A Current Affair had a story this evening about tips for job interviews. It was the usual fare…make eye contact, dress appropriately, etcetera, but what made this interesting was that they found two people who have been unsuccessful in job interviews for some time, gave them a crash course in interview technique, dressed them, gave them a haircut, and sent them in to job interviews that they (the people, not ACA) had already lined up.
One of the people went for an insurance job in a “Sydney skyscraper”. The candidate told us that the interview was short and to the point…he got the job, apparently. The other person went for a customer service job with Woolworths, and the ACA camera followed her in to the interview which just happened to be with a “HR executive” which one can only assume is code for “a high-ranking HR person” in the Woolworths organisation. ACA interviewed the executive after the interview and showed us a snippet of her describing the candidate with positive remarks. Not surprisingly, she also got the job.
A Current Affair then told us that they didn’t influence the outcome of the interviews. For the first job, that may very well be true…but highly questionable for the second. There is absolutely no way that Woolworths would allow a camera in to a job interview and then turn around and not hire the candidate, unless the candidate had done something on-camera to make them unemployable.
The Woolworths executive makes the whole thing even more suspicious. Either ACA took a camera in to the job interview and forced Woolworths’ hand in doing so, or the candidate got the job, and Woolworths agreed to a dummy interview for the sake of publicity…in which case ACA have misled their viewers by claiming that they were in the real interview, and claiming that the executive was the original interviewer (they had previously gone on and on and on about “first impressions).
Either way, it was a dodgy story, which is a real shame considering that, until then, the episode had been pretty good.
Samuel