Interview thoughts

 Interview thoughts

Yesterday I had an interview with Lincolnshire county council it was Kevin Brian and Zara.

Kevin works for the council bryan works for the regional adoption agency and Zara is a lecturer at university who has adopted two girls

The position is a performance support officer which does data analysis using Excel.

The first question was asked was why have I applied for the job why would I want the job.

And I answered that I have a talent for analysing data both qualitative and quantitated teasing out of it information that can be used to make decisions and to inform and also that working for the adoption agency meant I would be doing the work for somewhere meaningful rather than for example my previous post was for a water company and while water is very meaningful it doesn’t have the same passion that working putting children into forever homes that need a home would have.

There Was silence and a confused look so I think maybe this wasn’t the right answer but I’m good at doing analysis and they want someone who does analysis and it seemed reasonable to say that the company was somewhere I wanted to work.

I was asked about my use of Excel and I mentioned v lookups and pivot tables and functions and standard deviations and I couldn’t think of any further and again my answer was followed by confused silence from my interviewers.

I talked about converting the results from my analysis into computer programs that were written to automate the process and about data clouds and python, sap and scheduling they seem to want to know if I ever did reports and of course I said yes of course for senior managers who want the data in a particular way, which is different to the other data needs to be outputted for computer programming they still didn’t seem impressed.

I was asked about project management which I didn’t expect as it’s a data analysis role, however I have 10 years experience as a project manager so I talked about Prince 2 and lean competency and having 10 years of experience as a project manager. this didn’t really seem to do anything. I talked about facilitation and workshops and collaboration so you’d really think I’d be quite a good candidate having said all that and I’m not at all convinced that I got the job. Kevins questions I don’t even remember what he asked I think he asked about the reporting part. and I was also asked what I know about the adoption agency and I know nothing - I was hoping they’d be able to tell me about that that which seems reasonable as I’m the  candidate  and they are the interviewers. that came at the very end when I had a chance to ask questions and the answers given allowed me to talk a bit more about how my work will translate into their work but they didn’t seem interested by then. it’s like they’ve made up their minds and it when became relevant and interesting to talk about it was like there is nothing to be gained. They said ‘that’s very nice’ is if it didn’t matter any more. I still hope I get the job because it be nice to be doing something of interest even though this one pays very little it’ll be something to be doing and I think I could get interested in it because I honestly do believe the context is quite interesting adopting children. This makes me think of Daniel Palko and Victoria Climbie, and the cruelty experience of children and how in both cases I had wished I could take those children home with me so that they could be fed and loved and nurtured. But both died cruel deaths instead so I honestly do think this would be something I would enjoy doing I can do the numbers and improve the fight for those children that sounds like a useful and fulfilling thing to do.