This was one of those odd stories where I honestly would love to know what the reason was that I was had been brought in. There had to be something, but I doubt I’ll ever find out. So I had previously applied for a fair number of jobs with the local municipal entity. I had prior background working for several other larger cities so I vaguely figured they would pick me up for something. They never did. Not that I didn’t interview with them from time to time. At this point, I think I had interviewed with some department or another on probably 3 different occasions.
Anyway, this particular time… I didn’t apply to anything. Instead one of the senior attorneys reached out to me directly and asked me to apply to a position. Far be it for me to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I rightly assumed they were interested in hiring me for this position specifically, based on seeing my resume in the general pool. So I shoot off the application on the city website and rather quickly have an interview setup.
I show up, and as this happens to be in the midst of COVID we are all sitting in a large room, strangely distant for each other. This wasn’t the 6 feet everyone was asked to give.. no. There were 3 interviewer, the senior attorney and two counsel, and a paralegal. And they were arrayed about 20 feet apart from each other in a circle, a very large circle, with me in the middle.
The interview went very well. It was a litigation position so we started sorta going back and forth on cases we had done. The senior counsel was asking questions which were basically just to show that you knew WTF you were talking about regarding the local scene. I.e. how many trials, what firms were you most often opposed, what’s your opinion on judges… basically things you’d only know if you actually worked in the area for awhile. The short version is I answered correctly and ultimately we were joking a bit back and forth about some of the opposing counsel and some judges. I had been working the state and federal side more than enough to be able to match anyone in the room. The interview went really well.
I never heard anything back from them. I don’t even think there was a rejection. Just silence. I think I was brought in to interview for a position they already had a candidate for, but they needed to pad the paperwork to show that they interviewed more than just their one person. I will never know, but that is my guess.