The first candidate was seven minutes early, which Dorstan noted with approval on the scoring rubric he'd spent the weekend laminating.
He'd arrived at the community center at six-fifteen to arrange the chairs in a precise semicircle facing his table, because panel interviews conducted in rows suggested an adversarial dynamic, and Dorstan had read four books on organizational hiring practices, three of which agreed on the semicircle. The fourth recommended a diamond configuration, but that book had a typo on the copyright page and could not be trusted.
He aligned his water pitcher with the center of the table. He squared his stack of printed résumés — seven candidates, forty-five minutes each, starting at seven — against the table's edge. He placed a single pen beside the stack at a forty-five-degree angle, considered it, and adjusted to forty.
The first candidate, a woman in a heavy cardigan with red-rimmed eyes, sat in the chair closest to the door.
"Thank you for coming," Dorstan said. "I know it takes courage to put yourself forward."
She pressed her lips together and nodded, hard, the way people do when they are trying not to cry.
Dorstan understood. Interviews were stressful. He made a note on his rubric: Emotional investment — high. Good sign.
"Before we begin, I want you to know this is a safe space to be honest. I'm not here to judge you as a person." He folded his hands on the table. "I'm here to understand what you bring."
The woman let out a long, shuddering breath.
"I didn't think I'd actually come," she said.
"A lot of people feel that way." He'd read that sixty-two percent of qualified applicants almost didn't apply. "But you're here. That says something."
"My sister made me."
"Support networks are important. Now." He uncapped his pen. "Why don't you start by telling me what brought you here today."
Her name, she said, was Ketta.
Dorstan wrote it down, though it didn't match any name on his candidate list. Scheduling errors were common with community center bookings. He'd flag it with the office later.
Ketta told him that eight months ago, her husband had gone to pick up their dog from the groomer and had not come back.
Dorstan's pen hesitated over the rubric.
"He — left the organization?" he said.
"He left everything." Ketta's voice flattened. "The house. The dog. Me. He sent a text from the airport saying he needed to find himself."
Dorstan processed this. Some candidates liked to frame their answers as personal narratives. Unconventional, but the third hiring book — the reliable one — said to let candidates answer in their own style and extract relevant competencies afterward.
"And how did that experience shape your professional development?" he said.
Ketta stared at him.
"I stopped sleeping," she said.
Dorstan wrote: Demonstrates resilience under sustained pressure. Possible stamina concerns — follow up.
"I stopped eating regular meals. I stopped answering my phone. I wore the same clothes for — I don't know how long. My sister had to come over and physically put me in the shower."
"So you'd describe your self-management skills as an area for growth," Dorstan said.
Ketta's chin trembled.
"I would describe my entire life as an area for growth," she said.
Dorstan underlined growth mindset twice.
The door opened. A tall man in a fleece vest entered, looked around the semicircle, and sat two chairs from Ketta. His fleece had a small rip near the pocket that he kept touching with one finger, back and forth, like checking a wound.
"Welcome," Dorstan said. "We'll get to you shortly. I'm just finishing up with —" He glanced at his rubric. "— Ketta."
The man nodded.
"Ketta, I'd like to do a quick skills assessment. Can you walk me through a situation where you had to manage competing priorities under a tight deadline?"
Ketta opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again.
"Last Tuesday," she said, "I had to decide whether to get out of bed or stay in bed, and the deadline was that my sister was coming at noon to check on me, and both options felt impossible, and I chose getting out of bed, and it was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life."
Dorstan considered this.
"Good," he said. "Decision-making under ambiguity. And the outcome?"
"I stood in the kitchen for forty minutes holding a kettle I'd forgotten to fill."
"So there's room to improve on execution." He made a note. "But the decision itself was sound."
Ketta made a sound that was either a laugh or a sob. Dorstan marked adaptable communication style.
By seven-twenty, four more people had arrived.
None of their names matched the résumés in Dorstan's stack, which was beginning to concern him from an administrative standpoint. He would be filing a complaint with the community center booking system. A formal one. Possibly laminated.
The newcomers arranged themselves in the semicircle with the careful spacing of people who wanted to be near others but not too near. A young man named Prull sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles had gone the color of piano keys. A woman named Gosseny held a tote bag on her lap like a shield. An older man who introduced himself as Blique said nothing and looked at the ceiling with the steady focus of someone counting something only he could see.
The fourth was a compact, energetic woman named Tessavine who sat down, looked directly at Dorstan, and said, "I have to be honest, I almost didn't come because the last one of these I went to was awful."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Dorstan said. "Can you tell me what went wrong? I want to make sure this process is better."
"The facilitator kept interrupting. Every time someone tried to talk about their actual feelings, he'd redirect to coping strategies. Like — I don't need a strategy. I need someone to sit with me in it."
Dorstan nodded. Clearly she'd had a bad experience with a previous interviewer who kept redirecting candidates to competency frameworks instead of letting them demonstrate authentic responses. Valuable feedback.
"I promise you," Dorstan said, "I'm here to listen. This is your time."
Tessavine's eyes went glassy.
"Thank you," she said. "That means more than you know."
Dorstan felt the warm satisfaction of a well-run process. He was, he reflected, good at this. Four books, plus the one about the diamond configuration, plus eleven hours of preparation over the weekend, including the lamination, which had required a trip to the print shop and a confrontation with a machine that smelled like burnt plastic and victory.
"Now." He addressed the full semicircle. "I'd like to do a round-table exercise. Group dynamics reveal a lot about how people operate. I'll pose a question, and I'd like each of you to respond in turn. There are no wrong answers."
Six faces looked at him with the kind of desperate hope usually reserved for lifeboats.
"The question is: what do you want to get out of this experience?"
Ketta went first. "I want to feel like a person again."
Prull: "I want to stop waking up at three in the morning and reaching for someone who isn't there."
Gosseny, clutching her tote: "I want to go one full day without crying in a parking lot."
Blique, still looking at the ceiling: "My wife died."
A silence opened in the room like a hole in the floor.
"On a Tuesday," Blique added.
Dorstan wrote: Strong communicator. Concise. Possible leadership material.
Tessavine went last. "I want to learn how to exist in the space my mother used to fill. She was — she took up so much room. Not physically. She was tiny. But the room she left is enormous and I keep bumping into it."
Dorstan reviewed his notes. The candidates were, without exception, deeply committed and emotionally engaged. Their communication skills were extraordinary. Their answers, while unconventional, demonstrated a level of personal investment he had never encountered in a hiring process.
He was going to recommend all of them.
The problem was that there was only one position.
"Excellent responses," he said. "Really strong across the board. I want to move into a more challenging exercise now. I'm going to present a scenario, and I want you to describe how you'd handle it."
He consulted his laminated exercise sheet.
"You're in a room with a colleague who's made a serious error. The error affects the whole team. The colleague doesn't realize they've made it. How do you approach the conversation?"
The room went very quiet.
Prull spoke first. His voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper.
"That's exactly what happened with my brother," he said. "He didn't know he was sick. Nobody told him. We all — we kept saying it was fine, it's just a cough, you'll be fine. We were so careful. So gentle." His clasped hands separated and found each other again. "And he died not knowing any of us had been scared at all."
He stopped.
"I think about that every single day. That we thought we were protecting him and we were actually just leaving him alone with it."
Ketta was crying openly. Gosseny had her face in her tote bag. Even Blique had lowered his gaze from the ceiling to the middle distance, which for Blique seemed to constitute a breakdown.
Dorstan looked at his scoring rubric. In the column marked Conflict Resolution, he wrote: Exceptional. Demonstrates profound understanding of interpersonal dynamics and the cost of avoidance.
Then he wrote: Possible overqualified?
Several of them were holding hands now. This had never happened in any of his practice sessions.
He felt a faint unease, the kind he associated with discovering he'd used the wrong template for something. But the chairs were in a semicircle. He had a laminated rubric. He had a water pitcher. The structural elements were correct, which meant the process was correct, which meant whatever was happening was supposed to be happening.
"Very moving," he said. "Let's take a short break. There's water on the table, and the restrooms are down the hall to the left."
Nobody moved.
"Or we can keep going," Dorstan said. "The schedule is flexible."
"Can I say something?" Tessavine said.
"Of course."
"This is already the best one I've ever been to. And I've been to a lot. Like, a lot a lot. My sister thinks I'm addicted to them."
Dorstan beamed. He'd never received positive feedback from a candidate mid-process. He made a note: Format: semicircle validated. Laminated rubric: effective. Water pitcher: good touch.
"I want to move into final assessments," he said. "I'd like each of you to tell me — where do you see yourself in five years?"
Blique looked at him for the first time.
"Alive," he said. "That's the whole answer."
"If possible," he added.
Dorstan wrote: Modest goals. Realistic. Low flight risk.
The trouble began when Gosseny asked for a tissue.
Dorstan did not have tissues. He had laminated rubrics, printed résumés for seven people who were not here, a water pitcher, one pen, and a backup pen in case the first pen failed, because Dorstan understood that infrastructure was the backbone of any serious process.
He did not have tissues because tissues were not part of the interview toolkit outlined in any of his four books.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't bring any."
"There are usually tissues," Gosseny said, in the fragile tone of someone reporting a foundational crack in reality.
"I'll make a note for next time."
"The facilitator always brings tissues," Tessavine said. "It's — I mean, it's kind of basic."
"You're right." He was embarrassed. A good interviewer anticipated candidate needs. He should have thought of this. "I apologize. I'm relatively new to this."
"You're new?" Prull sat up straighter. "But you're — you're really natural at it. You asked that question about the colleague, and I — I've never told anyone that story about my brother."
"It just came out," Prull said. "Because of how you asked it."
"I appreciate that," Dorstan said.
"Honestly," Ketta said, wiping her eyes with her cardigan sleeve, "when I walked in here I thought this was going to be like every other one. Someone reading from a binder, making us do breathing exercises, telling us about the five stages like we haven't memorized them against our will. But you're different."
"Different how?" Dorstan said. He was always looking to improve.
"You treated us like — like people applying for something. Not like broken things that need fixing."
Dorstan wrote: Candidate Ketta — strong cultural alignment with organizational values.
"I want to go deeper," Tessavine said. She had leaned forward so far she was nearly off her chair. "That scenario question — can we do more of those? I think that's where the real work is."
Dorstan flipped to his next laminated sheet. It was headed Competency Assessment: Problem-Solving Under Resource Constraints.
"Absolutely," he said. "Next scenario. You're given a project with a six-week deadline. At week three, your primary resource is removed without warning. What's your first action?"
The room detonated.
Ketta: "That's my marriage. That's my exact marriage. Six years, and at year three, he just — removed himself."
Prull: "My brother's diagnosis came at the three-month mark. Three months from fine to not."
Gosseny removed her face from the tote bag long enough to say: "My daughter moved out on the third of the month. Third. I know it's a number, but I can't look at calendars anymore."
Blique: "Three."
Everyone looked at him.
"My wife and I had three good decades," he said. "Then the fourth one started, and she wasn't in it."
Tessavine was already crying. "My mother's hospice was three weeks. Three weeks from 'we should run some tests' to the room she left."
Dorstan surveyed the semicircle. Every single candidate had connected the scenario to a deeply personal experience. The level of engagement was unprecedented. He was, he realized, conducting the most successful group interview in the history of organized hiring.
He was going to write a book about this.
He was going to laminate it.
"Incredible," he said. "The emotional intelligence in this room is off the charts. I have one more exercise, and then I'd like to do individual closing statements."
He pulled out his final laminated sheet. Values Alignment: Organizational Commitment.
"Last question. And I want you to be completely honest." He looked around the semicircle. Six people leaned toward him with the gravitational pull of the drowning toward shore. "What would you be willing to sacrifice to be part of this?"
The door opened at eight forty-five.
A woman came in carrying a box of tissues, a ring binder, and a small battery-operated candle. She stopped. She looked at the semicircle. She looked at Dorstan behind his table with his laminated rubrics and his water pitcher and his seven printed résumés for people who were not here.
"Who are you?" she said.
Dorstan stood. "Dorstan Greel. I'm chairing the interview panel for the administrative coordinator position." He consulted his schedule. "You're not on my candidate list, but there have been some booking irregularities this evening —"
"This is Room Fourteen?"
"Yes."
"The seven o'clock Tuesday slot?"
"Yes."
The woman looked at the semicircle. Six faces looked back. Several were still damp.
"This is a grief support circle," she said. "I'm the facilitator. I'm late because my car wouldn't start. I sent a message to the center's front desk."
Dorstan looked at his semicircle. His semicircle looked back.
"These are candidates," he said, but his voice had developed a hairline fracture.
"These are bereaved people," the woman said.
Ketta pressed both hands flat against her face. Prull's clasped hands froze mid-grip. Gosseny lowered her tote bag for the first time all evening. Blique returned his gaze to the ceiling with the air of a man who had always known this was how things went.
Tessavine looked at Dorstan.
"You weren't the facilitator," she said.
"No," Dorstan said.
"You were doing job interviews."
"Yes."
"That question about the colleague who made a serious error. That was a workplace scenario."
"From a laminated sheet," Dorstan said, because precision felt necessary.
The real facilitator set down her box of tissues. She looked at the group. She looked at Dorstan. She opened her ring binder, closed it, and opened it again.
"How long have they been here?" she said.
"Since seven," Dorstan said.
"And what have you been doing with them?"
Dorstan held up his rubric. In the dim community center light, the lamination caught the fluorescent bar overhead and sent a small, crisp rectangle of light across the ceiling.
"I've assessed their conflict resolution, problem-solving under resource constraints, emotional intelligence, and values alignment," he said. "They're all exceptionally strong candidates."
Nobody spoke.
"Especially Blique," Dorstan said.
Blique, still facing the ceiling, raised one hand in a slow wave.
Ketta made the sound again — the one that was either a laugh or a sob — and this time it was both, and it spread through the semicircle like a weather system, and then they were all doing it, every one of them, laughing and crying simultaneously in the plastic chairs Dorstan had arranged with such care at six-fifteen that morning.
Tessavine wiped her eyes. She looked at the facilitator, then back at Dorstan.
"Same time next Tuesday?" she said.
Dorstan looked at his rubric. In the margins, in his careful handwriting, were the words growth mindset, low flight risk, possible overqualified, and strong cultural alignment with organizational values.
He picked up his backup pen — the one he'd brought in case the first pen failed — and in the column marked Recommendation, next to every name, he wrote hire.