A Job Interview

I want to work in a hotel. I like people. I can speak two languages. I am free on Saturday and Sunday. I can start at eight in the morning.

(1) Tell me about yourself. My name is Yusuf. I am nineteen years old. I am studying English at college. I live with my family. I enjoy football and cooking. I am looking for my first part-time job.

(2) Why do you want this job? I want to work in your hotel because I like meeting people from different countries. I want to use my English. I want to learn how a hotel works. The hours are good for me, because I have college in the morning.

(3) What is one thing you have done that you are proud of? Last year, I helped to organise a small event at my college. We made food for fifty people. I was the leader of the food team. We worked hard, and the event went well. I am proud because I was a quiet person before, and I learned that I can be a leader.

Last summer, I was helping at my cousin's wedding. I was responsible for collecting the older guests from the bus station and bringing them to the hotel. There were eight of them, and I had only one small car.

When I arrived at the bus station, I realised my plan would not work. The journey would have taken three trips and over an hour, and the older guests were already tired. I phoned my brother-in-law and asked if he could come with his larger car. While I waited, I bought cold water for the guests and explained, slowly and clearly in two languages, what was happening. My brother-in-law arrived twenty minutes later, and we did the journey in two trips instead of three.

I learned two things. First, that a good plan is not the same as a plan that works on the day. And second, that older guests appreciate clear information much more than they appreciate apologies. They were not angry about the wait; they were grateful that someone had told them what was happening.

When I was nineteen, I had an interview for a part-time job at a hotel reception. The manager — a kind, slightly tired woman in her fifties — asked me, near the end, what I would do if a guest was rude to me.

I gave the answer I had prepared. I said I would stay calm, listen to the guest, apologise for any inconvenience, and try to find a solution. It was a textbook answer, and the manager nodded politely, in the way people nod when they've heard something hundreds of times.

The answer I should have given is that I didn't yet know. I had never had a stranger be rude to me at work, because I had never worked at the kind of place where strangers are rude. I had imagined it, and I had read what hospitality books said about it, and I had practised the words. But the truth was that I would find out only when it happened, and I suspected I would handle it less smoothly than my answer suggested.

I did get the job. And in my second week, an older guest shouted at me about a key card that wasn't working. I did not remain calm. I went into the back office and cried for three minutes, and then I went back out and helped her, and she was gentler the second time. I learned more in that ten minutes than in the whole of my prepared answer.

What changed, slowly, was my sense of what an honest answer is. The honest answer to 'what would you do if…' is sometimes 'I don't know yet, and I would like to find out, but I am not going to pretend I already have'. I have given that answer in two interviews since. Both times, the interviewer relaxed slightly, as if relieved that someone had said it.

I have failed three interviews that I can remember in detail. The first was for a place at a sixth-form college, the second was for a part-time job at a hotel, and the third was for a scholarship to a university summer school. I did not get any of them. I would like, briefly, to say what I now think each one was actually testing.

The sixth-form interview was not, as the school had said, a test of academic readiness. It was a test of my mother's confidence in unfamiliar settings. I had, for some reason, taken her with me, and the interviewer addressed many of his questions to her, in an English that was somewhat faster than her own. She held her own, and I was proud of her, but I noticed afterwards that she had made the kinds of small grammatical mistakes that are perfectly natural in a second-language speaker and entirely audible to an English ear. I was not offered a place. I cannot prove the two things were connected, and they may not have been, but I have never, since, taken a parent to an interview that was meant to be mine.

The hotel interview was, I think, fair. The manager asked me reasonable questions, and I gave answers that were also reasonable, but the candidate after me — I overheard her in the corridor — had worked at three hotels already, and I had worked at none. She got the job. The interview was testing, accurately, who would need less training. I would have been the worse choice on that day, and the manager was right.

The scholarship interview was the one I have thought about the most. I was asked to talk about a book that had changed my mind, and I gave the answer I had prepared — a careful answer about a careful book — and the panel listened politely. The candidate next to me, in the corridor afterwards, told me she had talked about a comic book her brother had drawn for her when he was dying. She got the scholarship. I do not begrudge it. But I think the panel had been testing something I had not understood — not what I had read, but what I was willing to put on the table — and I had brought a careful book to a conversation that was asking for something else.

What the interviews shared, looking back, was that none of them tested what I had thought they were testing. They tested, respectively: whether I had the social capital to come on my own, whether I had specifically relevant experience, and whether I could recognise that the question 'what changed your mind' is an invitation to be unguarded rather than impressive. The lessons were, in each case, ones I could have learned in advance only with someone to guide me, and I did not have that someone. I have been more useful to my younger cousins, who are now in the same position I was, than the school career office turned out to be for me. That, perhaps, is the most useful thing I took from those three failures: not advice, exactly, but a willingness to give the advice I once needed and had not been given.

I have been to perhaps fifteen interviews in my adult life, and in every one of them I have produced a slightly different version of myself, calibrated — though that is too clean a word — to what I imagined the room could hold.

The version that goes to interviews is, in essence, a more articulate, more confident, more legibly serious version of the person I actually am. She uses qualifying phrases ('I think', 'in my limited experience'), acknowledges complexity ('there is, of course, another reading'), and offers small specific stories that have been polished by the previous five tellings into something that sounds spontaneous. She is, on balance, a credit to me. I do not entirely know how to feel about her.

There was a particular interview, three years ago, for a job I wanted very much. I had prepared, as is my habit, a short story about a difficult customer at a previous job, told in the situation–action–result form that all interview manuals recommend. I gave the story. The interviewer — a woman in her forties, no discernible warmth, no discernible hostility — listened, nodded, and asked, in the same tone she had asked everything else, 'is that a true story?' I had to think for two or three seconds — three seconds is a long time in an interview — before I said yes. It was a true story. But I had to think about it, because in the practised form in which I had told it, it had become, somewhere along the way, less true than it had originally been. The interviewer, I think, knew this. She gave me the job anyway, and I have not entirely forgiven her, or myself, for the small exchange.

There is a version of this essay in which I would now declare that I have stopped doing this — that I now show up to interviews as myself, unrehearsed, and let the chips fall where they may. That would be untrue. I still rehearse. I still polish my stories. I still produce, in the first three minutes, the more articulate version of myself. The difference, perhaps, is that I am now more aware that I am doing it, and more ready to break the spell when I notice the room can hold it. I have, in two interviews since, used the phrase 'that is the rehearsed version of the answer; would you like the unrehearsed one?' Both times, the interviewer relaxed visibly, as if relieved that someone had said aloud what they had spent twenty years politely not noticing. Both times, I got the job. I am not, however, sure this is the right lesson to take from the exchange — the right lesson might be that interviewers are starved of candour and reward it disproportionately, which is not the same as candour being rewarded as a general matter.

The version of myself I do not bring to interviews is the version that is sometimes anxious, sometimes uncertain, sometimes (when I have been working too long) faintly bitter about the structural unfairness of the form itself. I do not bring her partly because she would not be useful, partly because I do not entirely trust her judgements when she is in that condition, and partly because the interview is not the place. I am not sure this is wholly defensible. There are interviews — for some kinds of pastoral or intellectual work — in which the version of me I do not bring would be more useful, more accurate, and more honest than the version I do. I have not yet found a way of making the choice, in real time, in real rooms, that does not feel like a small betrayal of one of the two of them.

The essay ends, I am afraid, without a resolution. The question of which self belongs in which room is one of the questions adult life keeps asking and does not, in my experience, finally answer. I would be interested to know, if you have read this far, what the version of yourself is that you do not bring — and where, if anywhere, you bring her instead.