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A recent post on The Daily WTF discusses a company where they employ The Receptionist Test. The hiring manager has the receptionist stage a tech support problem and asks the candidate, waiting in the lobby for his or her interview, for help. One guy tries to help with a document that won't print, but doesn't realize the printer is off, and so on.

While tricks like this may not be common, there's a reception test that you run into every time you interview. Every interaction you have with everyone in the company is part of your interview that could have positive or negative effects, and the receptionist is the first candidate. The receptionist comes into contact with hundreds of people every day, and is likely tuned into observing people as they pass through the doors.

Whenever I have an interview, the first thing I do after showing the candidate out is ask the receptionist "What did you think? Any comments?" Usually I'll get something bland like "He seemed nice, I like that car he drove up in." Other times I get more interesting comments like "He took a long time to fill out his application. He spent a lot of time on his phone while he was writing, and didn't seem like he was very interested in the interview." or "It must have been a long trip, 'cause he practically ran in and asked for the bathroom." Those specific comments don't affect much as far perception, but it gives an idea of how you're constantly on display.

How you treat the receptionist speaks volumes about you. Were you polite? Did you say "please" and "thank you"? Or did you just grunt and drool before bothering to put on your Happy Interview Face? The receptionist, and those around you, will know.

It might not even be the receptionist who notices your behavior. Maybe that guy in a suit sitting in the lobby isn't another interview candidate, but the CEO waiting for the CFO to go to lunch. I've even sat in the lobby myself before interviews observing the candidate.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that your scrutiny starts when you step into the interviewer's office. You've been on stage well before that point.

As you work through life, and especially the job hunt, never forget that what you say may not be what others hear. Your message often has unintended side messages.

This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses how job candidates trash their chances of landing jobs by using overly informal communications.

After interviewing a college student in June, Tory Johnson thought she had found the qualified and enthusiastic intern she craved for her small recruiting firm. Then she received the candidate's thank-you note, laced with words like "hiya" and "thanx," along with three exclamation points and a smiley-face emoticon.... Workers in their 20s and younger are accustomed to online and cellphone messaging, and the abbreviated lingua franca that makes for quick exchanges, [David Holtzman] says. "It's just natural for them. They don't realize that it's perceived to be disrespectful."

Sometimes it's not even the medium or the message, but when you send the message.

Executive recruiter Hal Reiter recently received ... a thank you from a chief financial officer candidate sent by BlackBerry just minutes after the interview. "You don't even have time to digest the meeting and you're getting a thank-you note," says Mr. Reiter, chairman and chief executive of Herbert Mines Associates, a New York-based search firm.

In this case, the very method of sending the communication told the recipient that it wasn't worth much of the candidate's time. The candidate was on his way somewhere else and dashed off a reply, as if he was getting an odious task off his checklist, rather than giving a respectful letter that matched the gravity of the communication.

It's all about respect, and the ways that we can easily show our lack of respect or interest in others. Unintentional messages are messages none the less.

The slides from my OSCON 2008 presentation "How to speak Manager" are now available at slideshare.net.

There was a lot to cram into those 30 minutes. I wish I had more time. :-(

The always-insightful Seth Godin writes in Not so grand about the silliness of grand openings on a business.

Most overnight successes take a decade.... [T]he best way to promote something is consistently and persistently and for a long time.

The same holds true for your personal brand, and your relationships with others in the working world. The term I like to use is "time and repetition."

An article in the Wall Street Journal, says that panel interviews are gaining popularity in the private sector, with companies finding them "an efficient way to measure applicants' mettle under fire."

As with most interviews, preparation is key. Research who will be in the interview, and make a cheat sheet of who's who and what they do for the company. If you don't know ahead of time, keep track as you're introduced to each person. Notice where the power lies within the group.

You also should closely monitor the group dynamics. How screeners introduce themselves, their initial banter and the seating arrangement speak volumes about who wields the most clout.

Panel interviews may be the best predictor of cross-company dynamics, however. "You're not always going to be on the same page with everyone in the room," the article notes, and so it will be with your life on the job.

When you're in a job that makes you unhappy, it can be easy to start thinking about making a move elsewhere. Maybe the work's not as fun any more, or you're not advancing when you should be. While there are plenty of good reasons to leave, there's one that shouldn't enter your mind: Not liking the people you work with, even if it's your boss.

It doesn't seem like something you're likely to be able to get past. You deal with them every day. But don't think that you can go to a new job that will be jerk-free.

The jerks of the world follow you around. Remember how there were people in school you didn't like? And then in college there were people just like them? And then your first job, you get a new set of people, most of whom you like, but some are jerks, too? They are everywhere.

What's more, they move around. You can be in a perfectly swell department, with a great boss and great co-workers, and blammo! In comes some socially stunted goober who screws it all up. Or who can't code his way out of a paper sack. Or maybe your boss decides to take off and gets replaced by some micromanager who calls you "Pal".

You might think a bad boss is a bigger deal than a bad co-worker, and it is to a degree. When a boss is bad, it has bigger effects on you than just an incompetent co-worker in the next cube, so that much is the case. When you dig deeper, though, it's more an issue of the company and company culture than about any individual person.

Imagine working at the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin (on the US version of the TV show "The Office"). It's not that so much that Michael Scott is a terrible boss, but that he's allowed to keep his job in the face of his egregrious shortcomings. Michael has problems, but the company doesn't care, or doesn't seem to care. You take pride in your work, but why doesn't the company show the same pride?

The distinction between the bad co-workers and the company that allows them to work is an important one. The bad co-worker or bad boss may go away over time, but the company is a larger problem that may be well entrenched. Before you make for the door, make sure you know what the problem actually is. If it's just a person or two that rub you wrong, you're probably better off to live with it for a while until things change.

As I sit here on this Labor Day weekend, I ponder who it is we labor for. I want you to as well.

Most of us in the computer industries are lucky enough to be doing what we love. Programming, system administration and the like are in our blood. We've done it as a hobby, and now we're getting paid relatively large amounts to do it. Plenty of other people don't have it nearly as good as we do.

And yet, so many of us are unhappy with where we're at. We work with jerks, or the companies we work for have Mickey Mouse rules that treat us like children, or even worse, hourly workers. Maybe you're in a company with motivational posters on the wall where you can't miss 'em when you have to take a leak. It's a sort of ongoing battle for your soul, where the day-to-day grinds down at you and makes you miserable over time.

Seems to me, however, that the most common source of bad jobs is having the bad boss.

I had lunch with my friend I'll call Bob who had just been let go from his job after a short, confusing month. His boss was vague in expectations, yet also a micromanager. He'd demanded on Wednesday that Bob have a project done by Monday morning at 9am, because it was Crucial To The Company. On Friday night, after Bob returned home from a long-planned dinner with his wife and some friends, he found in his inbox on his return a note: "I see you logged off at 6pm, this project is crucial to the company." The boss badgered him all weekend until Bob finally declared that his work was done on Sunday.

Add to this that even though Bob had the work done, there were other unspoken, unmet expectations. The boss rattled them off to Bob at his summary firing, but Bob didn't understand them after the fact.

I offered "It doesn't sound like much of a loss. Your boss was crazy, or stupid, or just a bad boss. He wasn't like that when he interviewed you, was he?" Bob replied "I'm glad you think he was a bad boss, because I kind of picked that up in the interview."

Now here's what astonishes me. Here's a guy who's a good programmer, who works hard, and yet he's willing to take a job with someone who he strongly suspected of being dumb and/or crazy.

Bob's not the only one, of course, or I wouldn't be writing this. I've got other friends who jump into a job relationship hoping for the best, and coming out miserable. Some people may be desperate and have no choice, but it happens so often, that can't be the case most of the time.

I suspect that most people miss that word "relationship", because it is exactly that.

Your job is a relationship.

It's a relationship with your boss, yes, but it's also a relationship with the company, with your co-workers, with the commute, with everything that goes into your job.

It's a relationship that you spend 40+ hours a week on. How many hours a week do you actually spend awake with your spouse? Probably a little bit more than that, but it's roughly the same in size.

The relationship with your employer is as important to look at as the relationship with your spouse. That means both before and after you commit.

I'll write more about this in weeks to come, as I work on my upcoming book, Pragmatic Job Hunting.