The Group Interview June 25, 2010

Well, fellow failures, I’m employed again! I’m back in Denver, working for a certain high-profile exhibition that will be at a certain local art museum until sometime in January. It was, shockingly enough, only the second application I sent in this time around … and I was even luckier than that, since I was still in Minnesota for the initial interview date, but they ended up adding more dates when the initial round didn’t produce all the people they would have liked. It was my first-ever group interview and I only half knew what to expect — I’d had multiple interviewers before, but not multiple interviewees, let alone 20 or 50 of them. A lot of my fellow applicants were equally clueless, which is understandable given that group interviews aren’t the most common thing, so I figured I’d write up a recap of my experience for anyone who might be looking ahead to one of their own. I was probably more thorough than I needed to be, but specifics are what I found was lacking with other interview resources, so specifics are what I included.
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To begin at the beginning: I struggled out of bed at an unholy 6:00 in the morning, caught the light rail just after 8:00, and arrived at the museum to find a dozen other applicants already there, waiting for the doors to open. I was definitely the most formally dressed person there — I’d donned my new suit for the first time in the States, and I was the only one. I had originally planned on dressing more casually, but I’m a faithful subscriber to the Dress for the job you want and When in doubt, overdress philosophies of interviewing, and besides, all I had to do was take off my jacket to tone down the formality. The other people covered a range of guys in slacks and ties to girls in T-shirts, college students in their 20′s to full-grown adults in their 50′s, though most people seemed to be closer to my age.

Once we were settled inside, divvied up into four or five tables of people, we got a brief intro to the company running the exhibition and the available positions before heading into …

Activity #1: The “interesting fact” game
Each person wrote an interesting fact on a card and put it into the envelope at the center of their table, which was then shuffled with the other envelopes; the groups had to try to match the facts with the people at the table from which they’d come. When the right match had been found, the coordinator would ask follow-up questions to the person in question, which was especially good for people who had picked facts that led naturally into talking about interests and skill sets that would be pertinent to the job. I was more concerned with coming up with something actually interesting than something marketable, though even then the best I came up with was, “I can wiggle my ears.” (I thought about going with the fact that I’d been to more countries outside the U.S. than states inside it, but I figured that a lot of people would be doing travel-related things … and I figured right.) The intended lessons, of course, were 1) teamwork and 2) appearances can be deceiving, don’t-judge-a-book, treat-all-guests-equally, and all that jazz.

Activity #2: The puzzle game
Each group was given a gradeschool-level puzzle to finish. A few minutes into it, they took away the box covers that had the finished pictures on them. Then they told us we could no longer talk, representing not being able to communicate with our coworkers if our headset had died. (In other news, there will be headsets.) Then we could no longer use our dominant hand, representing working an understaffed shift with people out sick.

Activity #3: Problem-solving
First we wrote out individual solutions to a given work-specific problem, which was put in an envelope and submitted to the coordinators separately, so it actually became part of our application package. Then each group discussed their problem, agreed on a solution, and acted it out as a skit.

By this time it was 11:30 — time for lunch, ahead of schedule. We were told that we could come back in an hour, when the list of applicants selected for individual interviews (which turned out to be about 10 or 15 people) would be posted. I thought that I’d done decently during the group round, though not spectacularly, but I was happy to spot my assigned number on the list. One step closer to employment! I met for a painless 15 minutes with the appropriate coordinator; the questions were standard and I had a bit of a feel for the woman by that time, having seen her operate during the morning’s activities. After some chatting with the other interviewees, who were all pretty cool people, I went on my merry way … home to await the job offer e-mail, which arrived a week later!

I worked my first shift yesterday, but the exhibition doesn’t open to the public until Monday, which is when the real craziness will begin. But I’m pretty comfortable with the job now, I like all of my coworkers and supervisors, and the setting is pretty awesome. So other than the one drawback that it will end in six months … life is good.