Dinner's on me next weekend.

As promised, I will try to arrange a dinner next weekend (Feb 10/11). Originally planned out of spite, from the Tremblant plans falling through, I've decided instead to make it a celebration.

Yesterday, I received my contract from Cadbury Adams Canada Inc. for a 6 month full-time job in their Regulatory Affairs department. I'll be working with Marketing to ensure label compliance. It's entry level, in the foods industry rather than drugs, but I still see the potential for a good future. Hopefully, I'll be such a pornstar that they'll offer me a full-time indeterminate position when my contract is up. I start on Feb 19.

Anyway, I've learned some lessons about the job hunt in the last month-and-a-half.

I sent out approximately 30-35 resumes and applications. Maybe about a third of those were cold, the rest were in response to postings. Out of those 30-35, I got 2 interviews, one of which resulted in this job offer. So, that's about a 6% response rate, 3% success rate. I remember my Dad telling me that when he was job hunting, he sent out 40 resumes, got maybe a 10% response rate and a 3% success rate. So really, during the process of job hunting, while the rate of return seems discouraging, perseverance seems to pay off.

The Cadbury job was referred to me by Leslie Yang - you all remember Leslie from Haig, right? Anyway, I honestly believe that if I didn't have her help, I wouldn't even have warranted an interview. So, like the Career Centre at U of T says, networking is critical in finding a job. We have friends in all different kinds of industries, who have working siblings and friends. Towards the end, I even thought about Facebook - after all, it originally started as a networking tool for university grads. In retrospect, I would say that more of my effort should have been focused on networking rather than responding to published ads and postings.

While preparing for my interview, I explored a lot of the kinds of questions that managers like to ask. I mean, we all know the typical ones and how to answer, but I was more interested in the WHY behind the question. Why would a manager ask a particular question, and what does my answer tell them? For the longest time, those damn behavioural questions stumped me. I thought they were the stupidest things ever. As I researched interview techniques and stuff like that, I came to realize that those questions are designed to establish if a certain behaviour is normal for you. By that, I mean given a difficult situation, how could you be expected to react? The key here is specificity. The rationale is if you can come up with a specific and recent response, it's something that you know how to deal with, because you deal with it regularly. The only issue I take with behavioural questions now is that I feel they're only effective if the candidate has some solid work experience. Without daily interaction with co-workers or team-mates, the opportunity to come across difficult and relevant situations is rare. Basically, what I'm saying is that they're great tools for interviewers, but only if the interviewee has work experience. Asking behavioural questions to undergrads or high school students is still stupid, in my opinion (U of T Faculty of Pharmacy, I'm talking to YOU).

Anyway, I learned a lot, and I think those three points were the highlight of my experience in the last little while. Besides that stuff, I learned quite a bit about cover letters and resumes, and I compiled a list of potential interview questions, and general pointers on how to answer them. So, if anybody needs help in their job hunt, feel free to hit me up.