As parents, talking about our children comes as naturally to us as walking and breathing. I do it all the time, and if given a little rope will completely consume the conversation with anecdotal stories of my fabulous four’s antics. Having four children at home, I have a story for just about every situation and trust me when I say reality is much stranger than fiction. See, there I went, point made. There are instances however, where going off on ‘kid tales’ is not appropriate and can actually be detrimental; the Interview.
This week I had the pleasure of interviewing a delightful woman for a position. She was professionally dressed, articulate and well informed. She asked thoughtful questions and her resume was quite impressive, however her children dominated the conversation from the very beginning.
She took a very clever approach to her interview, wherein she tried to tie each of her previously held positions and their duties to the position she was interviewing for. A good strategy to show that you have the skill set, direct or transferable, and experience necessary to be successful in the new role. Her mistake was that each of her positions was related through her children in some manner or other.
When asked how she would approach managing a divers staff with somewhat differing approaches to their daily activities, her answer was about recruiting volunteers for her children’s PTA. When asked to discuss her experience with coaching and mentoring students to achieve career success she noted a program she work on with elementary children with regards to drug use.
Now I do want to point out that both of these endeavors are important, difficult and have intrinsic value to our society; however they did not clearly connect the dots between her skill sets and the needs of the position for which she was applying.
With her management and human resource background, she should have been able to easily make connections and share examples from her work experience to the job at hand. I wasn’t sure if her answers were due to a lack of understanding of the job she was applying for or her parental instinct to share stories about her children. Either way, she talked herself out of the job.
She was nervous, she was not observing the non-verbal cues of her interviewers, and she was not answering the questions in a manner that befitted a professional with her experience.
Kids and interviews don’t mix. Even when you feel the interview is informal and the interviewer is sharing stories of their children, stay away from the subject. It’s too easy to fall into the storytelling parent and lose sight of what the conversation is really about.
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