the lack of turtles, the would-be librarian, and other people who didn’t realize they don’t want THIS job

We recently talked about people applying for — in working in — jobs that were clearly at odds with what they wanted to do, and here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The lack of turtles

I worked with a lot of field biologists who were unsuited, mostly because they went into the field since they loved being outdoors and then were shocked to find that the job consisted of very boring and monotonous walking off trail and meticulous record keeping. But my favorite not-suited coworker was fine with all that! Except what she really wanted to be doing was surveying for turtles. Sadly, not a lot of our projects involved turtles. She still did a great job, but all her field reports would include lines like, “There were no turtles,” “One turtle seen on my lunch break when I hiked a mile to a waterway,” “Absolutely no habitat for turtles in this area, but I found some likely areas along the drive to this site,” and my favorite, “Thought I saw a turtle, but it was rock.”

Loved her, stopped by her house once to meet her 20something turtles and had a blast. She eventually found a better paying job, sadly not turtle centered though.

2. The honesty

HR and I were interviewing my replacement. It was an admin position supporting a sales team and a few managers. It was going well until the interviewee said, “I hate being constantly interrupted by people needing things.”

3. The wrong choice

There was the internal applicant from a different department who stated in the cover letter that they were trying to move away from a supervisor they weren’t meshing with well. The supervisor who was central to my department’s work. Who was on the search committee. And who would be working more closely with my new hire than most of their own direct reports. Also, the cover letter was emailed to me separately instead of included with the rest of the application materials. I immediately touched base with HR to make sure we got that cover letter on file in case there was any pushback from the candidate (who we’d already scheduled for a panel interview).

4. The computers

I once was in an interview where an applicant spent a lot of time talking about how much he hated computers and working on computers. We literally work entirely on computers and were part of a public paperless initiative so…

5. The veterinary assistant

Applicant to a veterinarian’s office who was a) afraid of cats and b) squeamish about both blood and poop. This was for a kennel-to-veterinary assistant position, not receptionist. I’m not sure what she thought she’d be doing, exactly.

6. The junior reporter

One of the reasons I was a hit as a junior reporter at a rural newspaper was because of the contrast between me and my predecessor. Instead of having an interest in court stories, local events, and making contacts, she was working at the paper because she thought it would be a springboard towards becoming an actress in a local soap. The newspaper didn’t even have a showbiz or entertainment section, we had no connections with the soap opera, and we weren’t even based in the same town as them. I asked my new colleagues how she had planned to pull this transition off and the response was, “Well, obviously it was just pretty misguided and maybe she gave up after realiing that; most of the time she was either making very noisy smoothies while we were busy talking on the phone, or she was napping in her car.”

7. The would-be librarian

A couple of years ago, a retiring teacher called the library reference desk to ask about jobs in the youth section. She went on and on about how, after so many years of teaching, she really needed a job with peace and quiet. I don’t know if any of you have been in a library in recent years, but the youth department is NOT quiet – it is a hub of activity and lovely children and teens making lots of joyful noise! It is not for the faint of heart! Or for anyone looking for peace and quiet!

I did not tell the retiring teacher any of that; I figured it was better she say that if she made it to an interview. No retired teacher showed up in the job.

8. The honey bees

I research honey bees. Every year my group hires one or two field assistants, usually undergraduate students who don’t typically have a lot of research experience. The number of people who make it clear in the interviews that they do not want to work around honey bees is always surprising, given that we are very clear on the job ad that responsibilities largely involve working with honey bees. Special props to the guy who very earnestly tried to convince us to hire him to do his own research on stingrays (???) — my best guess is that he somehow thought it was a grant and not a job.

9. The teacher

My brother’s Leaving Cert Irish teacher had 16-18-year-olds making badges and learning songs, which she then had them sing for the principal when he came in. This was a higher level class and the higher level Leaving Cert Irish exam includes things like writing a short essay in Irish on topics like climate change or unemployment or drug addiction and questions on Irish novels and drama and poetry and back then had a section on the history of the Irish language, which included questions like explaining, in Irish, how the placenames of the country came to be. But yeah, making badges and singing for the principal!

She would have made a brilliant primary school teacher.

10. The anime fan

I work for a large financial institution and a couple of years ago interviewed a candidate for a compliance internship who had apparently confused my company with a cable TV channel and spent the entire interview talking about how much he loved anime.

Very sweet kid, but apparently he was like that in all five of his super day interviews. I still don’t fully understand how you get to the interview stage of a highly competitive finance internship without realizing you’ve applied to the wrong company for the wrong job entirely, but it sure made things easy when we rejected him for a lack of attention to detail.

11. The surprising choice

I was hiring positions for the student package center at a small college. One of the people I interviewed told me she didn’t like “packages, answering the phone, or dealing with people.” Which was literally the core functions of the job, and stated very clearly in the job description. She was so matter of fact about it, I almost thought she had to be pranking me because why on earth would you apply to a job where the job duties were entirely the things you claimed to dislike.

She was not.

I often wonder if she was surprised when she didn’t get hired.

12. The whales

I had to drop an undergrad class I’d been really excited about because of this. Week one of Intro to Creative Memoir, every single minute was spent by my professor talking about whales, showing us videos of whales, telling us what products we needed to boycott to save the whales. Every supposed memoir on our reading list was actually a book about … you guessed it. On day two I started a tally. She used the word “whale” nearly 100 times in an 80-minute class, “write” or “writing” less than a dozen, and “memoir” not at all.

I am firmly pro-whale but geez.

The post the lack of turtles, the would-be librarian, and other people who didn’t realize they don’t want THIS job appeared first on Ask a Manager.

View the full article