Interview no's and woes.

If I've been lucky enough to get an interview for a job, I've generally gone on to get the job.

I'm good at expressing myself. I'm good at getting employers to see what a wonderful thing they'd be doing by employing me. Piece of piss.

Okay, okay. It isn't but I've generally found them a pretty positive experience and not been too bothered by them. Take my current job: I knew the way they worked from a little bit of research and talking to someone who worked for them. I dressed the part, babbled with enthusiasm about how great it would be... and got the job on the spot. My job for this summer, well let's say within five minutes of chatting on the phone I knew I had the position. In TV interviews are unbelievably informal. Or mine were anyway. More a formality than anything else I think.

And then there was today. A phone interview for something I want with someone I really want to work for. High stakes. Won't say more. I applied - not a particularly great application as I hate application forms (do you see a pattern forming yet?) and prefer to let my CV do the talking - and was pleasantly surprised to be invited to do a phone interview. The interviewer basically said the job was as good as mine as long as I answered the questions and they got good references.

So. Phone interview. TWO INTERVIEWERS. On a phone interview. On speaker with mini time difference time delay and pauses so they could write down what I said. Oh my word. I sucked.
I was incoherent, repetitive, kept forgetting the questions, became less and less articulate. I didn't even SOUND like myself. *sigh*. I have never had an interview like this before. The first half was very very formal where I had to site examples of things I'd done in my teaching career that related to the questions being asked.

My typical responses were:

'er, yes, one time i er, no, wait, er, yes, i know, one group had er..... sorry, could you repeat the question please?

I talked a lot and answered something or other each time, but I don't think I actually answered the questions that were being asked.

I can think on my feet. I can bullshit til the cows come home and through me hypothetical situations and I can come up with good responses but ask me to remember instances of things that relate to things that the nature of my current job probably hasn't given me the opportunity to do and, well it was a disaster. The second half was more informal and I had lots of questions and the tone was much lighter, but I think the damage was done in the first half.

I emailed to think them for interviewing me and they said they'd take into account that it was the first interview of that type (competency based) that I'd done. I took this to mean they thought it was as bad as I thought it was.

*Sigh*. I'm so annoyed at myself. I prepared well for the interview. Or I thought I'd prepared well. I was even pre-empting the shitty interview questions like why do you want to work for us? what are your weaknesses? what could you bring to the job? what would you do if students didn't talk, etc. But they didn't even come up.

I am gutted.

Absolutely gutted.

I'll get a formal response in a couple of days but I'm so annoyed at myself for being so crap.

I'll pull out the silver lining somewhere later down the line. Right now, I'm just horrified at how shit I was.