Don't Be Me

In late 2016 I had an interview for a Technical Recruiter role at Facebook. While going through the process with Facebook, my friend's wife reached out to me about a surprise 40th birthday party in LA and asked if I could make it. Sure, a quick flight from San Jose to Burbank, Lyft to Altadena, and the opportunity to surprise my old friend, sounded perfect.

Then, the Facebook onsite interview got scheduled for Monday and the party was on Saturday night. Ok, no problem, I will just switch my Monday flight to Sunday evening and I will be well rested for Monday morning. I mean, I got this, I am an expert interviewer and surely Facebook will not pose any questions I can't answer.

Well, they did. Specifically, the feedback was that the role required a lot of sourcing and they didn't think I could source. Reflecting back I agreed with their decision. The interview with the Sourcer could have been amazing, I had so many examples of a time when I had used creative strategies to source, examples of finding purple unicorns, etc. But all those examples escaped my mind and I ended up not impressing the interviewer.

I didn't get the job at Facebook because I didn't want the job. If I did, I would have cancelled my trip to LA. I would have spent the weekend preparing and conducting practice interviews. I would have treated the interview at Facebook seriously and I would have been made an offer.

So why share this story, particularly one that makes me look bad, because this is likely what you are doing. You are not treating the job interview as a job, and this is what is needed for success. There are no shortcuts when it comes to job interviews and people look for shortcuts all the time. Spending 20, 30, 40 hours or more preparing for a job will guarantee better results.

So as we head into this long weekend in the US, do you have an interview next week? Is it your dream job? If so, you should have a really crappy weekend. One where you spend 8 hours a day preparing your behavioral examples, preparing your open-ended frameworks, and practicing answering questions, ideally with another human being. Does this sound like way too much? If so, then you don't want the job. Giving up one long weekend to land your dream job can absolutely change the rest of your life. So, who is ready for a crappy weekend!?!? Good luck!