In Which I Struggle NOT To Tell The Truth

I'll get the good news out of the way first:  I'm employed full-time again!  The employer which laid me off in June asked me to return, so I'm back at the same place!  I'm just hoping not to repeat the layoff experience again in a few months!

Since there was about three months between receiving my layoff notice and returning to my office, I have some thoughts on the job-search process.  Chief among those right now is that interviews are the pits.  Of course, when you're looking for work, you want to have them.  But really, they're bad on both sides.  If you're the one being interviewed, you're going to feel anxious and awkward, and then you're going to second guess everything you said as soon as the interview is done.  If you're doing the interviewing, you're trying desperately to fill a position with someone both competent and tolerable, and you have very limited means of determining whether your applicants are either of those.

Unfortunately, the very limited means of trying to learn about an applicant often mean asking questions that are nearly impossible for the applicant to answer truthfully.

I'm going to purposely leave out a lot of details here, but I had an interview for a position for which I felt qualified, but was different in many ways from other positions I had had.  I was surprised when I was contacted for an interview.  During the interview, one person asked me how this position fit into my career goals.  An honest response would have been something like this:

"I applied for this position shortly after being laid off with no warning.  At that time, my goal of having income and benefits overrode any loftier career goals I might have had.  As a plus, this position seemed like it might be pleasant, and the office is close enough to where I take evening classes that work shouldn't interfere too much with my studies.  Otherwise, though, this position has very little to do with my current career field, and probably even less to do with my planned future career."

Obviously, there was no part of this I could have shared with my interviewers.

I don't even remember how I answered the question, but I doubt I was either convincing or credible.  They say practice makes perfect, though, so for any future interviews for positions that are not obvious career fits for me, I'll have to be sure to get my lies straight ahead of time.