www.fastcompany.com: Over the past two years, companies and employees have had to adapt to new ways of working, ranging from shifting how they serve customers to where employees work. But now, things are changing again. Many companies have or are planning to welcome employees back to the office, at least part of the time.
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A lot of things had to change for the pandemic but guess what? That's kind of the fucking point. There's a fucking pandemic happening and people are dying. And for once in their goddamn lives people have a different outlook on life about how things are supposed to be and happen because none of us have lived in these "unprecedented times" (remember that phrase folks?). It's like yeah, people are going to ask different questions about who they're going to hire because its simply a different time. It's not unreasonable to believe that people are going to have different expectations after living through such an absolutely shitty pandemic where they felt isolated and alone for so long. So yeah, ask me about how long I'll stay in an office or how I deal with managers asking me about deadlines or some shit. Just give me a job to survive this pitiful life.
I thought this article gave a pretty good insight into the changing landscape in interviews as a lot of positions are transitioning from stagnant to active, or even settling permanently as something remote. While all these were really good points, I can’t stop thinking about the very last paragraph. I do not think it is helpful to ask the question of whether or not someone is ready to go back to a full working schedule after spending two years going back and forth and/or spending some time strictly from home. I do not think I have met anyone who was honestly one hundred percent prepared about going back into their workplace. Even those who were leaning towards the confident side are going to need some time to re-adjust. Just yesterday I was working on tech for my show, and the person giving the cast a walkthrough of the space turned back to me and said “am I doing okay? I’ve never done one of these before.”
Although, I am fairly young to the industry. I have been on a very large number of interviews in the last five or so years. All things considered, I noticed a significant tonal shift in the theatrical interviews I participated in for summer work in the last few months. They were far more casual and centered the candidates, I think companies, especially theatre companies, have had to adjust to better serve their workers and artists. This is allowing employees to have more freedom and individual opinions on the structure of their work. I think this is a really wonderful thing to come out of COVID. I really enjoyed all of the interviews I have done since the start of 2022 because I feel like I have really had the opportunity to connect with the people interviewing me, and it made my decision as to which company’s offer I wanted to take far easier.
One concept I found particularly interesting while reading this article is the concept of including vaccination status on resumes. This is not something I heard of before the pandemic so it is clear employers are specifically interested in coronavirus vaccine status. This an important factor in workplaces today since companies want to keep their employees safe and protect their companies from another pandemic. The statistic that hiring managers eliminated “resumes that don’t include vax status” is quite significant and makes me consider including it in my future resumes. Another concept in this article that I find interesting is making sure a candidate can communicate in a variety of forms including how they make sure everyone feels included and heard in a hybrid format. This is applicable to the theatre industry because as a stage manager during the pandemic, there were many times my high school had hybrid rehearsal and it was important for me to make sure attention was evenly distributed.
I think I can safely say that this is one of the “good” things to come from the pandemic. Not necessarily that the interview questions have changed but because a company's expectations have. A good company should be ever-evolving and as pointed out in the article, many companies were forced to change what they needed from their employees when the pandemic hit. This also means that job requirements as a whole shifted and there was a relaxation that washed over the entire workforce because everyone was expected to do less. This, of course, was underlined by the anxiety of the entire pandemic so no one was really reaping the benefits of this shift. Looking back now though I do think that some of the new changes brought by the pandemic were good shifts. Like telehealth for example. While this was something that has always been available it is a resource that many people stayed away from either just because they didn’t know it existed or because of the stigma surrounding it. It is cool to see how such external factors can shift the workforce as a whole.
None of these questions were particularly surprising, especially the ones that focused on an employee's readiness to return to the office in person, but I did like that it seems like most companies aren't just ignoring the fact that the pandemic, and the many things that have happened during it, just hadn't happened. Too many people I feel are too eager to just jump back into the old normals and pretend that the past two years never happened. And, even more than that, if these interview questions are widespread enough, companies seem interested in continuing that change moving forward. Particularly, the increase in questions around DEI is very good to see, since it implies that companies are starting to actually take some of the progress of the last two years to heart. But also, it's good to know these things from an employee standpoint, since it means that the company I'm interviewing for would have a good focus and (hopefully) share some of the same values that I do.
Here’s a pretty big shift I noticed in this article: a lot of those sections have pretty strong correlation to centering candidate’s needs and preferences. For example, of course COVID is, and has been, a huge topic at interviews because this pandemic is STILL GOING ON. So I think asking people how often they would want to be asked to be in the office is important (as long as the employer does not immediately dismiss people because they would prefer to only come in a few days a week: if that means the work gets done, people should have the choice to do that I think). Though, I found it odd people will throw out a candidate from a pile of resumes if they don’t include their vaccination status? Unless someone specifically asks for that in an application, that is not something I would immediately think to include on a resume.
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