On Tuesday, Caroline had an interview. Actually, it was more of a meeting than an interview but at the end of it she has at last (and about time too), got a job. Caroline has had quite a few interviews during her career and she has never been unsuccessful. I, on the other hand, had several during my working life and was only successful at three.
I was an appalling interviewee. I have absolutely no idea why. The last one was nearly twenty years ago when feedback afterwards was never given and so I never found out. I have some ideas though.
The first interview I ever had was when I was seventeen. It wasn’t for a job but for a scholarship. The Birds Eye frozen foods factory was one of the largest employers in Lowestoft when I was at school. Every year they granted an award of £120. This went to a male student in his final year in the sixth form at Lowestoft Grammar School. Very 1960s that wasn’t it? No girls were expected to follow a career in industry. That person would be looked on favourably if he were ever to pursue a career after university with Unilever, the parent company.
I applied but all I wanted was the cash. I didn’t want to work in a factory and I’m afraid that this became all too clear at the interview. The only question I can remember being asked was, “On a wet Friday afternoon would you rather be in a classroom studying history, or out on the sports field playing rugby?”
What an absolutely stupid question - and I told him that it was too. That was my first failed interview.
I acquired my first ever teaching position without having an interview. In the summer of 1969 after completing a teaching qualification course at the Institute of Education in London, I was working on Quality Control at Birds Eye. I had no intention of ever becoming a teacher.
I had applied for a place on the teaching course in order to have a year in London at the taxpayers’ expense – no student loans in those days! The plan after that was: work at Birds Eye throughout June, July, August and September; pay off my £125 overdraft; save as much money as I could; go to New Zealand for the winter and play cricket; come back to the UK in the spring of 1970 and then think about getting a job.
But my plans were thwarted. The sequence of produce to be harvested and then frozen at Birds Eye during the summer was:
1 - Peas (June/July).
2 - Runner Beans (July/August).
3 - Strawberries (August/September).
At the beginning of September, tragedy struck. The strawberry harvest failed and I was laid off. There I was on Thursday September 4th with no job and no prospects.
“You could teach,” my dad said, clearly alarmed at the prospect of having to support his unemployed son. “Go down to the Education Office. They’re always desperate for qualified teachers.”
So that’s what I did. “Be at Roman Hill Secondary Modern School on Monday morning,” I was told.
Just think! If late summer 1969 had been a little warmer or maybe cooler, wetter or drier, windier or calmer, my whole life would have turned out differently.
Eighteen months later, I applied for a job at Creighton School in Muswell Hill, North London. Also there for interview was a young Scottish woman. We sat together in a small room chatting awkwardly, waiting to be called and I suddenly realised that she had absolutely no idea where she was. She knew that she was in London but when she told me that if she got the job, she intended to rent a room from her sister in Reigate, which is a town nearly 30 miles and more than two hours away and on the other side of London, I knew that for a potential geography teacher, geography was not her strong point.
I had one tricky moment during my interview.
“Tell us about the pastoral system you have at your present school,” I was asked.
“Just because we’re in Suffolk doesn’t mean we all keep sheep!” I retorted indignantly but the Scottish girl must have been even more stupid than me.
Three years after that, married and with a baby daughter, I had an interview for the Head of Department job at a school in Harlesden. There was a shortlist of six and after a tour of the school, the interviews were held in the education offices of the borough council. Of course, being a ‘W’, I was the last to be seen.
The six of us sat in a small, bare office and left one by one to be interviewed by a panel made up of governors, education officers and senior teachers, in a large room at the end of the corridor next to the toilet.
After the second person had been interviewed and returned to the room, someone said that they’d both been gone for exactly 5 minutes and thirty seconds. When the third person also returned in five and a half minutes, we all sniggered a little. Eventually it was my turn.
I sat through and responded to some mind boggling, unimaginative, dull questions. I noticed that one of the seven interviewers had not only failed to acknowledge me when I introduced myself but that he spent the entire time with his back to me, gazing out of the window watching the traffic and pedestrians outside. When I stood up to leave, thinking that I had acquitted myself very well, he continued to ignore me, staring out of the window.
Once in the corridor, I looked at my watch. 5 minutes 20 seconds. That was amazing. I would be gone for exactly five and a half minutes too. Then I had a brainwave. In those days it was the custom for the candidates to wait while the panel discussed things and came to a decision. Sometimes you could sit and wait for an hour or more waiting for a resolution. My ruse wouldn’t improve my chances of getting the job but it would give the competition something to think about. I went to the toilet.
I sat in a cubicle looking at the second hand of my watch moving slowly around the face. After five minutes I was bored and decided that I had delayed things long enough to earn some respect.
As I turned the handle of the waiting room door I couldn’t help grinning. Eleven minutes since I’d left. Tee hee! But the room was empty!
I was confused. It was now about six fifteen on a dark November evening and as I walked out, I could see that the offices I passed were empty but then, through the big window of one of them, I saw a face I recognised from the interviewing panel.
“Oh, there you are,” he said as I walked in. “We thought that you’d gone home.”
“So, I didn’t get the job then?” I said.
“No, but it was close,” he lied. “It wasn’t easy.”
“Wasn’t easy?” I asked incredulously. “You came to a decision in less than five minutes. It must have been the easiest decision you’ve ever had to make – or a complete stitch up,” I added darkly.
“Now, now,” he said. Things are always fair and above board here.”
“Come off it,” I said. “It takes about five minutes to say the internal candidate’s name and I suppose that she got the job?”
“Mrs Azikiwie Gbadamosi-Olanrewaju was appointed, yes. But I assure you that no decision had been made in advance. We are very strong on equal opportunities here in Brent.”
“Yes, obviously,” I muttered.
For the next few years, I didn’t apply for any promotions. I was never ambitious. Then one day I was asked to see the Headteacher in her office.
“Oh God! What have you done now?” one of my colleagues asked.
“Nothing that I can think of,” I said but that was hardly reassuring. The last time I had been summoned to see the Head, I could tell as soon as I walked in that she was furious.
On that occasion, “I will not have racists on my staff,” were her first words.
“Good,” I responded, thinking that was the right thing to say.
“I’ve received a report from a parent that yesterday you made a racist comment to his daughter in the new first year class.”
“Did I? I don’t think so.”
“You referred to her racial origin.”
“Oh no,” I thought, “She could be right.” It was early September and I’d spent all summer playing cricket with and against loads of Australians. I call Australians, ‘Aussies’. Did I call a Pakistani girl a ‘Paki’?
“What did I say?” I asked with some trepidation.
“You called her a Jew.”
Suddenly I felt relieved and a lot happier. “I certainly did not,” I said emphatically. “I wouldn’t know if a kid is Jewish. I can’t recognise Jews and even if I did, I would never refer to it.”
“She says that you did. Her friends say you did, and her parents are making a complaint.”
I felt dreadful again. How can you prove that you didn’t say anything? And there were witnesses too. I seemed to be in big trouble.
“What shall I do?” I asked.
“Well, you could start by apologising and see what happens then. The girl’s outside. Would you like to speak to her?”
Into the office came an eleven-year-old girl who sat down and gave me the sort of look of utter contempt that only Muswell Hill kids can produce.
“What did I say?” I asked her.
“You called me a Jew,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. Are you sure that you’ve got the right teacher? I don’t recognise you. What did I say?”
“In geography yesterday you said, “Turn round Jew.”
Suddenly it made sense. “Yesterday was the first lesson you’ve had with me, wasn’t it? And as we’d never met before, I didn’t know any names. You misheard me. What I said was, “Turn round you.”
This time though, I wasn’t in trouble. I had been called in to be offered a job. I became Head of Careers at Creighton School by default. The post holder had resigned and nobody had applied for the vacancy. In desperation (as she told me later) the Head asked me if I’d take it on. I wasn’t at all interested but as it would mean an extra £2500 a year on my salary, I said yes.
When Creighton School closed a year later, amalgamating with another school to re-form as Fortismere, we all had to apply for our old jobs but neither I nor the Head of Careers at the other school, who was leaving the area, applied for that Careers position.
Four external candidates were interviewed and as I knew the layout of the school and the department, I was asked to show them around during the afternoon before the interview in the evening.
The next day I found that I was not very popular with the newly appointed Headteacher.
“What did you say?” he spluttered.
He told me that the interview panel hadn’t met as all four of the candidates had withdrawn within half an hour of the end of my tour. They had asked me a lot of questions and I must have been too honest in response I suppose.
There was one job that I expected to get but didn’t. In the first year of Fortismere School’s existence there were 190 teachers but only enough teaching for 155 of us. We all had a lot of non-contact time and I was sent on a one-day-a-week course on Pre Vocational Education at Roehampton College, twelve miles away in West London. Every Monday morning for nine months, I would leave the house at 6:30 in the morning and crawl slowly around the packed and crowded North Circular Road. I would get home at about seven o’clock in the evening.
It was tough and an intense course but I stuck it out because, as the Head had told me when he persuaded me to follow it, “You’ll be the school’s expert on the subject when you complete it.”
Consequently, I was a little surprised and more than a little pissed off to see a paragraph in the Staff Newsletter in May informing us all that someone else had been appointed to the post of Head of CPVE.
“Isn’t that the job you promised me?” I asked the Head. “Shouldn’t you at least have advertised it?”
He wasn’t even slightly embarrassed.
I was once offered a position after being successful at interview but declined it. I was interviewed for a senior position at a neighbouring school. After my interview - I was the fourth of four shortlisted - I sat and chatted with the other candidates while we waited for the decision. After about half an hour, I was called back in and offered the job. I turned it down.
During the wait, I had found out that one of my competitors was applying for her own job. She had resigned two months earlier, intending to go with her partner to North Wales where he was relocating for a new position. Then he had dumped her and as she no longer had any reason or desire to leave London, she had tried to withdraw her resignation. The Head, however, told her that she was too late and she would have to apply along with anyone else who was interested.
As soon as I informed the panel of my decision the Headteacher went into a mini tantrum and accused me of wasting everyone’s time. I was immediately certain that I had done the right thing, as I would never have got on with her.
I was appointed to the very last post that I ever held at Fortismere after an interview but in reality, it was virtually by default.
The post of Co-Ordinator of Examinations and Assessments came up and the day before the deadline for the receipt of applications, I was told by a very senior member of staff that there was only one applicant and that I should, “Please, for God’s sake, apply for it. We can’t have him.”
I did apply, mumbled my way through the interview and that became my job for the last fifteen years that I worked.
Interviews are a load of bollocks anyway. I was on the interviewing panel for jobs at Fortismere a couple of times. During one interview, assessing only internal candidates, we had to keep score surreptitiously on the responses.
After the last candidate had been seen we sat in an embarrassed, awkward silence. At the end of the procedure one candidate stood out way ahead of the others according to all our score sheets. “We can’t appoint her,” someone said. “Could you work with her, Terry?”
“No,” I said.
The post was as my assistant and the person who had starred at the interview was a deeply unpleasant and universally unpopular woman both with the staff and the students. Some people excel at interviews and in the teaching profession at least, they use that ability to make rapid career advances and continue to do so until they reach their level of total incompetence. Unfortunately, by the time they get to that level, some of them - but not all and Caroline is an obvious exception - have caused and continue to cause, huge damage.
Knowing that I will never experience that rejection dejection ever again, is deeply satisfying.
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