Our guest speaker this week talked a lot about selling Grove City College to football recruits, and that made me realize how many big decisions in my life have been spurred by a sales pitch. I had never thought of it this way, but in college interviews, internship interviews, and job interviews I was not the only one doing some selling.
In these types of situations, I never considered that I was being sold on a school or a company, but I certainly was. These institutions need students/employees as much people need a job or an education. It puts everything in such a different perspective when I think that while I was sitting in a job interview, they were trying to convince me that *insert company name here* was the best place to work in the world. It is certainly in their best interest to be as “wanted” by the unemployed public as possible.
Institutions do this through obvious ways such as scholarships and dinners, but there are also more subtle ways that the employer-selling can be seen. Development programs, flashy internships to get young people in, trendy facilities, good food, diverse benefits, and even the nice, HR middleman are all there to convince you and me that their company is the best place to work. If the company makes themselves vulnerable enough to give you an offer with salary and benefits, they must want to feel reasonably assured you will accept the offer. They insure this by selling themselves to you all throughout the process- answering any and all questions, giving tours, validating parking, etc. I have even heard from many people that the taste they got from a company during the recruiting, interview, or even internship processes is rather different than what life looked like after full immersion.
Maybe stepping back and realizing that a potential employer is trying just as hard as you are, will take a bit of the edge off of the interview!
BoweryJE22
You definitely have a point here. After my freshman year of high school my church was looking for a new youth pastor, as our current one was leaving us to be a stay at home mom. We formed a committee and went through an intense interviewing process. Most of our candidates were definitely focused on selling themselves, but we had one candidate who was certainly looking for us to sell the job opening that we had to him. He turned out not to be right for our church, as it was, but we spent much of the interview process answering his questions about the job, the benefits, the environment, and so on. People don’t want to work in uncomfortable environments, and even in a job interview situation, the potential boss must sell the job to the potential employee.