Re: Preparation for a phone screen interview

[Tom Storer <tstorer_tw -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

--- John Posada <john -at- tdandw -dot- com> wrote:
> If the requirement was phrased "Have you ever used
> ABC Flowcharter?", then
> the answer would have been "No, but since I
> understand it is similar to
> Visio, I expect that I can be up to speed in a few
> hours." However, that
> wasn't the requirement.

I see your point. I still say you run a certain risk
of finding that you are mistaken in your
"understanding" of what an unfamiliar tool is similar
to, and if that then causes you to miss a deadline
because you have to learn it, you will appear to have
been dishonest even if, in your heart of hearts, you
had no such intention. 

You may reply that you would not represent your skills
that way to the interviewer unless you were *really,
really sure* the new tool was what you thought it
would be; or that you are Superman and no new tool
could withstand your onslaught. ;-) And therein lies
the problem with debating about entirely hypothetical
situations: we could keep adding assumptions and
what-ifs indefinitely.

I'm not a consultant but a salaried employee, and I
concede that job-seeking is not the same affair for
you as for me. Perhaps I have a more timorous
personality as well, who knows.

> Suppose if you had answered 3, their response was "I
> really am not
> interested in your opinion of what you think you can
> do. I need results. Can
> you create flowcharts or not?"

Voilà, another what-if. I'll answer this one and
decline to fire back another what-if of my own. 

In this what-if, the hypothetical interviewer has
recast the question so that it doesn't mention ABC
Flowcharter. The first version implies that they
specifically want to know your experience with ABC
Flowcharter *as well* as your general flowcharting
chops, this one clearly implies that ABC Flowcharter
is just a detail. But if someone said that to me in an
interview, I would probably conclude that I didn't
like their tone of voice and stop trying for the job.
;-)

To conclude, note the contradiction between your
hypothetical interviewer's "I really am not interested
in your opinion of what you think you can do" and your
later affirmation that "Managers are interested in
what you think you can do." Was that a typo?

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