Interviews - Married in an hour

Many of you know I have been looking for a new job. Some of you know that looking for this new job has become more like a second career.

What do I want to do, you ask? Well, I want to help make a small entrepreneurial company grow to become a successful one. Then I want to start my own and do that same. I want to get experience in sales, business development, operations, strategy, and management. I'm really not interested in gaining accounting experience. That's why there is outsourcing.

As part of my figuring-out-what-I-want-to-do process, I have taken up lots of reading. I have done this partly because I simply don't have enough to do in my current job to stay busy, but mostly because I want to be better informed. One of the blogs I read daily is written by Seth Godin, author of The Purple Cow, Small is the New Big, The Dip, and many other highly-read business books.

Today, I found an entry he posted in September: "The End of The Job Interview". Since I have been interviewing notoriously, his message hit home. Instead of making a decision after a 1-2 hour awkward conversation, he writes, hire the person for a task. If they succeed, hire them for a weekend. Then make your decision.

Would you marry someone after talking for an hour? Of course not! Then why hire them?

The first thing I'm going to do when I'm hired is begin work in enhancing the process for my new company. Tack on Human Resources as something else I want to do.