March 18, 2010
Earlier this week, I spent several hours teaching a workshop to help clients answer interview questions. We went through all the techniques; we worked on the answering the ten most asked interview questions and we talked about the meaning of body language.

Then we rehearsed and rehearsed. Something seemed flat; I was vaguely uncomfortable about the session but couldn’t put my head around what it was. Then we took a break and went for coffee. Of the 15 in my workshop, seven people immediately got on the phone and began calls or started texting.

I looked around the Starbucks, there were people sitting with other people, both were on the phone or texting.

We are in constant communication with our thumbs. We have stopped talking to each other. This is evident everywhere, this is what I noticed when I was working with interviewing skills.

In a culture where we are always talking about being authentic, how do you know who is real and who isn’t? Well, it certainly not by evaluating a conversation that takes place in restaurant between courses and is conducted largely with rapid digital movement.

I believe email and texting are both wonderful ways to stay in communication with day care, school and work. It is also in the grocery store, bathroom, cars, (scary) sporting events, even walking outdoors and the beach? No kidding. Most recently, I witnessed somebody getting a call in church. I wonder who was calling, God?

Most of this is good; the other way to look at it is to accept the bad of it. We all know the good, life saving emergencies, time saved, talking to somebody when you have to wait at the car wash, or please pick up some milk on your way home from work.

To get back to my point, interviews. We are losing the skill of talking to each other face to face without our fingers or something stuck in our ear. We listen but ignore questions we don’t want to answer and we have learned to dodge these questions so often, some of us declare it a benefit of email or of being a politician.

We have lost the warmth of a smile, the quizzical glance, the enthusiasm in our voice and face when talking about a job we love. Have we lost our ability to convey meaning to what we say? Is this is what is trickling down to the inability to communicate in an interview? It is not so much what we say but how we say it. Have we lost our human regard?

I went back to the workshop and talked a little about what I noticed. We went back to the agenda, I felt better drawing attention to the observation, sometimes heightening the awareness is the first step to making a change.

My assignment to each participant in this workshop was to stop using the cell phone for anything other than emergencies for 6 hours. I will get feedback next week to see how it worked.

If our fingers are doing the talking, who is listening?