All week I’ve been firing questions at him, reminding him that in interviews first impressions are key. I’ve been encouraging him to do some research on Unisys on the web but whether he has or not is a secret he’s keeping. We’ll see how it goes.
It reminded me of my first job interview at Rootes. There were about a hundred 17 and 18 year old boys wandering around all waiting for instructions. Some were eventually herded into a workshop whilst others including myself were asked to wait in a large room and advised that it could take up to an hour before we might be called.
One of the guys in the room said he’d heard about the Rootes interviewing technique and that they’d probably ask if we could do, or had done anything unusual. We went round the room and all the guys said what they’d done and when it came to my turn I said I could do the Lotus position. Somebody asked me to show them and I got down on the floor, folded my legs across one another and started to swing on my arms in a perfect Lotus position. The door opened and the Personnel Officer came in and before he’d even seen me, he called my name. I tried as best I could to unfold my legs but they were stuck. I couldn’t extricate myself from this damned Lotus position. Eventually, after getting no response from the others in the room, he came round to my side of the table, looked down at me swinging on my arms and just said, ‘I take it you’re Thomas Cupples‘? That was just the start of the process but after a few more rounds I got the job so it obviously didn’t count against me.
A few years later, after Chrysler had bought Rootes and had decided to downsize and get rid of me and all my mates, I ended up at another interviewing session for the then Glasgow Transport Executive (the crowd that ran the buses and tubes). The salary was good and I had formed a good relationship at night school with a guy who worked there. He informed me that the test and interview was a ‘doddle’ and that I should consider my chances of getting the job 50/50 as another night school person, a guy who also worked at Rootes was being interviewed as well. That morning I left Chrysler for my interview and my ‘colleague’ and adversary wished me well – his interview was in the afternoon. I arrived to be shown into this pokey little office where I was given a set of questions on Work Study Methodology (which was my job at Chrysler) and left on my own. I looked at the questions and frantically scoured the paper only to establish that I could not answer a single one of them. It was a different discipline of Work Study and I didn’t have a clue. I was aghast. What should I do ? Try and sneak out without them noticing ? I was desperately working out what my strategy should be when my mate from college came in and asked how I was getting on. When I confided to him that there wasn’t a single question I could answer, he laughed, pulled a sheet of paper out of his inside pocket, put it on the desk I was at and left. It was a complete set of answers.
A few minutes later, the two departmental bosses came in, picked up ‘my’ paper (I’d put the original one in my briefcase), looked through it and nodded to each other. They said all my answers were correct, there was no need for an interview and that they’d only one other candidate to see that afternoon. They’d let me know.
I hot-footed it back to Chrysler where my ‘colleague’ was waiting for me. ‘What was it like’. Was it difficult? Was the interview tough? I simply took out the unanswered test paper, slid it across the table to him and watched him go pale. He went off only to come back a few minutes later. ‘Where did you go to’, I asked’ ‘I’ve just phoned them and told them I wouldn’t be coming for the interview this afternoon’. ‘What did they say’, I enquired. ‘Only that it was good of me to call and they wished me well’. ‘Whoever gets that job bloody deserves it if they can answer all those questions’, he said.
I left two weeks later. He didn’t come to my leaving do!
PS - that's not me in the picture.
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