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Asking a Professional Colleague (Friend) to Come Along with me on my Job Interview (for Moral Support)
By Morgan Jassen
Next time I go on a job interview, I want to invite a colleague to come along for moral support.
Mind you, I don't know of anyone who does this. However I'm thinking it would be great if we did.
But how can I find someone who will come with me?
The answer is that a really great colleague would do this for me and support me. I'm thinking like a "Support Driven" (à la supportdriven.com community feeling) type of colleague.
No, I don't know that I'll be able to find someone. But I can ask!
But what else does this mean? I need to be willing to do the same thing for my colleagues.
So I will. I will offer to go with my colleague on their job interview. (I will offer in the same manner of suggesting any outing; I'll offer to go, if it can be set up with some days notice, and if my schedule permits.) I just set my calendar reminder to email this offer to four of my colleagues, one per week, for the next four weeks.
And the thing is, I feel deep down that this really will help our chances of getting the job. In fact I say this might be a solution to some of the broken-ness of the traditional apply-then-screen-then-interview job-seeking process. What do you think?
In fact this may be how to actually do the kind of helping that I started to write about in these two past posts:
Web Developer Professionalism (w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2016.php#2016-11-06)
, and:
Brooke Allen - The Idea of Care and Community in Hiring (w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2016.php#2016-11-08)
In conclusion, next time I go on a job interview, I will invite a colleague to come along for moral support. Furthermore, starting immediately, four times in the next four weeks, I'll write a note to a professional colleague offering to go along with them on their next job interview (situation permitting).
Note: this blog post is dedicated to week 5 of the supportdriven.slack.com 2016 6-week writing challenge. (more details here: "Stretch your Typing Fingers – Support Driven 6 Week Writing Challenge" ( https://supportdriven.com/...6-week-writing-challenge )) Join our community, here: https://supportdriven.com/support-driven-chat/
Tags: #challenge, #mingling
2017-05-25 Update: I've done this two or three times now where I've offered a colleague to go along with them on a job interview. The result is that in general it is not effective. Not particularly well-recieved by the other party. I'm going to mark this up as being a failed experiment for now, unless I can think of a way to modify it to be effective. An answer to this situation may be to, if it is really that important to me to have someone along on my job interview, then I should ask my friends until I find someone willing to go with me. But if I feel that I can do it on my own like is normal, or if I suspect it would be not-well-recieved by the other party for me to offer this, then I probably won't ask someone to go with me, and I probably won't (nonsequitur/cold) offer another to go with them. However the idea did spark some other funny ideas. The first was, I was actually on a job interview by myself. And I was asked "What three words would your colleagues use to describe you?". I thought to myself: "If I had asked a colleague to come along with me today, then I could say to the interviewer: 'They're in the hallway -- let's ask them!'" The second funny thing was, not funny really, it was that I thought instead of asking someone to go along with me during the interview, I could just ask them to meet up for coffee just after the interview. So I could have someone to talk through the results of the interview with. And knowing this might make me more confident during the interview, too.
[2019 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2016/... .html.]