Interview Week!

This week can easily be called Interview Week! I guess I was clearing up the backlog of interviews that resulted from kind friends who provided contacts to companies that are employing but not advertising in the public sphere. Thank you RY and HY! And of course the many people who were the intermediate contacts along the way, such as BL, NL - without you, I won't even have had the chance to face the interview panel in the first place! (muarkz!)

Let's recollect backwards, starting from the freshest. I went to MV for an interview this afternoon, and although it was a nice fireplace chat of sorts, I guess I should've known from what the career guidebooks say that no matter how casual an interview is made to be, it is, after all, still an interview and thus the interviewee (i.e. me) has to be very clear about his goals and his background research. Anyway I was 10 minutes early as usual and met ADL, the HR manager. She was very nice and we broke the ice pretty quickly, discussing about her pregnancy and the impact of age differences in sibling relationships. After ushering me to a meeting room in the marketing department, she proceeded to chat about HR practices which were pretty interesting, to say the least. As they do not have any openings at the moment, I guess I should have been more cautious when I heard that they will create openings for deserving people. Before entering the interview, I felt I was compelling material, but I guess I was wrong. That, rather, was a signal to me that I should have sold myself like nobody's business as they are not in a rush to hire.. on the whole it was alright, and I felt we had a fluent conversation.

At that moment PL the Chief Organization Officer came in, which was pretty cool. Before the interview I thought that it might be a coincidence that PL was the other on the panel, but now to think of it he's the most natural person to be there since my resume seems to point towards a corporate communications/marketing direction which is his specialty. Things started off well, until we went on the topic of spotting industrial trends. Call me daft if you want, but I didn't practice these questions although I had expected them to arise before I went. So it was impromptu answering, and he didn't agree with some of my ideas and opinions. An example was the need to hire physical staff in the markets that operate and whether one can purely work from a headquarters like Singapore. I said no, it is difficult as the company will need the localized experience and he goes yes, it can be done. Another question that stumped me was what Creative Technologies should do now with its diminishing market share in MP3 players and sound cards, to which I gave a (lame?) reply of analysing current patents and work on their core competencies. I tried to add value by saying also to explore new ways of interaction, citing Creative's (flopped) attempts like the Audigy keyboard (interesting, but impractical) and Nintendo's Wii in the upcoming episode of the video console war. With regards to MV, I only gave (cursory?) replies that it is heading in the right direction - a big NONO cos it means I cannot offer anything of value to the company.

So that was the interview at MV. Do I expect a call from them? I'll be surprised.