Panel: So tell me something about yourself
Me: (Don’t you read resumes before recruitment? Bloody free riders) Blah, blah, blah (=> me is the best, was born for your company, for this job, hehe)
Panel: You seem to have good academics. Tell us something about non-academic things you do.
Me: (You don’t want to know the truth, do you? I sleep!) Sir, I read sci-fi, play lawn tennis…..
Panel: So you read science fiction? Which is the latest one you read?
Me: (Gotcha!) Neuromancer. (I talked about the book). I’ve also read Brave new world, Calcutta Chromosomes, Frankenstein…
Panel: (Looking confused) Hmmm…. Don’t you read Asimov?
Me: (Bloody, I hate him. And for all the intelligence you claim, don’t you know anything about proper science fiction? Hell, and you claim to be a sci-fi buff!) Sir, I read a book from the foundation series but did not like it much.
….
That was just a snippet of what I faced in a job interview. Such shallowness of knowledge is not uncommon amongst the managers. They can talk about various things for hours, and probably this impresses their clients. But any person who is a master in the area will shred him to pieces. In fact, you don’t even need to be a master to do that. I, who is just a student, could spot the consult (from a reputed firm) who came to recruit at our place claiming glory for what somebody had already published in the Harvard Business Review! (Obviously the rest of the students were negligent of the fact as they come to b-school only for that 6 figure salary and never read something that is not directly related to it, even if that thing is HBR)
try talking to them *in detail* after the interview about sci-fi.
I guess there’s no real point in that and anyway, as a candidate for the job, I would not be allowed to interact with the company people. I really do miss those sci-fi sessions of DA-IICT.
I share a ditto experience, that is when i went to NCBS (TIFR) for the final round of my interview for an Int. PhD. Geting thorugh 3 damn rounds of exams! Bloody idiots actually!
Why the hell do I have to login to leave a comment!! Anyhow, it was enlightening to read this post.
@renzoash
.
I thought they tested for depth of knowledge for PhD admissions!
@Vinod
Login’s there to prevent anonymous spam comments. But the reason its active here is because it comes by default and I did not bother to change the settings
@ chintan
Yeah they did n i must say i learnt a lot from my mistakes, n naturally they should have kicked someone like me out when out of disgust I answered “Around the world in 80 days ” to the question “What sci-fi have your read?”….see you need to keep cool, because even if the thing “that i had read HG wells n stuff, n have watched a lot of sci-fi movies”, is written there in your write-ups they want you to tell them….n even if my reference letters talked lavishly about my presentation and communication skills, you have to prove it yourself. Who says “It’s always proved on papaers?”
Whatevs about that, but i can tell you there are many better ways to ask such questions…it never makes sense asking the person “Tell me about yourself?” in interviews when the person has the resume handout, if he needs to test things like “confidence” or “communication skills” he can better take some ideas from me!
@renzoash
You got it. Learning from mistakes is probably the most important thing.
By the way you had a good encounter with your interviewer. The way you you have written that’s great.
@riti
Thanks!