interview horror story #3:
About a year after I'd interviewed at that weird airline software development company, their recruiter reached out to me again. I thought, "Ok, it didn't turn out so well back then, but maybe they've gotten their act together in the past year. I'll go interview them and check them out." I did not expect to get a job offer out of it. I went to the interview anyway just for the purpose of networking and getting some interview practice.
I always go into interviews now with the attitude of *I* am interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me. You can learn a lot about how a company is run based on going through that interview process.
Ok, so THIS time, there was a new VP head of something or other. Different guy in charge compared to who was in charge the year before. The company had grown as well. this time around, the interview was a grueling 4 hour process. It was kind of brutal, having to be on your A game for 4 long hours of interviews one after the other. The last part of the interview was me (female) with a bunch of men around a gigantic conference table. Also at the table was the guy they'd hired a year ago for the job that I had applied for back then. That dude had a chip on his shoulder and he was a butthead. Acted like he was the expert in ___ when he'd only been doing it for a couple of years and I had many more years of experience over him. He acted like I was a poser or something in my field. Total jerk.
Anyway, the new VP head of something or other was a nice guy. In the group part of the interview, they asked me a series of "What if" questions. "What would you do in this sort of situation?" Stuff like that. Most of the questions were pretty run of the mill and I'd had experience before handling those exact situations, so I was able to answer the questions pretty well.
then there was this 1 question. LOL. The hypothetical situation presented in this question involved the head executives of the national airline of Saudi Arabia. And the project was way overdue on the schedule. AND I'd have to give the customer bad news...that not only were things X, Y, and Z not done, but we couldn't give them a new target date yet. How would I present this bad news to the Saudi Arabian airline?
<background info>
Back in business school (when I got an MBA), I took an amazing international business class that was taught by an American professor who was raised in a small fishing village in Japan. The class was awesome. I learned so much from that professor about how important it is in the workplace to step back for a moment and consider that sometimes YOUR point of view of a situation is not how the other party is looking at it. And maybe something that you are perceiving as being rude (like being late to a meeting) is actually considered normal and socially acceptable in other cultures (Spain, Latin America, for example). Or how maybe it's considered polite to spend the first 15 minutes of every meeting asking about each other's families and stuff like that instead of getting straight down to business.
<end background info>
So when they asked me this question, I immediately thought of that amazing class in business school and all of the stuff that professor used to talk about regarding international business practices. I told the software company people that the first thing I'd do is make sure that at the meeting with the Saudi Arabian airline, that I had a male colleague attend the conference call with me. Preferably a male employee senior to myself.
Needless to say, they were shocked. They said, "But why would you do that?" I thought, "OMG, duh, isn't it obvious? it's no wonder you have customer satisfaction problems here."
So I told them this:
"I think it's important when you're doing business with companies or organizations in other countries, that you really need to consider cross cultural business practices and that we should not assume that the way that we operate here in the US is how they operate at their organization. Social mores here in the US are often very different in some other countries. Take Saudi Arabia, for example. It's a very conservative country in general. Women are not allowed to drive, for example. In general, women do not work outside the home and when they leave the home, they must have a male escort with them. A head of a Saudi Arabian airline might not appreciate hearing really bad news from an American woman. But the message I need to communicate to them might be better received by them if I were to have a male colleague or male superior in attendance with me so when the Saudi company wants to challenge the information or escalate, there's someone else there who they can speak directly with....someone who they will respect more."
The software company VP was really surprised. He said that he had never thought of looking at it like that. All of the other men in the room bristled and you could tell that they were really irritated by my answer.
Then at the end of the group interview, the VP asked about salary and he apologized because he said that halfway through the 4-hour long interview, he realized that nobody had checked with me to ask what my salary requirements were. I told him that my salary requirements were the same as the year before, which were ___. i was too expensive for them yet again. I was really polite about it, said that it was really great meeting with everyone and I had learned a lot about their organization and how they were doing some interesting things. The VP was very apologetic. Apparently he really wanted to hire me. I'm glad I didn't go work there.