Hunting & Gathering

How To Manhandle Job Interviews

What kind of exquisite kaka makes all of us at Más Kapital want to chew staples? Check this: From the October/November 2004 issue of Jungle mag comes this steaming slab of fermented tripe disguised as interviewing advice:

"Don't touch your nose...touching the outside of the nose can be a prime indicator of lying. Guilt associated with deceptiveness triggers a rise in blood pressure, which then causes tissues in the nose to stretch and release histamine. The histamine causes itching, which in turn induces scratching..."

Yeah, well scratch this: If you get rejected from a possible job because you touched your nose during an interview, thank the gods you won't have to work for that fascist droid farm. Granted, if you're digging away inside your nostrils, unearthing the Ark of the Covenant and Jimmy Hoffa, we wouldn't want you hanging around us either. But the outside? Give it a scratch already. No one with at least half a frontal lobe cares, and it beats sniffing and twitching like a coke junkie dying for a snort.

And that underscores all our advice: be your sweet freaking self in an interview. To paraphrase his holiness Groucho Marx (yes, we confess, we're devout Marxists), you don't want to work for some jerkoff who won't have you as an employee. You're better off on your own selling Viagra on the Internet. Really. We've Jungled our way into many an ill-matched job only to resent the people who hired us. And we've made a whole lot more money selling Viagra on the Internet.

Now, if "your sweet freaking self" is an asshole, do try to behave just a little: don't come late, don't stare at your interviewer's body parts, and don't show up wearing a wifebeater tee.

Otherwise, do reveal what kind of person they'll be living with six months down the road. It's better to learn that they dislike you now before you take out that lease on a new Subaru. And imagine how much you'll love working for a place that digs you and all your quirks.

FRINGE BENEFIT:  If you get a job even partially because of your quirks, you're gonna be a whole lot harder to replace with a talking word processor in Bangalore.

Now let's look at three common interview questions and how to answer them:

"What is your greatest weakness?"

Only sexually frustrated cubicle lifers with the imagination of wallpaper paste would ask this. And it's truly amazing how many sexually frustrated cubicle lifers with the imagination of wallpaper paste there are in corporate America.

Now don't debase yourself by replying with another pathetic cliché, like, "I'm too much of a perfectionist" or "I need to learn how to work less and enjoy life more." Not only will your interviewer hate you for lying and being a self-aggrandizing putz, we'll hate you, and so will your mother, your first-grade teacher, your dog, the Attorney General, the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and that really cute classmate you had a crush on in junior high but were always afraid to talk to.

You could play it safe and dull with confessions like, "I'm terrible with foreign languages" or "my sorry golf skills have hindered my ability to network, but I am taking lessons." But remember, this is wallpaper paste you're talking to, so tell them what your sweat freaking self really wants to say, like, "I'm not good at remembering exactly what trite, contrived replies I should make to trite, contrived questions like that" or "My love life has been missing you—that is, until now."

"What will you do if you don't get an offer from us?"

Only a self-loathing intestinal worm would reply, "I haven't given it much thought, because this is the only job I want, and I will do my best to get it." The Más Kapital response: "I would go into business for myself, make solid powerful connections, raise the necessary capital, then perpetrate a leveraged buyout of your company and fire everyone who had a role in rejecting me."

"Why should we invite you to a second interview?"

The only possible answer: "So we can discuss what kind of company car I want."

So you probably won't score the job. And you'll obliterate your school's relationship with that company. And you may be blacklisted from the entire industry. But by humiliating interviewers into changing their errant ways, you'll also spare future job hunters from these crimes against humanity.

And consider this: How often do you get to feel so good simply from something you said?... [$]