Interview

Well yesterday I went to an interview with a company that shall remain nameless. Seeing a couple of their web sites, thought that they seemed that a company that was going places. Well they have moved into nice offices, even if it doesn't conform to the DDA, not that affects me. But their websites looked good and I was keen to find out more about them.

Three people were interviewing me. Worked out that one was head of department. Another has worked his way up from the bottom and was now the CEO, or something like that. But no idea on the third person, who seemed to be doing most of the talking. He lived in Eastleigh and well and made it clear that he thought I was mad to move there. I just said that I have no regrets at all about moving. I could have gone into details about how in Eastleigh you can leave your wheelie bin outside your house and they kids won't set it on fire, but I was here for a job interview, not to discuss the pro's and cons of Eastleigh over Bournemouth, Something you regular readers would have really all about over the past 18 months.

Anyway, back to the interview, Things got off badly and just got worse and worse as the interview went on. You know its going bad when you are telling them all about yourself and all the interviewer is doing is drawing doodles on your CV. I know that says more about his professionalism then it does about me. However at least he wasn't blowing his cheeks all the time like the other one did. I admit, I'm rubbish at interviews, I get nervous. I'm getting better at them, but its such a long time since I did one maybe I'm slipping back into the past and I always feel that this so much more I wanted to say.

They wanted to see the councils web sites. Now there’s a big problem. For the last few weeks we've have a slow response time from the web site. Something we know about. Even the head of IT has ordered that the three top people from the web team, servers and comms get together and sort out, but not much has been achieved yet, due to various problems. So for the whole 45 min interview we got the front page of the site up and that was it. So from that point onwards I felt that I was being judged by the performance of Bournemouth Borough Council. Now I think that we've done really well in the web team seeing all thats happened in the council

It's hard to convey just how councils are, and the way we work, they way things are done. It's a different world. So it was clear that this company and I are not right for each other at this stage.

"On your e-commerce sites how much of it have you done". They Asked. All up to the point that pass over to the bank for them to do the credit card details, I said. ‘Oh so not it all, we do all of it and we are so fantastic.. blah blah blah. We charge people lots of money blah blah blah’ (yes he was that full of himself and the company) OK but we are a council and we felt that people wouldn't want to give their credit card details to a council. Also having the extra work involved in securing the details was too much for us at that time. Easier and cheaper to let the bank do it, they are the specialists in that area, we have a budget to stick to you know.

How much SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) does the council do?, they Asked. I could have lied at this point as I'm the key SEO bod here, but I know I'm fighting a loosing battle at the council. No-one else is interested, especially those people who only update web pages because they have to. They won’t care about SEO. Still I have my own sites to play SEO with and some of them are number 1 in the google search ranking. That keeps me happy on that front. However, they would have easily picked up that there was no real SEO on the sites, so I had to let that one go.

Then they started on about Amazon and how rubbish it was compared to the sites they do. Quite how many different ways you can do a shopping cart system I have no idea, maybe that’s the problem with this interview as I just didn’t get exactly what the point was he was trying to make and he wasn’t going to give me clues.

The on to the job itself, turns out that the job description which I was given, which was different to the job advertised, was different again to the job I was being interviewed for. Not that they gave me much details of any of the jobs. It was quite hard work getting information out of them. I was trying to push for how the job role fits in to the organisations structure. What careers paths were open etc. The latter just got looks of amazement. It was clear that I was never going to get employed by them, so why ask about promotion chances. I nearly walked out as they weren't just telling me anything and it was getting to be a total waste of time. I know that it's a dog eat dog in the e-commerce world and they didn't want to give anything away to someone who they weren’t going to employ but it was getting silly. Maybe they were looking for someone who can find his own place in the organisation. Similar to what I've done at the council. Making a job that is unique. Your guess is as good as mine on that.

So I was going to get nothing about the company and job from them. However, I was curious about the building, which they said they had built. Interesting to know what design features they had requested in the build (if any). What was their criteria, would they change anything about the building? So I felt safe about asking them about that.

Well we didn't lay the bricks one said (the others laughed)…. It's better than our old place with a nice view over the fields. I felt like saying that I have signed the Official Secrets Act on four separate occasions therefore I am quite discreet and won’t pass on anything to anyone else, but just smiled and that was the end of that, building e-commerce sites all day isn't going to happen… they made it clear that that's all they want to do. However, my boss turned up early today, arriving at 1pm (early for him). Pete one of your next tasks (of which I have many) is building an e-commerce site for a project from Social Services. I laughed, but the boss didn't get it (why would he?) Still, I'd better put my money where my mouth is then and do a good job on it I guess.