Unprofessional Interview

Congrats to Mo Yan, the first Chinese government-recognized Chinese Nobel Prize Winner in Literature. He is not the first Chinese Nobel laureate, but he is for sure the first Chinese Nobel laureate who only speaks Chinese. I guess the committee must haven't expected this new situation, and therefore had difficulties in finding a capable person to inform Mo Yan of the news, which explained the terrible 8-min call that Shang Yan made to Mo Yan to congratulate him on his success.

Shang Yan is from China, and works in an association of local Chinese community in Sweden. But it looks like she has no experience in interviewing people. During the 8-min phone call, whose record was posted Nobel official site later, she failed to say a single complete sentence, but paused again and again after every four to five words. Compared to her dramatic tones and fragmented questions, Mo Yan seemed very calm and eloquent, patiently answering all the stupid questions, but finally hang up when she started to introduce herself - her name and interests. Geez, who cares about that? I don't know how Mo Yan felt when he received such an unprofessional interview, I would doubt if I'd received a fraud call or a prank if I were him.

Unprofessional interviews can undermine interviewee's impression of the interviewer, and more importantly, the group that he/she represents. I once interviewed an entrepreneur when I just started my first job. Though I prepared for a long time, I couldn't help get nervous when seeing him, and got terribly stammers during the interview. The entrepreneur skillfully started to ask me a few questions about myself to help me calm down and we finally finished the interview. In the end, he smiled and shook my hands, saying I've done a good job, but I couldn't help thinking that he must have expected a better interviewer from my organization. Similarly, last year I went on a field trip to Africa for a workshop on regional trade integration. During a meeting with a high-level official in South Africa, I asked a question about their monetary policy. However the governor was so diplomatic that he did not provide any useful information during the interview. I was disappointed, but I did reveal my disappointment as one of my colleagues, who chipped in and answered half of my questions in a different way, including "correcting" the governor. We stayed in silence for a while before another colleague broke the ice and changed the topic.

It's probably difficult to balance courtesy and acuity in interviewing people, and it may requires some experience to stick to the topic and keep the interviewee involved during the entire process. However the Nobel Committee embarrassed itself by hiring a garrulous and unintelligible lady to notify Mo Yan of the big moment of his life and throw dumb interview questions on him.