Competent incompetence

Following ten years service I will be leaving my current employer in February next year. It’s been a while coming so I’m actually glad to be going now but this means I have been looking for another job and with this comes the inevitability of the competency based interview.

I remember the interview that got me my original job at said current employer. It was the oddest and yet most enjoyable interview I have ever had, before or since. It probably showed the square-route of bugger all about my technical abilities but likely gave a fair insight into me as a person. There were such questions as ‘If you had £1500 to decorate a room in your house, which would you choose and why?” I chose my kitchen and waxed lyrical about how I would put everything where is was accessible and make sure I was never working in my own light. I remember agonising for days about what I had given away about myself. The kitchen was at least a productive and potentially creative room in the house, I supposed. Would they therefore assume I was both those things? If I’d have chosen my bedroom would that have implied I was lazy and self-indulgent? When I eventually got the job I asked my boss what all the psychometrics were about and he said that they simply wanted to see if a) I had an opinion and b) was able to express it convincingly. No problem there then.

What was great about that interview was just how hard it would have been to prepare for and ultimately blag. It wouldn’t have been possible to do what most people do in interviews and pretend that everything that has been achieved by the more talented people around them was actually their own work. These days interviewers spend about five minutes talking through your CV and 55 asking you to ‘describe a time when... (enter improbable situation here)’. Call me a spoil sport but I find it hard to recall times when ideas ‘haven’t gained approval’ and therefore struggle to waffle about ‘what I did to overcome the problem’ blah, blag, blah! What I do say is often a montage of right answers rather than any genuine insight and therefore only likely to inform of my ability to say the right thing – perhaps something that large corporations are actually looking for, who knows.

There is a lot of talk about what women bring to the work place. Some speak of compassion, people and listening skills. Likewise, that older people bring more experience and perspective to the table. You will not hear me argue that diversity is bad, quite the opposite. But it occurred to me during some interview preparation recently that parenthood itself develops many of the so called competencies required in the work place. At our place these are grouped together under elaborate titles such as ‘Achieving Excellence’ and ‘Collaborating for Success’. I genuinely do not believe that my ability to ‘Persuade and Influence’ has grown more at any other time than when my daughter learnt to walk and speak. Being able to go where she wanted and say what she wanted (or rather not go if she didn’t want to) presented a whole new set of challenges to me as a parent. It became crucial to identify the ‘win-win’ situation for anything to happen.

Me: “Hurry up and get dressed, we need to get to nursery”

Her: “I’m watching Peppa Pig”

Me: “If we get to nursery quickly we can show everyone your new doll.”

Her: “Ok, mummy. But he’s not my doll he’s my brother.”

Similarly, when we discovered how competitive my daughter is (well, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree) this was put to great use by having ‘who can get dressed the fastest’ competitions in the morning. This was actually my husband’s idea proving that this isn’t a mum thing, it’s a parent thing. Problem solved.

The sad fact is that despite leaps forward in legislation, women who have children or are likely to have children are discriminated against in the job market. I actively avoid talking about my family situation in interviews as I fear mentioning my one daughter will prompt the mental calculation in my interviewer’s head – 1 female in her mid-thirties plus 1, three-year-old child equals pregnancy waiting to happen. I do get it of course, it is a nightmare to recruit good people, not to mention expensive, and I have no doubt that smaller companies must be crippled when even one member of staff goes off for a year. But good, experienced, clever, talented people should be having children so there’s half a chance of some good, experienced, clever, talented people in the world in 20 odd year’s time.

Raising children is hard, rewarding work. Working for money is the same. Done well they can both inform and improve each other. In our two-parent family my daughter already knows that dividing and conquering can be extremely effective in getting her own way. Parenting golden rule number one almost has to be to present a united front at all times and if that’s not ‘Collaborating for Success’ I don’t know what is!

Jec
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