Interview Part II

Well the moment has finally arrived, I'm interviewing for two more members of my team. It's only taken 9 months to get round to it.

This time around we spared no expense and ran a single advert in the local Southampton Echo newspaper. Within two weeks we had nearly 50 applicants. Compare this to last December when we posted a single advert at the job centre and received a mammoth..... 2 responses.

After sifting through the CVs, covering notes, begging letters and bribes I managed to whittle the 50 down to 9. I called them up and arranged interviews, most of which I have now completed. (I've had one no-show, but out of 9 that's not a bad statistic). The hardest thing is now trimming the 8 I've seen down to two future staff members.

I think for the sake of privacy it would be wrong of me to go into details about each candidate, but what I can say is that choosing the top pair was an almost impossible task. I think the main problem is that I was only seeing the positive in people. If I found a fault I was calculating in my head how we could get round it. Everyone I interviewed had something good about them, and I could easily picture me training them for the next few weeks.

...oh except for one. I'll simply call him "Mr P". From the moment he sat down he kept spinning round on his chair. He spent most of his time looking around the office and asking about the TV systems we had. If I didn't know better I'd think he was casing the joint for a future burglary! At least that was one I could cross off the list.

I have narrowed it down though. Both are young (so we can get them cheap), and both live very close by (so early starts won't be a problem). Both have excellent numeracy skills and a passion for sport. One of them has a German A-Level (trust me, for this job that's important), and the other actually is German! Neither have to give notice at an existing job so by 1st August I could be the manager of a full team of odds compilers....

...about bloody time!