A FEW YEARS BACK ON FACEBOOK, I POSTED A SERIES OF 50 ESSAYS ON MY NEARLY 30 YEARS AS A BOOKSELLER. THE INTENT WAS (AND KIND OF STILL IS) TO DO 50 MORE AND THEN PUBLISH THEM AS A BOOK. JUST NEED TO FIND THE TIME TO DO THAT. MEANWHILE, HERE'S ONE OF MY FAVORITE PIECES.
Interviewing is a necessary evil if you’re a Retail Manager but I never cared for it.
A typical Waldenbooks interview consisted of about 20 minutes of asking the company’s pre-planned questions to your interviewee while they fed you back the answers that you wanted to hear.
“This job often consists of heavy lifting. Would you be able to lift up to 50 pounds?”
“Sure.”
“Great. Next question. What is your favorite book?”
(Remembering one they read in school) “Uh…I guess Lord of the Flies.”
“What did you like about it?”
“It had a good ending.”
“Okay, moving on. Next question.”
With these interview questions, every interview was essentially a crapshoot. One time Brenda took a young woman in the back to interview her and they were back there for two full hours! The rest of us were joking about what was taking so long. Eventually the bell on the back door rang and the young lady came walking straight out. I stopped her before she could exit and said, “Just wanted to tell you that was Brenda’s longest interview ever. Pretty sure you’ve got the job.” Turned out she did…and I later married her.
Brenda had me sit in on interviews sometimes but I never really had to solo on them until I was actually promoted to Store Manager in 1995. Unlike Brenda, I wanted to teach my own inherited Assistant, Cheryl, to do interviews (figuring that the more people trained to do my job, the easier it would be for me) so I let her solo on one early on. She and a young woman were in the back room talking and I would go in and out just checking on them. Neither one seemed particularly animated. I finally asked, “Everything going okay?”
“Oh, fine. I guess we’re about through. Did YOU have any questions for her?
Off the top of my head, I said, “What’s your favorite TV series?”
That did it! Suddenly she was animated. Spinning around in her chair, she said, “Oh, that’s an easy one! STAR TREK!” She proceeded to then do about 10 minutes of “selling” us on the brilliance of STAR TREK, ending by showing us her STAR TREK-related ankle tattoo.
She apologized for her “unprofessionalism” but I said, “Can you start Monday?” Maureen did and turned out to be one of the very best booksellers I ever worked with and a wonderful human being, besides!
Eventually, I decided to give up their stupid standardized interviews and make them more into just chats. I cheated a little when I sat down and wrote some questions along the lines of the “television” question, designed to tell me useful things about the interviewee. I’d start out with the company’s questions, by that point in a thin booklet they sent us dozens of copies of per month. I’d ask one or two and then I’d say, “This is ridiculous! Let’s just talk!” and I’d rip the booklet in half and toss it in the garbage. Then we’d chat about life for about half an hour. I’d be talking about how much I hated to clean my room as a kid, for instance, and get them telling me how in-depth they were when it came to cleaning. We’d talk about movies, TV, parents, kids, whatever animated them.
I hired one girl because she had blue hair. As we talked, she said her mother kept nagging her that no one would hire her with blue hair and she was going to make her dye it back to normal…so I hired her. She worked out great for a short while but then her mother made her do it anyway and she freaked out and quit.
Brenda’s hiring instincts had always been pretty good, in spite of her actual interviews so I learned to trust my instincts as well. One person got bad references but I hired them anyway and they lasted for years, going on to manage a bookstore elsewhere. Another person I was worried was trying to steal a dirty magazine instead asked me for an interview just before I was going to confront him. He also worked out extremely well. One young woman seemed very shy at the beginning of our interview but by the end, we both said it felt like we’d known each other all our lives. She also worked out and we remain friends to this day.
One guy, though, I had a great interview with. We had a lot in common. He collected comic books, liked the same movies and TV shows and his interview was memorable all around. He quickly became a millstone around my neck for various reasons and since firing him was tricky and involved all sorts of warnings and write-ups, I literally talked him into quitting.
One night a woman and her two kids came in. Well, hardly kids. Her son was in his early 20s and her daughter 18. The woman said, “Are you hiring?”
“Yes”
“My daughter is looking for a job.”
I looked at the girl and asked her a question. Again, her mother answered. I asked another question. Again, the mother gave the response. Next time I asked, “Can SHE talk?” This ticked off the mother but the girl laughed and I agreed to interview her. I didn’t end up hiring her…then. Normally after an interview is over, I would quickly forget the names of rejected candidates. In this case, though, six months later when I found myself hiring again, I remembered her name and my instincts told me to call her in for another interview. This time I hired her and she was great. So great that I later hired her again when I was at the airport! In fact, Brittany became my best friend, an unofficially “adopted” member of our family, and my creative muse! I even officiated at her wedding! (In a way. But that’s another story).
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