Bite, damn Fish, bite I say!

I hate job interviews.

I particularly hate the "behavioural questioning" line that recruiters cream their jeans over, the idea being that a candidate's future performance can be judged on how they've acted in the past.

I had my first interview on Monday and, unfortunately, my past work-life is so much of a blur (2 months of Japan + China + North Queensland will do that to you) that questions like "Name a time when you have missed a deadline, what happened and how did you learn from it?" induced a cocker-spaniel-meets pit-bull look of helplessness.

Now, of course I've missed deadlines and made plenty of mistakes but could I come up with one specific time? I said I didn't tend to miss deadlines (simply because I couldn't think of just one) and they were usually beyond my control, so instead of coming across as a mature healthy mistake-maker, I sounded like an arrogant, ne'er do wrong princess. Errrr, hang on a minute...

The questions came in intimidating rapid fire with no attempt to make the whole process comfortable and I left the interview shaking my head thinking "What the?". I felt like I'd survived the Spanish Inquisition but my thumbs were still hurting.

And as if the interview wasn't bizarre enough, I got a second interview.