The end of the Corrales story

Remember when I applied to a job in Corrales? Corrales is a cute town down by the river near Albuquerque, with tree-lined acequias running through it.

I applied to the job on a whim, mainly because someone had asked me to apply. (If I had gotten the job, I would have been his boss.) I met him when I called to ask a question about a house we considered buying in Corrales this summer.

My question was whether a small, foundationless structure on the property qualified as a “guesthouse” or whether it was just a shed with a piece of carpet on the floor.

And I wanted to know whether it was built with a permit. So I called the Corrales Planning and Zoning department, and got to talking to one of the employees, and ended up sending my resume. As you’re probably aware, we did not buy the house. But I did, eventually, get called to interview.

I interviewed for the Corrales job last Friday and I thought the interview went horribly. I totally bombed the questions; they asked a lot of detail about Corrales that I didn’t know, and they gave me almost no chance to speak about my leadership skills. I assumed they had written the questions like that because they had a favored internal candidate, who would do well with detailed questions about Corrales. From my perspective, however, they learned next to nothing about how I would actually perform in the position.

I was also unhappy that they refused to answer any of my questions about the job, saying it wasn’t the forum for that. Excuse me? Aren’t interviews supposed to be a mutual assessment?

Another concern for me was that the hiring manager didn’t play a role in the interview at all. She was in the room, but she never spoke once. I felt like she was completely sidelined, when, in my opinion, she should have been the lead in the process, regardless of the rank of the others in the room. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work in that environment.

By the way, Friday was the same day as we tried to buy a house in Santa Fe and lost the bid to a higher bidder. I just wrote it off as a defining day. In hindsight it wasn’t worth taking the day off; I worked overtime for two weeks to earn that day!

Then Wednesday I was stunned to get a call from Corrales asking for a second interview. Luckily I missed the call and they left a voicemail, giving me time to come up with something more intelligent to say than an astounded sputter and indecision. When job hunting, you always want to present the utmost enthusiasm – all the way right up to the point that you turn them down. Which I did. I called them back, declined the second interview and wished them luck in their candidate search.

I still don’t think they really wanted to hire me. I think they had an internal candidate and just needed some arguably qualified additional people to interview so they could satisfy their process requirements. But if they did actually want to hire me, they blew it.