Job interview #6 this morning. I was actually looking forward to this one; I felt confident in my ability to do the job (Research Consultant/Project Manager with a public opinion & consumer research firm), and I'd done a lot of preparation for the interview, even though I was only asked to interview yesterday afternoon. I was encouraged by the fact that I'd only submitted my application the day before, and because the interview was with the company VP.
The interview itself went all right - we had a good conversation about Alberta, vegetarianism, and Conservative Party politics, and I got a sense of what the company was about. And then I asked "the question": "How do my skills and experience fit with what you are looking for in this position?" That's when I got it - the old inexperience card. She said first that she liked me - thought I was bright, intelligent, etc. (I knew there was a reason I got into grad school! ;) And then she gave it to me - I just don't have enough current quantitative research experience. This is an understandable assumption, given that I haven't done stats or quant methods since my first and second year of university, and that I have no training using SPSS statistical software. The thing is, anthropologists just don't do that stuff. And if it's imperative that I need to know it, training me to put numbers into software (especially when it does the calculations for you) wouldn't be a big deal. I was also told that my writing is both too lengthy and too academic, which I suppose isn't surprising either given that I've been writing academically for the last 8 years. At this point, I would like to send out a great big thank you to all the wonderful professors who gave me such hard constructive criticism during my degrees, because otherwise this all would have been very hard to hear in person! That said, I truly appreciate that she was honest with me.
At the very end of the interview, I found out that about a dozen other people have been interviewed so far, some of whom already work for research firms like this one. Any person with some sort of common sense would know by this point that there is virtually no way that I am going to be called back for a second interview. That just plain sucks, since this is a job that I know I could do if someone gave me the chance. And the thing is that if no one does, I'm kinda screwed.
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