Had an interview recently for a fairly senior role. All went jolly well, came out feeling moderately confident and then heard nothing. OK, another one bites the dust and, as usual, no feedback from anyone means you have no idea what you were lacking and need to improve for next time.
Thinking back on this one, though, I may have spotted the problem. One question was “What governance structure would you put in place to manage this programme”. Given that this is a well-established international company who, you might think, would have all this buttoned down already, I suggested I might well use their existing processes for the technical delivery side and focus on the political aspects of running something with four equal partners in the overall programme. Good answer except that it does assume they have a process and it does assume they understand that running cooperative ventures is not a matter of KPIs and deliverables, something I don’t think the interviewees had realised.
So write that one off and keep on looking. And next time, don’t make the blindingly obvious error of thinking the interviewer knows all of the problems of the role they’re trying to fill…
One other role is irritating me as well. It’s literally 15 minutes from the front door, paying serious money and all about people management through transition to a new system. It’s been open for three weeks now. And that’s because the prime requirement from the client is that the incumbent has a detailed technical knowledge of the precise application in question. Which is already in use elsewhere in the group, which has a full support operation in place and which performs a back-office function that’s largely invisible to the target audience, whose main challenge will be taking on the new business processes being introduced. Talking to the agent they’ve had dozens of CV s from blokes like me that know how to deliver such a project but none from anyone with the high level of application skills they demand that they don’t need. Oh for the days when you could talk to the hirers and not have to do it all by remote control!
