#032 - Start Getting Offers: The Ultimate Guide To Interviewing

Did you know job interviews were invented by Thomas Edison?

It makes sense when you think about it. We didn’t need job interviews before the Industrial Revolution. Jobs were just passed down from generation to generation. If your father was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith. No drama.

But with the Industrial Revolution came factories, and factories need bodies.

Lots of people wanted to work in Edison’s factories. He would post a job ad in the local paper and get literally hundreds of applicants so he needed a way to whittle the number down. So, he created a 150-question (!) test that not only covered the specifics of the job but also general knowledge of the times (!!). Here are some of the questions:

• What countries border France?

• Before World War I, what country drank the most tea?

• Which is bigger, Australia or Greenland?

• What is the largest telescope in the world?

• What is a dinosaur?

• What do white corpuscles do?

Yeah. I know.

Other business leaders and companies cottoned on and the rest, as they say, is history.

(Who ‘they’ are, I don’t know.)

Anyway.

Interviewing can be broken down into three stages: before the interview, the interview, after the interview. (My genius - it’s almost frightening.)

Before the interview is all about your prep. The interview itself is all about your performance. (I mean the way an athlete ‘performs’, not in an inauthentic way). After the interview is all about your proactivity.

Let’s be like my new puppy with every inconceivably small space and get into it: