Last week I saw this beautiful AIDA ship in Hamburg harbor and it reminded me of one story.
Back in 2019 I was on a journey to transition from Academia to Data Industry. Most of my applications got just cold rejections, even without any interview. Now I know why, but back then it was very frustrating. Nevertheless, having LHC(CERN) in my CV was helpful and I sometimes I was getting invitations to the interviews. Once I was invited to HeadQuarters of a ship-cruise company. They were looking for someone who can build in-house number of data-driven services. Their shopping-list was quite long and included things from price optimisation up to resource planning. To be honest, I was absolutely unprepared, had a very vague understanding of what we were talking about and absolutely no idea how to implement something like that. Two gentlemen, who interviewed me, were trying during the entire hour to find any experience I had, which could be useful for them, and kept asking questions. For a chat in a bar my answers would be absolutely fine. But in the setting of the interview it was just a waste of our time.
As you might guess, a few weeks later I got a very standard rejection email.
There are 2 lessons I learnt:
1. If you have an on-site interview and afterwards they don't show you the office or at least public areas, but instead you're immediately escorted to the exit, there is a 99.99% probability you will get a rejection email soon.
2. It's ok to blindly apply to every job ad you see, but as soon as you're invited to an interview, you should take it seriously and read the job description. The main question you should ask yourself: what do I have under my belt to prove I can do the job?
Did you have failures at interviews too?
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