Leadership Voyage

S4E1: What Not to Do in an Interview

• Jason Wick • Season 4 • Episode 1

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We're back for Season 4! Jason discusses:


Leadership Voyage
email: StartYourVoyage@gmail.com
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LeadershipVoyage
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonallenwick/, https://www.linkedin.com/company/leadership-voyage-podcast/
music: by Napoleon (napbak)
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voice: by Ayanna Gallant
www.ayannagallantVO.com
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[Music] Here welcome back everybody it's really really nice to be here for leadership Voyage season 4 it's been a long time coming it is March 2025 and you know honestly I have not been doing anything with this podcast for for many many months and I will address that directly here but it is really nice to be back with you all season 1 of episode excuse me season 4 episode one excitement for me uh to be back in it so you know I was thinking about this um for those who've been a listener for a while um I want to talk about a few things today um some of them are a little personal and some of them are of course in the spirit of this show which is trying to help everybody where wherever they're at on their their Journeys but um you know first things first uh 2024 was a challenging year for me professionally which made it a challenging year personally and I think that's part of why I stepped away from the podcast the second half of last year is honestly I didn't really want to talk about some of this stuff in a public Manner and uh I I'm reinvigorated to do that again to be honest with you but I'm going to get into some of that you know why why has there been a delay with getting this show back on and then uh second we're going to talk about interviewing today uh and we're going to talk about an interesting uh story in the Wall Street Journal that will hopefully bring a little levity to those of you who might be struggling with a job search whether you are unemployed or employed looking for greener pastures as it were and then there's a LinkedIn post I want to highlight um which I'm probably not going to reference directly but I want to talk about this that showed in my feed which is related to interviewing and um hopefully you all have some interesting thoughts about all of this so I'm going to get back into why it's been a little while since the podcast has been on talk a little bit about this Wall Street Journal article and then this LinkedIn post that I really want to highlight about the interviewing process so anyone anyway welcome back for those who are new welcome to leadership Voyage my name is Jason Wick this is the podcast uh dedicated to your pursuit of becoming a great leader wherever you're at on your journey basically 2024 um was a challenging year for me I had to uh go through a couple of different layoff scenarios um both as the manager and as the employee and so I'm here today with a an entirely different environment in my own personal work life which makes it a different perspective for me um I am working on launching my own thing at this point which is a totally different place to be uh in 2025 compared to

2024 you know um I have been faced with the realities of what it is like to have been laid off it's it's very interesting um I haven't been out of work in a prototypical sense for honestly it's been almost 20 years and that's the challenge that I've been facing personally and um it's allowed me to see things in a different way and it's allowed me to maybe think about taking courageous steps that I was too afraid to take before and that's okay right that's that's good trying to find the proverbial uh lemonade when given lemons uh right but what it gave me above all when it came to the podcast is it gave me time to think I didn't want to do the podcast in the second half of 2024 and um for those of you who've been listening I had talked to uh to some other guests about their Journeys and and they've also face challenges with um not wanting to do their own podcast honestly uh sometimes the pressure of just putting it out becomes more important than the actual reason to do it so for me I just thought I should stick to following what I wanted to do because I didn't want to create episodes that were just phoning it in in essence but it did give me this time to think about why do I have a podcast and and I I've got this podcast to help people become better leaders and managers that's the whole point of it and so that's what I am renewed and focused on is helping people have something that they can use to help their leadership help their management and why is this so important it it's so important because we've as we've talked about on the on the show in the past work is is such an important part of people's lives if you go back to the beginning of season 2 and and I talked to Zach Mercurio about mattering right work is something that we spend a third of Our Lives doing it has such a profound effect on our well-being and mental health someone's manager is in essence equivalent to the most important person in their lives when it comes to Mental Health forx 70% of the population it's not just work it's a huge component of people's lives and managers are the key to that when people have great managers they have better lives when they have great leaders they have better lives and I don't want to lose sight of that focal point um in essence so that's why I'm back with the show that's a little bit of my journey uh about what's going on with me over the last several months and I want to talk about a topic today that popped up in my news feed uh this is a Wall Street Journal article from February 28th 2025 the author is Franchesca Fontana the title is the passive aggressive Donuts that tanked a job interview your future employer do doesn't want to know how you sabotaged your current boss's weight loss effort so maybe the first third of the program is like seriousness about the show and intensity about my you know Journey back to to spinning up season 4 and all that and that's great but but uh this is supposed to bring a little levity and this is targeted primarily for those of you who are looking for work either unemployed currently or looking for a different job currently it's also targeted at those of you who are hiring and I'll get to that in just a second why does this matter for those of you who are hiring so the Wall Street Journal has this series called if these resumés could talk and in all honesty I'm not exactly sure of the intent but for me as a reader I find it really entertaining and um these are real interview anecdotes from people that I find extremely funny uh and you know maybe it's not funny in the moment or the reason why people made these choices during their interviews but I'm choosing to take it as uh you know having it bring levity and and I think it's important especially for those looking for work when when they've been in the trenches for months fighting the AI tools that do job screening uh or or keyword searching right many of the people don't even understand how the tools work when they're using them recruiters using these tools don't even know how they work and it's a frustrating place to be people who are looking for work putting hundreds of resumés out there hundreds of applications getting almost zero acknowledgments of their applications this growing Trend at least I was hearing about on the end of 2024 where companies are posting jobs they have no intention to of filling just so they can get tax credits or tax um tax breaks I can't remember the specifics of that but it could be a very cynical environment for folks looking for work and for me this is important to bring some levity to the situation and I want to share some of these anecdotes from you from this article the passive aggressive Donuts that tanked a job interview so these are stories The Wall Street Journal is sharing from actual recruiters with their most interesting uh stories that they're sharing about interviews or or otherwise so here I'm going to share a few of them um the question they asked these folks today is what is an instance where a job candidates miscommunication misunderstanding or conversational misfire instantly CA them the role and here are a couple of the answers which I found really really funny okay so um the first one here is when they asked a candidate have you ever had a challenging Rel relationship with a manager and if so how did you essentially you know try to deal with that or make it better and and apparently this candidate said how much they disliked their current manager and you know many of us know that you one of the big uh no no in interviewing is trashing your your current manager uh they do not like to hear that right um this story involved the candidate sharing that their current manager was weight conscious and dieting and trying to watch what they ate but the person taking this interview who was this manager's employee currently apparently shared how under the guise of a nice gesture they would bring their manager a half dozen donuts every morning just to create that Temptation what a horrible thing to do right that this is something someone shared in an interview answer and it just is crazy to me to think about it what a crazy answer um so yeah that'll disqualify you from having a job uh here's another anecdote they're calling uh this one no filter when asking a candidate what would your ideal job be one of the answers they heard was I would get paid to do nothing another answer around someone's ideal commute my office would be next to my house and when they followed up with this person later what the heck are you doing with these answers you know and they're like they don't they have like I have no idea why I'm doing this uh it's just crazy but obviously if you say my ideal job is getting paid to do nothing and my ideal office commute would be next door you're probably not propelling yourself to the top of the list I would think right um another example that they're sharing here is when um filling out forms during the application process and the the um it's there's a line marked at the bottom of it which said sign which of course is asking the the candidate uh for the applicant for a signature uh rather than signing it they wrote Sagittarius every time that it showed up as a Sagittarius I got to kick out of that one but you know just like don't don't sabotage your own opportunity here by being overly clever or snarky right I think is the point of here uh here's an interesting one I liked uh this one's called wrong suit apparently this uh this interviewee had a tip which said hey you should wear a suit to this interview and uh what they chose to do was wear a sweatsuit so yeah that didn't go over too well um but again you know maybe there's an attempted humor here uh to to just show the whole the whole process I'm so tired of these expectations or something uh but anyway that one will get you disqualified they already were given the tip to dress nicely and instead of wearing a uh a business suit they wore a sweatsuit uh and I've got one more uh that I want to share with you here which I thought is interesting um talking about an interview that took place in Washington DC where the candidate was facing a window outside the interviewer was facing the interior of the room and could not see outside and unannounced the interview e the candidate suddenly makes a comment uh about how good-looking a woman is who walked by outside of the window uh just unprompted so you know there you go maybe maybe not the most uh judicious application of uh of observation if you want to think of it that way uh making a comment about someone's looks out the window in the middle of an interview for no reason but pretty interesting conversations uh to be had here I think in a humorous way about some of the um interview no NOS that have happened the reason I think this is is interesting to think about though is when you think about folks making these choices talking about their ideal scenario being next door or doing no work um making a comment about someone's looks during an interview or or or actually wearing a sweatsuit instead of a business suit you know I also wondered about if it's more speaks to the mindset of someone who's gone through the fatigue of applying an interviewing so many times is it even fair to expect the best behavior from someone who has been beaten over the head over and over and over through this process of trying to find a job in today's world of work particularly in the white collar and it sectors where unemployment last I think I saw it was about 5.9% so much higher than the national average but a lot going on where there's just a frustration amongst the workforce but they don't really have any leverage right at this point there's not a lot of Leverage even though half the workforce that's currently employed is looking for other work it's really hard to find it and so going through this process is probably frustrating for the majority of the workforce right now I wanted to take this chance to highlight a LinkedIn post that's also about interviewing and this popped up in my feed with one of my connections I wanted to share it with you this is posted about a week ago late February 2025 I'm not going to read it verbatim but it's about someone uh who was giving a phone in a phone screening I think or a phone call with a potential candidate and in this post they are complimenting the potential uh candidate with um based on their behavior sorry I'm not being very eloquent right now so they were complimenting the phone screen uh person that they talked to and said that in this interaction the person didn't dwell on their past they were between jobs they were a victim of a reduction in force but they didn't really um think on themselves in a in kind of a woe as me way you know they said in essence yeah it's okay uh what happened to me with this reduction force is in the past I'm looking on the future I'm looking to make a positive impact on the next organization that I join and this recruiter is is complimenting their attitude is complimenting the fact that they didn't have woe is me attitude about things and what I find the most interesting about this post which got quite a bit of Engagement is the most relevant at least for my feed the most relevant comment on this post is actually kind of critical about it it's saying with the power dynamics so imbalanced should we expect applicants and individuals who are victim of reductions and force to disregard their circumstance to in essence ignore what has happened to them in the past and just focus on a positive you know maybe rose-colored glasses approach to the Future and there's an interesting dialogue that engages here by my account here there's a I think 17 replies to this comment with a lot of folks going on and that the topic of toxic positivity comes up and I guess there's just some food for thought in that right as an applicant as an interviewee you are obviously trying to look your best for the organization you're interviewing with you're trying to to read the room of the interviewer and I think it really brings up this discussion of what's the difference between you know honesty transparency and authenticity and how do you navigate that process and I'd love to hear from you all um about this especially those of you who are interviewing or um you know some those of you who are being interviewed or those of you who are administering interviews I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because it's an interesting topic right the leverag is with the employers especially when we think about white collar and IT jobs and which is where I've been coming from um in my own personal experience for the last 20 years or so and um I just find it an interesting topic right so the point of all this from my my perspective was to bring a little levity with some of these funny anecdotes of the interview process uh recognizing that it's a tough environment for those of us um who are interviewing and it's probably a tough environment for those of us who are searching for talent or hiring using AI tools we don't even know how they work um also a very challenging environment where you're faced with such a flood of applicants and where do you meet in the middle so that there's a productive conversation the interviewee is authentic but the interviewee also is um recognizing what puts them in the right place to to look good to an perspective employer and all of this stuff that's going on right and so that's why I wanted to record this first episode of Season 4 today was just to just to bring a little bit of that um in into the fold so a quick recap for today uh I'm really happy to be back it's been a while I think the last episode was smack in the middle of 2024 so it's been a long time it's probably been N9 months or so and leadership Voyage season 4 is officially kicked off I wanted to share that Wall Street Journal article with you again it's called um the passive aggressive Donuts that tanked a job interview February 28th Francesca Fontana and then also this LinkedIn post that I saw which is complimenting someone for their mentality about Not Looking Back and focusing on the future while the dialogue also questions whether that's an appropriate mentality for applicants is it toxically uh is there toxic positivity in that so interesting topics today all right folks it's great to be back for those of you following along you can email me at any time start your Voyage gmail.com um all the show notes are going to be in the podcast and the episode notes so um looking forward to a strong 2025 and until next time everybody take care

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