Punchbowl Blog

This post was written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO

Last week, I wrote a blog post about an interaction I had with a prospective MyPunchbowl intern candidate. If you haven’t read “A story about spunk and fight” I hope you will take a few minutes to read it now. Here’s the readers’ digest version: a woman emails me with a great subject line, but a glaring spelling error. I respond by pointing out her error, wanting to see her response. She responds with an outpouring of anger and frustration. I write back, challenging her to face the person she insulted.

The comments to that blog post have been overwhelming. The one thing everyone wants to know: how did the interview go?

Fast forward to Tuesday. The intern candidate interviewed at the MyPunchbowl office. My first impression of her: she was *very* different than her email. She was timid, contrite, and anxious. Clearly she never thought she would be sitting face to face with the person who she wrote things like “well let me tell you something mister” and “your little wanna be company.”

However, the intern candidate was thoughtful and personable, and I thought that she presented herself well. She had a great sense of humor, and when she finally relaxed, I found that she had interesting ideas and thoughts about MyPunchbowl. Most importantly, she was very prepared for the interview. She brought writing samples, a fresh resume, and had clearly spent a lot of time reading everything she could online (even some old blog posts I wrote about interviewing. For example, I was surprised when she referenced this post about how to nail the “24 Hour Test”)

During the interview, I challenged her on a lot of things. I challenged her about the email she wrote (and for the record, I was quite blunt in my questioning). I pushed her to tell me more about why she decided to respond with such vitriol. We met for about an hour, and I left the room with the clear message that not only was she very sorry but that she had prepared very well for the interview.

So what’s the next step? What is the next logical step in this story? I decided that the only way to really know who she is as a person was to ask her to write a blog post to respond to all of the blog comments. How would she address those who are critical of her? How would she respond to the people who have such harsh words? How would she deal with those who seem to hate her?

Her blog post will be posted soon. But I would love to know your thoughts. What are you hoping she’ll address in her blog response?

This entry was posted on February 5, 2009 at 8:16 am and is filed under Hiring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.