A couple weeks ago, I did an interview over Zoom with a fairly well known tech company. In the calendar invite, there was a note about how the company uses third party software to record interviews in order to allow interviewers to focus more on the candidate. The email clearly stated that I could disable the recording if I wanted to.
When I logged into Zoom, sure enough, there was a third party in the call and a note in the chat about how to disable the recording. Being recorded does make me a little more nervous, but I wasn’t too concerned about it if it’s helpful to them.
When the interviewer joined the call, she also mentioned the software and that it was there to allow her to focus on me. She then told me that if I was more comfortable turning my camera off, I was welcome to do so. She said that she would also probably turn her camera off at some point because she would be taking notes on a different monitor and thus wouldn’t be looking at me. I’d just be staring at her profile while she made notes. As she asked her first question, she turned her camera off. I don’t want to stare at myself so I went ahead and turned off my camera then too. What exactly is the point of this third party software if you’re still not going to engage with me directly? (At the start of the summer, I had an interview with a different company where Zoom wasn’t working well and we turned off our cameras after a couple minutes to be able to continue. I didn’t feel less than human in this case.)
I spent the whole interview feeling like I was staring at a wall and speaking to a robot. I didn’t do particularly well, nor did I feel compelled to work for that company. I think the primary thing that makes me good at my job is how much I care about people! The interview seemed designed to reduce me to some component parts. No humanity allowed!
The real kicker of this experience was that immediately before asking that first question she said, “We’ve been remote for 20 years at this company so we know how to do remote well.” I’m not so sure.
In contrast, over the past couple weeks I’ve had engaging, conversational interviews with several lovely humans. I can’t tell you what a difference this makes. Some of these people have LinkedIn profiles that really highlight their humanity. I’m going to follow their example and rework my own profile. I really want to work with other humans on projects that support humans. Interviews that don’t make me feel like an automaton are certainly encouraging!
