We'll get back to you..............

This week has been dominated by interviews. 

Not interviews for work by me. That’s next week I hope.

No, I’ve been sitting on an interview panel to interview for a very important position for an organisation I am connected with.

It would be wrong of me to comment in any specific way, but it is interesting to draw some general conclusions from what I observed from spending ten hours meeting people.

Actors interview a lot. While most people might have five or ten job interviews in their life, actors can have that many in a month if they are very lucky. I would hate to think how many interviews I have done, but given that I have been acting for 33 years this I rather suspect that it has to be well over 3000. 

One still takes them seriously. At the end of the interview there is the chance of work and this is always guaranteed to whet the actors appetite.

For people who do not do so many job interviews, they must rise up from the tranquil sea of life like a huge mountain to be climbed. We saw nervous people, chatty people — another manifestation of nerves, arrogant people, and people who didn’t really seem to have understood what the job needed.

As an actor you are asked to read at an audition or to do a piece. Both of these provide an opportunity to display your abilities. For the people doing the audition to test competence. In most interview situations this is impossible. For a senior position, what skills can I ask someone to display? They spend most of the interview putting a spin onto what they have done, and they may have an idea of what they would do in the job, but it proves almost impossible to test competence.

So the people who were able to give practical examples of what they might do, and indeed what they had done in previous circumstances made our job much easier. Some people had no trouble telling us about their skills and their abilities - as they saw them. With no practical examples, and no one to call up and ask - although in one case we did this with spectacularly revealing results — it can be a hard call for the people making the decision.

Dress - although this was a senior position, not many of our ten candidates seemed to have made any effort on the dress front for the interview, choosing to rely on their talents alone.

This advice also extends to actors. If you don’t feel you have to dress in character, then dress up. I am not advocating the school of thought told me by one actress I worked with many years ago who attended every interview she did in full evening dress, jewellery and the works. She got a lot of jobs too. I just want people to look as though the interview matters to them. It makes the panel, the interviewer or whoever feel that they are worth meeting.

For actors you can’t go wrong with a simple black suit, polished shoes and a clean shirt. Some of our candidates this week had not managed to go that far.It just shows that you feel the interview was worth something. You’re there after all presumably because you want the job. Most people will have done a lot of work in preparation. Don;t let it slip through your hands because of how you look.

It will be interesting at our second round to see how other people view the final candidates that we selected. It will be curious to see if we can get the right person. At the end of the interview process it will still be a gamble and only time will tell, but hopefully we will be able to take a calculated risk.

So don’t call us........we’re still trying to make our minds up.