First and foremost, I need to thank Andrew Romano at Newsweek. In today’s “Stumper” (Newsweek’s hot political blog), Romano provides a link to my post from last week, Clinton Campaign: Obama Wins “Boutique, Latte-Sipping States.”

Romano writes: “As the opening gun sounded yesterday on the uninterrupted six-week Pennsylvania marathon, Clinton’s strategy was clear: appeal to the state’s whiter, older, more blue-collar and more conservative Democratic electorate by reminding them, both explicitly and implicitly, that she–unlike, presumably, her opponent and his “boutique, latte-sipping” supporters–is one of them.”

I don’t know if Andrew is a regular reader of this blog, but I am so honored by his referral… particularly because I thoroughly enjoyed his piece before realizing it linked to my site! As a Newsweek subscriber (it came free with my public radio membership, and I’ve kept it ever since), I have tremendous respect for that publication. So this is a big honor for me.

Now, back to the actual content of Romano’s piece.

He reports on a Hillary Clinton rally in Philadelphia last night: “‘I saw a sign up there: ‘Help Wanted. Experience Required, Day One,’ Clinton said near the start of her remarks. ‘And I think that says it all. I want you to think about this campaign as a loooong job interview. Because each of us is going to come and talk about what we’ve done and what we want to do, and you have to decide: who would you hire for the toughest job in the world?’”

Well, Op-Edna reader Babar77 recently asked the same question. So I’d like to turn this space over to him momentarily, while I sit back with my pad thai and bask in my new fame.

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Hillary would crash and burn my job interview (by Babar)

Lately, Hillary Clinton loves to tout her resume on the campaign stump, inferring that she would be a better pick if you were hiring for a job.  Well, I do have experience interviewing professionals for jobs.  In my career, I’ve interviewed about 100 people and hired seven.  So I decided to see if I could put together how she might fare if I were interviewing her.

Let me start with the basic qualities I look for in a candidate.  The first and foremost are candidness, integrity, ability to work a problem under pressure, ability to work in a team, and ability to accept constructive criticism.  For a leadership position, I also look for judgment, reflection, and ability to mentor.  Then I test for technical knowledge, and make sure it jives with the resume.  The reason I rank technical knowledge below the others is that it’s more easily gained on-the-job or through training if the candidate has the first qualities covered.  However, there is a minimum threshold of technical knowledge required based on level of position.  Based on those I’ve hired, I would say my theory definitely holds water.  Finally, if I get one whiff of someone trying to take over the interview (I let candidates know they will have their own time at the end) or if I detect an air of entitlement, they will be shown the door.

Next I have to ask myself how would Clinton’s resume look?  I assume a cover letter would emphasize her 35 years of experience and ability to drive change by working within the system.  It would include her previous positions (including First Lady), her education, her goals, and finally rewards and accomplishments (including her husband’s).

Now let’s assume I have a lot of resumes to look through (as it completely the case in this year’s election).  I would need some way of quickly filtering candidates.  As I have done in real-life, I scan the resume and cover letter over looking for deal breakers and making sure it all jives.  I would notice that her claimed 35 years of experience includes her years at school.  The very next suspect item on her resume is including her spouse’s experience as her own – something I have yet to see in the thousands of resumes I’ve scanned.  Stretching the truth is an obvious violation on integrity, and would draw into suspect every other claim on the resume.  I would immediately eliminate her and she wouldn’t even get an interview because if she can’t even get some basics correct, I have little hope of her doing her job well.

Would she still fare better in an interview?  I could go into a lengthy discussion here, but I would summarize it:  I think she would show she possessed technical knowledge and the ability to think under pressure.  However I think she would fail miserably at candidness, ability to work in a team, judgment, reflection, ability to mentor, and integrity.  Her results with health care and Iraq, coupled with her reasoning for both would speak to her lack of judgment, reflection, ability to accept criticism, and ability to work in a team.  Her dismissals of states that don’t vote for her and (most importantly) lack of acknowledgment to her supporters and volunteers in those states speaks to her ability to mentor and ability to work in a team.    

I can only imagine how the part of the interview would go when I asked her about her accomplishments in the senate or as First Lady.  Of course, she would have a significant disadvantage to any real life candidate I’ve interviewed in that her record is easily researched on the internet.  However, I would ask her questions without first revealing what I know to test her integrity.  I listen carefully to pronouns when I ask candidates about their team experiences.  Overuse of “I” or absence of “We” (as Clinton does so frequently) is another sure way to fail one of my interviews.

Another failure in the interview would be her response when asked in a debate, “What is your greatest weakness?”  That type of sugar-coated answer is a sure way to get booted, especially when compared to the candid responses given by other candidates.

Finally, her biggest failure – which might even cause me to show her the door before the interview is scheduled to end would be her high sense of entitlement.  In my experience, you can directly correlate a sense of entitlement with job performance and they are inversely related (The greater the entitlement, the worse the job performance).  There are psychological studies to back this assumption up – google “Emotional Quotient.”

In Summary, based on her campaign performance, I believe Clinton would fail miserably at getting hired if I happened to view her resume or interview her.

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