Job Market Stories & Experiences

Canadian sweatshop, an amazing place to be interviewed. It happened to me hundreds of times. Went to an interview and they start speaking a total foreign language.

Have you done ACDMS? or FYML?..Have you used PMS (ouch)? Also, do you have experience in FFWM (this I will translate in French Fries With Milk, but the meaning is total different)?

These strange questions can go over and over for hours in some cases. And strange as it looks like they can understand each other, you are the only one that don’t. More strange if you go for an interview for the same kind of job but with a different company the acronyms will change. Instead of FFWM you will get POPD or GIGO (this is really Garbage In Garbage Out).

You can fail an interview because of PMS (power modulated sources), or because of HITGIFOMCB (how idiot the guy in front of me can be). If you ask them to translate the acronyms in something understandable you will get the “Thank you we will contact you … never”. Or they will look puzzled: “Oh, you don’t know this, so bad? You should have knew it”.

It is amazing but what I can’t understand is how a “smart” person, can think that an outsider will know all the letters and all the acronyms. I worked in a few different companies that have this culture, one of them had a “Acronym document” on the intranet. The document was 300 pages, and they expect YOU an outsider to know all the pages by heart.

This kind of interviews you can pass only if the interviewer is a person that can imagine itself in your boots. If he/she is a hard head you will fail it from the beginning because of YATSTUA.

PS. All the acronyms in this post have a meaning, if you like please, find the meaning of them

Now, that I already had my first interview in two years, I would like to share with you some guidelines in How to pass a job interview in Canada.

1. First of all, you have to convince the interviewer that that job is the job you dreamed of from when you was in your mother womb. It doesn’t really matter how you think and who is the real you, you have to convince the person in front of you that the truth is: You envision that job from small ages, and it is what you dreamed of all your life.

2. Lie, lie, lie. In all my experience (and I have a lot) with Canadians interviewers, they don’t like to hear the truth, no way, you have to lie and to be a good actor, play drama, play comedy, play the role of your life if you want to get the job. If you are a person that like saying the truth, or don’t know how to be a good actor, than search for jobs in other places (US is a very good start, Europe, is not bad also), but don’t try in Canada, even you are the best of the best in your field the chances to get a job there are minimal.

Once, I was able to get a HR book in my hands, I was amazed to see in that book that they were told to lie to the candidates. What you can expect from a person that is saying lies, only untrustworthy things.

3. And here comes the next advice to follow, DON’T try to show that you are better than your interviewer, it doesn’t work that way in Canada, if you are better than him/her one day you can take his/hers job, and that is no good for that person. No you have to be lower than him and to stay there. Don’t be a smart ass, that will not give you a job in Canada. The only chance to get a job if you are smarter than the person is interviewing you, is: or that person will be retired in one-two years, or if the product is so screwed up that only a miracle will save it, and they are expecting that you will be the miracle.

4. The HR interview, that is the nicest part, to be able to pass it buy a book about interviews and learn it by heart, when you get to the interview only say the exact answers from that book. The HR person doesn’t need to find about you and to see if you can fit in the collective, no in Canada they need to know if you can learn a book by heart and if you can repeat it word by word. If you don’t have a good memory, forget about a job in Canada, it will not happen, go in US, where the HR questions are humane and you don’t need to learn anything by heart, or go somewhere else, where HR is made by peoples with feelings, not machines.

5. There are others, but first I am waiting for your comments….

I almost forgot how it is to pass a job interview in Canada. My last interview was almost two years ago and yesterday I went to my first one after all this amount of time.

The job, one that I can do it in almost no time, maybe three or four weeks of work. Done the same job before, very easy to do it again. The expected dead line for the whole project six months. First part of the interview went OK. And… here he come, the guy that doesn’t know too much, but he is the best what the company has, the person who is afraid if someone better than him will get in job in the company, all the others will find out that he is close to a fraud. And what is this guy strategy? A easy one, ask questions with the answer known only by him, or whatever answer is good, but from his perspective the only good answer is the one in his mind. In his defense: I can say that this is a very good strategy for someone in his boots, if the guy is better than him, he can say the guy didn’t have the right answers, and to fail him. If the guy is lower than him, he always can say “This guy is perfect for the job, he gave the perfect answers”. The results, I failed to pass an interview that I should have passed in no time. And I knew I will fail it from the second question so I had my perverse fun.

Now, this is what is happening in a lot of Canadian companies, you get a person in your company, that doesn’t know too much, but he can catch attention, he has charm and he can trick the others to think that he is very good (almost every Canadian company has one or even a few of this kind). The guy will get high in the company hierarchy and soon he can decide whom to hire. Now the thing is propagating, he will hire only people that knows less than him - because he doesn’t want competition, normal and in the human nature. The company products will lose in functionality, performance, … in a few years, the company will start loosing good people, and later will start loosing money.

What can be done about this not to happen? In Canada, nothing, is the way the things are working there. In other places, I haven’t seen it, and I think that is because the way of thinking there is different.