Reviews

[msmemory_archive]

It's been a very HR day. I had never interviewed an employment applicant before, least of all to be my boss. Tough to come up with questions, in fact, that weren't "Please restate your resume, so I can hear you talk and decide if you are nice, and have a clue." But I think she'll do OK, if hired; I could work with her. She won't be as detail oriented, I think, as my outgoing boss, but that may not be a bad thing. P could drive herself nuts worrying about saving $2.

Also today were employee reviews (administered by P, my outgoing boss). Very nice and favorable, and I got a promotion one grade, plus a raise! Yay! She particularly praised me for finding stuff for D's expert witness case last December, and for my excellence in teamwork (by which I suspect she means not whining when asked to cover for somebody).

Comments

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Yay - congratulations!

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the raise!

One thing that our management does for interviews that amuses me is that they'll stick the potential employee in a room with their potential peers (ie, other engineers who have been here for a year or two). They tell the interviewees that its not part of the interview process, and to ask questions about the area and what it's like to live here, that type of stuff.

Then they'll ask us what we thought. Based on their questions and responses to our answers we should judge whether or not they'll fit into the organization socially.

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

w00t!1!

Fingers crossed for a good new boss, too.

With my group at Genuity, I had one supe interview for tech skills, one interview for customer service skills, and I'd go last and interview for team mesh. After I was confident with their decision making, I empowered either one of them to pull the plug on an interview before it wasted anyone else's time. (Candidates were not told they'd be meeting with more than one person, but they probably knew it was going well if they got me in there.)

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Intel always had you meet your direct reports if you were going to have them, which was cool, or your peers. If you gave bad vibes in either group, it didn't happen. (Except for once, when a VP literally pushed a candidate onto us, and it was baaaad.

We were asked to do behavioral interviewing -- "Tell me about a time when you had to ......" with the elipsis being "deal with a report who had a problem with the rest of the group" or whatever. Do you guys do that?

[galaneia.livejournal.com]

Aha! It's called "behavioral interviewing?" I've had interviews that were entirely done in that style, and I've come to hate it. In part because the interviewers were clearly reading from a prewritten list of questions that they didn't necessarily care about, and in part because dredging through my memory for specific instances is a rather time-consuming process.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Yes. People who actively seem to be reading off a script are doing it really badly. Recently the questions seem to come in a questionnaire (which makes my brain hurt, since the point is supposed to be to see how you respond [struggle, easily, refuse to stay on point, or whatever]). My shrink says that if they want to be dumb, it gives me time to carefully choose my answers and word them just exactly correctly. My win.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on the review and raise!

[Alexx ponders glumly the review schedule at his own company. *Supposed* to happen every November. Nov 2004 review didn't happen till March 2005. Nov 2005 hasn't shown any signs of even starting yet...]