Job Hunting Tips for Peru

To all my Y people, this post is especially for you:

Having worked in employment with newcomers in Ottawa, I had a sense that a CV doesn’t have the same requirements from country to country. I was expecting differences in the job search process here in Peru.

Here, you often have to include a photo of yourself as well as your age/birth date on your resume. But that’s true in many countries, so no big surprise there for me.

This week I sat through one of the job search workshops my centre delivers. The facilitator was telling everyone to be prepared for tests at the interview stage. As an applicant, she said, you might be asked to answer math-testing questions or to draw a picture of a person in the rain.

I repeat. Draw a picture of a person in the rain.

I’m sure I was grinning to myself in the workshop, but everyone else was looking very serious. So I had to reign myself in until I got home.

It is administered as a psychological personality test to job seekers.

Here the kind of thing I might have drawn:

Christina’s attempt at securing a job in Peru

Fail!

It is a personality test, with understood rules.

• You should draw a representation of yourself. No caricatures, stick figures or other flights of fancy.
• You should include an umbrella
• The rain should not be represented with droplets, just with short lines
• You must draw the ground
• Your person should look happy

More like this:

Acceptable “Persona bajo la lluvia”

Wait! There’s more…. Sometimes you’ll also be asked to write a short 4-5 sentence backstory for your drawing.

It’s totally surreal. I have to admit, that aside from all the ridiculousness of having to draw as part of the interview process, learning this tidbit completely made my day. I could have traveled in Peru for a year and never learned that a local job application might involve potentially betraying your deepest personality traits in a very confined drawing exercise.

Happy Job Hunting!