33 years have passed since my last job interview but I’m showing some form

You wait ages for a job interview and then two come along at once. Before last month, the last time I was professionally grilled was for the position of editor of In Dublin magazine and I only realised it was a job interview halfway through the conversation when Vincent Browne — the editor of The Sunday Tribune and owner of In Dublin, who’d invited me in for ‘a chat’ — asked what I’d do with the restaurant reviews in the magazine.

Still, I fared slightly better than my colleague and sometime occupant of this space, Philip Nolan, who on a later date was similarly called in for ‘a chat’ by the formidable Browne. Except in Philip’s case, the chat happened while he was wearing shorts and a particularly garish Hawaiian shirt (Philip, not Vincent) and after he’d had a couple of cheeky daytime pints, the consumption of which meant he had to excuse himself halfway through the job interview to go to the toilet. Anyway, miraculously, we were both hired and in my case at least, it would be a full 33 years before I had to undergo another job interview.

This one, at least, I’d applied for. I’ve always had a vague sense of civic duty where the census is concerned and being somewhat under-employed when this one came around, I applied to be an enumerator. And so it came to pass that I was interviewed by two serious people while I pretended to be a serious person as well. The interview took place over Zoom — meaning that my interrogators couldn’t admire the tracksuit bottoms I’d snazzily matched with my smart silk blouse — but that small detail aside, it was a proper 40-minute grilling with lots of questions about the value of data and my ability to prise the number of their working smoke alarms from reluctant householders, and some low-level lying on my part about my interest in traffic management and my fluency in the Irish language. They didn’t ask me about my hobbies — I think the point at which ‘hobbies’ disappears from your CV is the moment you’ve finally grown up, which at 55 is probably no great harm — but I did mention that I was fit enough to walk up hills, which they seemed pleased about (with hindsight, I possibly shouldn’t have volunteered that detail, since I was eventually given the job in a part of the city that is overcrowded with apartment buildings and, presumably, stairs. Given how difficult it is to catch people at home in those buildings and how much the former census enumerators I knew hated them, I eventually declined the challenge.)

And that might have been that as far as me and job interviews went, until just a week ago when my agent asked if I’d take a call from a film production company that again, quickly deteriorated into a job interview. There was a lot of messing at the start of this one, largely because of my unfortunate relationship with Microsoft Teams, which hates me. From my scant understanding of the situation, I was in my kitchen on one meeting while my interviewer was somewhere in London on another one, as we both waited patiently for the other to ‘join.’ By the time we eventually synced up the technical side of things, my interviewer was precisely 14 minutes away from his next appointment, so there was simply no time for me to tell him about my Pilates classes or lie about how well I speak Irish. There was, it turned out though, ample time for me to tell him about all the scripts I’d written in the past and attempt to dazzle him with how much work I had produced, even though he was the one who’d asked for the meeting in the first place so I kind of thought he’d have known all that. Anyway, I mentioned Pierce Brosnan because when you’ve worked with Pierce Brosnan it’s always worth mentioning, and because he was American (the interviewer, not Pierce) he seemed to like that just as much as the census people liked me being able to walk up hills.

And I can’t say much more about that because again, I was offered the job and I am currently ‘mulling it over’ and even though the company is American and the interviewer was in London, I don’t want him reading this on the internet and thinking I’m making a big joke of the whole enterprise. Because if I’ve learnt anything from my three job interviews in 33 years, it’s that it’s never a good idea to make fun of the interviewer until you’ve definitely moved on.