The Interview

Several readers have asked how the job interview that I mentioned in my blog post on Aug 31 ended up so I thought that I’d put the results into this week’s posting.

To set the stage for this little story you have to remember that this was the first job interview that I’ve done in about 7 years, so I was admittedly a little nervous. Phone interviews always suck, and as I’ve already mentioned this one was going to focus in on my ability to communicate in Dutch.

I started preparing by walking through my experience in English, then once I had the pat answers down in my head (i.e. best project, worst mistake, weaknesses, strengths, etc.), I started to translate it into Dutch. Every time that I didn’t know a word for something, I would look it up and put it into a small cheat sheet of definitions that I could have beside me for the interview. By the day of the call my “small” cheat sheet was two pages long filled with various definitions, sentences, and phrases. I was amazed at how little business language that I knew in Dutch. It’s a lot different than talking about the weather or dogs in the park.

At 4:50 on the day of the interview, I locked myself into my office and ran through some last minute rehearsals in my head. The call to my cell phone came at 5:00 sharp. I answered with a formal greeting. The guy on the other end of the phone returned my greeting and then added something that I had absolutely no idea what it meant. It must have be something cordial…not a question yet, right? Everything drained from my head. It was like someone had rebooted me and I lost any semblance of composure.

I stammered back a daft reply, only to be greeted by silence.

It went downhill from there.

I found myself explaining my background in simple, 2nd grade Dutch. Loosely translated, it went something like this:

“At that job I did important work. I had a team. They lived in different countries. It was hard work, and important. We worked hard on projects. There was a lot of data.”

You get the drift. It wasn't exactly what you would expect to hear from an IT professional with more than 17 years of experience.

When I hung up the phone - after a whopping 10 minute interview, I never felt smaller in my life. That horrible feeling lasted about an hour…then I got mad.

That evening I sat down and wrote a letter - in English, to the guy that I had interviewed with. I clearly spelled out my qualifications and highlighted the ability to act as a communications bridge between the IT and business world as my greatest strength. I also outlined a plan to quickly improve my Dutch in a business environment. Every word that I wrote was bold, assertive, and confident.

The next morning I sent the letter via email. I wanted it to get to the guy before he had a chance to reject me.

That afternoon the recruiter that introduced me into the account called me. The manager had received my letter and was sufficiently impressed enough that he wanted to meet me in person. An intense, 4 hour face-to-face interview was scheduled. No mention of the disaster on the phone.

I met with 4 different people during the interview, and with three of them (including the guy from the phone interview) I didn’t speak a word of English. It was 100% Dutch and it went 100% better now that I was face to face. I’m sure that I missed a word here or there, but generally I was able to hold a conversation. I only faked understanding things once or twice and that was only a detail or two. I still was able to follow the general meaning of what was being said.

The fourth guy that I met with was a senior manager and I did speak with him a bit in English…mostly because he wanted to practice his language skills.

After the interviews were done, they had me wait in a conference room for about 20 minutes. The hiring manager returned with a folder full of material. It was an offer of employment.

So, it all worked out in the end. I rate my Dutch skills as reasonable, but the company actually felt that I was more in the “satisfactory” category. I think that is a bit of a stretch, but who am I to argue.

By the way, I rejected the offer.