What do you do for a living?

[fan johnny]

I didn't do half bad for the interview, but I have competition in the downed California economy. Tough to get a read on how I did, in hind sight I should have asked. They told me I'm up for the next stage which is the technical interview. Kinda sounds like a Government job process.

Good luck mate, I'm sure you'll do well. I always think I suck in interviews, and I think I can only remember one interview where I haven't got the job out of some five or six I've done so far.

I'm leaving out my application for MI5 in my last year of uni where I got cut at the aptitude test phase. I only applied for a laugh, and went to this big govt building near the river if I remember rightly. Everyone else turned up in suits, and I'd gone to the effort of putting my best jeans on. I was also kind of hungover, so I didn't expect too much, but it was quite interesting.

Those kind of Civil Jobs you have to prepare for. in the prep course they have mock up interviews and they really put a lot of pressure on you to get you to react in one way or another. When you first look at it is seems the right way to do the process to weed out all the bad candidates. But all it really means is they have weeded out the people that don't prepare. When I was still in College I tried the firefighter exam. My first application there were 2500 people that applied. After the written exam there were only 850 left. Then after the physical exam there were a little over 400 left. Then came the board interview and after that there were only 250 people left to fill 11 positions over a two year period. I ended up 47th after the board interview and got called to the fire chief's interview. I did good with that too and ended up number 22 on the final list. I don't know if I could do any better than that which was my first try. I met guy who had been going through the process for 5 years in different counties and never made it that high. The job paid a base salary of 65.000 but most first years made an average of 95,000 because of the over time. The work 1 day 24 hours get 1 day off 24 hours for 3 days, then get 3 days off in a row. The duty shift is from 8-5 and they get to what ever they want the rest of the 16 hours while on-call at the station. A lot of the firefighters do other jobs as well. That's why there were 2500 applicants for 11 jobs.