from the hip and lets see how things go.

The right person is the key to the puzzle, we have great people with us now that are in roles we never even imagined when we hired them. On of our junior techs moved up to being our service manager, my purchaser is now my logistics manager…direction occurs when you have the right people on the bus and the bus starts to move, only after they find the right seat.

You have to get them on the bus first, and then the true talents show. By the way, good talent show just as fast as the crappy talents. Just ask the 30 or so people that don’t work us any longer.

Cheers from Snowy Calgary

Stuart

http://www.stuartcrawford.com
http://www.thewealthyprofessional.ca

But Vlad overstates the degree to which I push a process over a person. I think my post makes clear that we work hard to make sure the person will work well with our team.

If you disagree with my process, there seem to be two obvious alternatives. Either you disagree with having a process, or you disagree with _this_ process.

I think everyone should have some process. It certainly doesn’t have to be the same as mine.

If you have no process, what do you do?

What does a hiring non-process look like?