I had conducted my first interview. For me the experience was good, I learned a lot about how to conduct myself in an interview, and what kind of things to look out for. One of the most important lessons I learned however, had nothing to do with how to actually conduct the interview, rather it was the principle of why you’d want to mark someone as not a probable candidate.

The candidate that I interviewed wasn’t technically strong, and had incredible difficulty articulating their intentions. But by giving them a negative review, I wasn’t obviously doing them any favors. But that’s the thing. I’m not supposed to. I’d actually be doing them a disservice because if they’re not ready to take on the challenges of the program by completing relatively simple interview questions with any amount of time to prep, they would struggle heavily with limited amount of time to study concepts for assessments. And if they had picked up and moved, and happened to be dismissed because they were struggling to keep up, I would have wasted their time and resources.

While this reasoning isn’t all encompassing, it seems to cover majority of the cases where applicants are technically weaker. I always get bummed out when an applicant doesn’t do well, because I do want them to succeed, but not by doing them a favor. In the long run, that’d only hurt them and App Academy.

After my shift yesterday, we started working on cover letters. While it is a bit tedious, finding a company you really want to work for and writing a cover letter to tailor to their company isn’t hard if you have the basic ideas. I look forward to completing and refining my current cover letter, and really work on writing cover letters that tailor to various companies I would love to work at.

That’s pretty much it for today! Talk to you guys tomorrow!