Do You ‘Dream’ of a job?

One often comes across elaborate write-ups on how to crack an interview and bag the ‘dream job’ these days. All these articles talk about certain characteristics of a human being about to face an interview panel and the first advice they give is almost always to deny those characteristics and emotions and be someone that one actually isn’t.

For example, all these write-ups would inevitably ask you not to be nervous. While it’s common knowledge that being unnecessarily nervous about things which are beyond one’s control doesn’t help (whether it’s an interview or a football match) in any whichever way, the writers seem to suggest that there must be a chirpy, feel-good, festive mood about it, whereas the reality is that someone would have not gone for an interview in the first place if it wasn’t of some if not utmost importance to him.

Then they go on talking about the perfect style of dressing, gesture and posture before, during and in cases even after the interview! They advise people to be confident and smart even if they do not know the answer to a very specific question. The idea is to utter the unspoken words ‘I’m Bond...’ somehow even when one is simply not doing well during the interview!

These articles promote hygiene in so far as they ask you to cut and file your nails before an interview. They though don’t advise you to brush your teeth in the morning and bathe. I guess they assume that every interviewee does so without any ‘expert’s advice’. In that case, couldn’t they leave the rest of the decisions such as cutting nails and dressing up to the wisdom of the interviewees?

These articles ask you not to be a rambler. They advise you to speak less and in precise terms. It does make me wonder about all those colleagues I had who seemed immune to any form of counselling or medication to cure their verbal diarrhoea. How did they manage to bag the ‘dream job’! Were they successful in fooling the panel during the interview or did the panel itself was in dire need of good advice from another set of experts to look through the veil of the interviewees? Or, maybe it didn’t matter to the panel whether the person on the other side was a rambler or not as long as he seemed eligible for the post applied for and spoke sense?

Now is the time for some food for thought. From my personal experiences of being associated with the media for some time now, I’ve seen that it’s almost always the responsibility of someone to specialise on these vague, absolutely worthless topics, who was the least impressive among his/her colleagues during his/her own interview. Would or could a journalist (nowadays even the guy who’s in-charge of the car pool of a media organisation claims to be one) be genuinely interested in writing these articles? Or, would any editor summon his best reporter to write such articles?

Now, there are certainly captive readers of these articles, even if all of them say the same things over and over again. There is no dearth of job-seekers all over the world and in their moments of anxiety, it’s but obvious that they would look for another opinion on a topic that apparently interests them, particularly when the opinion is published in a newspaper or website widely read. But isn’t it a classic case of exploiting human weaknesses in another form? To make matters worse, some of these so called journalists have now decided to write books on this ‘immensely important’ subject!

I am of the opinion that there is nothing like a ‘dream job’. And if someone ‘dreams’ of working for someone else or in other words, bagging a job then he/she could do a great favour to the world by not offering his/her two cents worth on someone else’s dreams or aspirations.