Still Job Hunting
by Mr. New to Denver on Feb.02, 2010, under Job Hunting
I had a job interview this morning. It was my first face to face interview I’ve had since I’ve been in Denver. The company is looking for some temps to take on a horrible data mining project. They have a division which they don’t think is profitable, but they don’t really know for sure because all the data (sales, collections, COGS, customer info) is in multiple databases and they need army of analysts to figure it all out.
I’m excited but it’s only for a temp role, but they think it might become permanent. It seems like it will be a lot of work, but they are trying to hire four heads to work on the project. How did it get so bad that they need four people to handle it. Sounds like Red flag #1.
I usually interview very well, at least I think I do. I’m usually very relaxed, I have good answers etc. I might get stumped on some technical questions, I’ll tell those stories some other time.
Back to this morning, mid way through my response to the first question I found myself talking very fast. Throwing out random verbs and nouns being forced to then string together tenses and conjugations until I could recover and give the illusion that I speak the language. And just as I am able to get basic English and grammar down I start to hope that I have enough time left to actually attempt to answer the question I was asked.
Luckily I recognized I was doing it and I recovered. A couple of deep breaths later and I was fine. The questions I was asked were mostly about: “How would you solve this problem.” I got a weird vibe from the first interviewer. It was almost as if he didn’t like my answers or that I was missing something. I said the same stuff to the second interviewer. He loved my responses and said I was “spot on.”
I’m not sure what answers the first guy was looking for. If a division is not profitable I would analyze sales, selling prices, mix of products, contracts, all costs, SG&A expenses, and allocations. Usually everything is forecasted so start investigating variances and go from there.
