The Job Interview

by Tom Lutz

I

1. The job interview is decisive.
2. What sets you apart from the other applicants in this interview group?
3. Image consultant Sherry Mayonavies gives advice on how to create a positive first impression through dress tips.
4. Often the decision about a specific candidate—that is, whether he or she will make the next cut into the final 7 or 13—is effectively made scant minutes after the applicant’s arrival.
5. Try to get a sense of what the candidate would be like as a colleague, but without asking any illegal questions.
6. The phone interview is a strange animal, its feet and head separated by miles and miles of wire.
7. More often than one might expect, an interviewer can begin to think of a bad moment from the recent past, perhaps involving a lover or simply an angry motorist, and completely miss the candidate’s answer, remaining unable to recall, graspingly, even the candidate’s last word or two, whose timbre and tone still hang in the air.

II
As we sat down to dinner, the chair of the search committee was saying something about a store in town that sold many kinds of beer. This store, he said, had such an extensive museum of stouts, ales, bocks, lagers, pilsners, lambics, and porters that people came from miles around. Two Belgian tourists told him they had come to this tiny midwestern city only to see the famous bookstore and the famous beer store.

I was only half listening, of course, the way one does at recruitment dinners, jumpy, already replaying faux pas, my psychosocial antennae roaming the rest of the room, gauging the temperatures and moods, monitoring the chattings and harumphings of the other professors and their partners. It never occurred to me to wonder why the partners were there, but they were.

Fresh from graduate school, this was my first campus visit. All of it was new and pasted with anxiety.

The search committee chair, I slowly realized—it was his house, he was at the head of the table—was very excited about all these beers. He was like the man in a cowboy hat many years later who asked me, with hiked-up eyebrows, “Do you like to shoot guns?” nodding enthusiastically. The chair wanted me to share his enthusiasm for this fundamental source of pleasure in his life, and he was hoping—he was a very nice guy—that in sharing it, he could put me at ease and luxuriate in his own obsession at the same time. I slowly realized that he was giving me a choice, and I told him to go ahead and pour me whatever he wanted. He chose a very dark, thick brew— I seem to remember it being from Luxembourg, although that seems unlikely—which he carefully decanted into a special, thin, 13-inch-tall beer flute.

Across the table was one of the editors of the reigning anthology of American literature in a shiny new, light gray, bird’s-eye-pattern power suit, a man who radiated, at least it seemed to me, a barely contained dyspeptic cruelty. I had been unintentionally keeping an eye on him, my tail wagging low, ears down submissively. This was at the height of the academic star system, when the Stanley Fishes and the Stephen Greenblatts roamed the land in designer suits, logrolling each other through endowed lecture series. Turboprofs we called them, and this guy wasn’t really at their level of fame, which years later I would come to think produced oceans of emptiness in him, vast continents of resentment and a woefully enfeebled soul. But even that evening, having just met him a few hours earlier, I sensed something amiss....