I recently had lunch with two former colleagues.  At this time last year, we had all been laid off from our jobs.  Since then, two of us have found new jobs, but the third is still looking.  It’s not that she hasn’t had other things to keep her busy – a condo renovation, her wedding, and, now, pregnancy.  Which brings me to the point:  Once you start showing, you can stop interviewing.

I know this sounds overly harsh, disciminatory, and flies in the face of equal opportunity employment.  But it’s true.  Given the number of qualified, unemployed people that are competing for jobs right now, it’s really unrealistic to expect an employer to hire someone who is going to need at least 6 weeks off in a couple of months.

Still I wished her luck and recommended she wear a suit with a swing jacket.  That style makes anyone else look pregnant, so it should cover up the real thing.

My other friend at the table then told us about someone who had interviewed for a job working for her, in a position that explicitly said 50% travel, internationally – and asked if that was really necessary, as he had a family.

My next question to him would have been, is this your first interview in a while?

We’ve all said things during interviews where you can tell that you just shit the bed.  Usually, this is early on in the process, when you’re still a little cocky.  But then you learn from those mistakes and start playing a little more competitively.  Or you end up not getting a job that may have been totally wrong for you, anyway.

One of my biggest f-ups in an interview was when I interviewed for a marketing job with an online publication.  The interviewer asked me how I felt about pitching in on sales.  To this day I have no idea why this came out of my mouth: “Well, as long as it isn’t cold-calling.”

I might as well have farted.

However, despite the fact that I really needed a job at the time, I can look back and see that I would have been miserable if I had to do cold-calling.  I’m glad I didn’t get that job.  But I also hope I never make another mistake like that in an interview.

I was recently reminded of how at this time last year, I was unemployed.  It kind of hit home with a really loud thud as I became mildly annoyed at being asked by a friend to look at her resume for the 99^th time… then I remembered that she had been laid off before me and was still out of work.  I now need more than two hands to count the number of friends who are out of work, some of whom for more than a year.

I am, in a word, lucky.  Very lucky.

Being the relative success story in the group makes me the number sounding board, I guess, and I will gladly do it.  I listen to many conversations about how interviews went, help tweak many cover letters, and read email after email about positions they’re interested in – and should they go after it.  Yes, go after it.  What do you have to lose?  As someone who had been there, let me tell you – you have nothing to lose.  Your pride?  Get over it.  Your time?  Well, that’s the one thing you have plenty of.

But I’m not writing to provide what is probably the opposite of the advice I had read (“target your search, blah, blah, blah”).  I wanted to rant about something I think all of us have come across: the pumping-you-for-information interview.  You know, when you apply for a position, get the call for an interview, and then spend an hour with several members of that company’s team asking you questions that have everything to do with your previous employer and their products, services, marketing practices, etc. – and nothing to do with your qualifications.  Sometimes they even give you scenarios and ask you to provide ideas.  Ideas that they hastily write down, unless they’ve asked you to write it down for them.

Now, many jobs will ask you to do some problem solving to ensure that you have an understanding of the job, but you can tell which ones are legitimately testing you and which ones are just using you to steal information or ideas.  The most telltale difference is that the former will wait until round 2 or 3 in the interview process, after they’ve determined they’re already interested in you –and you’re interested in them.  The latter springs it on you in the first meeting, before you even have a chance to think about it.  Also, if they never ask you about other jobs, or have even printed out your resume, those could be bad signs.

I’ve been on those interviews before, and I always come out angry and wondering if there was even an opening.  Now able to recognize these interviews fairly early on, I usually shift the conversation away as much as possible and try to redirect as many questions back to them as I can.   But I’ve decided that if  I’m on one again in the future, I hope I have the balls to tell them this:  If they’re this hard up for new ideas, then maybe they should dump some existing employees and actually hire new ones.