3F Interviews

Generally, I speak from my experience. So, I will start this blog with an anecdote. Few years back, I was struggling in my professional life. I was desperately looking for a job or rather for a good job. All of my friends circle was aware of this and were trying their best to help me out in this difficult and challenging phase. They forwarded my profile to many organizations and I got interview calls from most of the organizations. But in most of the organizations, my interview was of not more than 10 minutes. The interviewer was even not interested in what currently I was doing. The organizations for which I am talking here are some of the big and well known organizations. I was quite surprised and was unable to identify the reasons behind that.

But there is a specific reason of why they were doing so? The thread is like this. My friends forwarded my profile to the concern person. This guy can be a HR or a technical person. Now, due to the friendship and other personal relationships, they couldn’t refuse to even interviewing me. This was irrespective of the fact that whether there was an opening in the organization or not. So what was happening that I was being called for an interview keeping this point in mind that we will not consider this guy for further actions. Just for the sake of friendship with their friends, they were spending 10 – 15 minutes with me.

This is called a 3F Interview.

3 F means FAKE, FRAUD and FALSE.

Recently, I also get a chance to perform 3F with one of the candidate who has applied for a specific position in my group through one of my colleague. But this time, since the roles have been changed and I have to decide whether I will perform 3F or not, I refused to do so. I simply said to my concern friend that this person is overall not required in my group for this position. And I will not perform any 3F interview.

I hope this has been appreciated by my colleague and hope I will not perform any 3F interview again with anyone due to any pressure or relationship. Experience is a hard teacher because it gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

-- Sanat Sharma