At one point, I received a reply to my perpetual frenzy of sending out resumes/cover letters/applications/sacrificial goats. It was, at the time, at the other corner of the country (I would later relocate to that region, coincidentally), and as a result, the reply had this gist:
1) Said organization, purportedly a consulting firm, would like to interview me.
2) However, they have a company policy of not conducting phone interviews.
3) Thus, they would like me to fly out for an interview.
4) But, as they are not going to reimburse me for the travel costs to said interview, they advise me to schedule a number of interviews in the region at the same time so as to get better mileage out of my expenses.
I found that last point particularly ridiculous. Sure, guys, let me just call up all of the organizations in the area and make them give me interviews so I can get my money's worth. That's how interviews work after all, right?
One thing worth mentioning from the beginning is the poor quality of this organization's website. For one, it is incredibly fancy, with a glossy splash page, fancy Flash effects,and a horrendous techno track that makes me jump for the mute button to my computer each time I visit it. Seriously, how does techno go together with consulting? What's more confusing is that nowhere on the website does it talk about specifics. It talks about marketing, and clients in varied sectors, and expanding worldwide by 2010, but it never says exactly what the organization does or how it addresses its challenges. The careers section boasts about "performance-based" processes, "in-office" and "practical" training (what kind of training is impractical? A liberal arts education? Self-zing. Sigh), and a "development program," but doesn't define these things except in vague terms (never feel like your career is stagnating!). In fact, the only specific piece of information on the website has to do with the organization's community service, where it talks about the firm's president participating in some sort of marathon to benefit children, and encourages employees to get involved. This probably should have been a warning sign, but hope's eternal springs kind of get on my glasses and make them wet and blurry. You know how it is.
In any case, as I knew I'd be relocating to the area in about a month, I replied notifying them of this and asking whether they would still be conducting interviews at that point. I expected them to tell me to go drown myself for having the audacity to suggest pretty much anything at all, but they surprisingly replied that they would be holding interviews up through around the time that I was scheduled to arrive at their location. Pretty convenient, I thought.
Upon moving, one of the first things I did was send them another email, essentially going, "Hey guys, I'm here now, how about that interview?" A few days later, I received a reply informing me that before I could come in to the office for an interview, they needed to do a standard phone interview with me. At this point, I was rather confused. Just a month ago, I was told that they had a company policy of not conducting phone interviews. Was there a massive takeover that rewrote the company's operational code? Did the CEO undergo some kind of Freaky Friday-esque mystical transformation, rendering him comically unable to keep directives consistent with his predecessor? Or was this just a case of massive fail?
Employer Fail #19: If company policy is one thing, then it's that thing. You don't get to change it just like that. Or, well, you do, but it registers you as a big blip on the fail radar.
The message told me that for this phone interview, all I had to do was call their office at any point during business hours. So I did. I called once, at about 1:00 on a Tuesday, and was answered only by their overly-lengthy voicemail recording. The same thing happened at 2:00, and 3:00, and well, you get the idea. I called about every hour of business hours for four days, leaving at least one identical message per day. No call back. No email response. Maybe they really did have a company policy of not doing phone interviews, and some crazed maniac had broken into their office computer system just to send me a misleading email. Or, again, maybe they just failed. A lot.
Employer Fail #20: If you tell me to call during business hours, that generally necessitates that someone be there to pick up the phone during business hours. Or call me back during business hours. Or listen to the voicemail and email me back during business hours. Or actually show some signs of life over the course of a week.
Finally, on the fifth day of calling, on about the third phone call that day, someone picked up. After explaining who I was, the voice on the other line seemed to recognize me just fine, but nary was an apology issued for being inexplicably absent for the past week, nor was there a mention of my multiple voicemails or my few emails expressing my concern for their well-being. How was I to know that they weren't being held hostage by the crazed email-doppelganger, who wanted to mislead their applicants, taping the employees' eyes wide open to make them watch all the maniacal happenings? I figured it couldn't hurt to ask, though I realized that any reply I received might have been composed by the criminal mastermind himself. He's a cunning adversary, I'll give him that.
On a less fantastical note, however, the secretary to whom I was talking to, who incidentally happened to be the same one that had emailed me the few times I had had contact with the organization, asked me whether now would be a good time for the phone interview, or whether we should schedule it for another day. My thoughts were, more or less, "For the love of God, now! If we reschedule, the heat death of the universe will probably happen at about the same time that you decide, in your infinite grace, to pick up the phone again!" So, I agreed to do the phone interview right then and there.
Of course, what made this laughable was that the phone interview wasn't really an interview. I was asked my current address, whether it was true that I just recently graduated from college (no, I lied on my resume because I actually got stuck in a time-warp and that's generally awkward to explain to employers), and quizzically, my current living situation. I didn't really see the point of the last question, but maybe they have a company policy of not hiring polygamists. In which case, reasonably, I probably could've expected them to give away my position to the cast of "Big Love" in a month. My answers to those three questions apparently had me pass the phone interview, and I was told that information about my in-person interview would be emailed to me shortly. Naturally, it ended up taking another day.
Employer Fail #21: Making me attempt to reach you over and over for the least consequential phone interview in history. Seriously, why didn't you just ask me whether Coke was better than Pepsi, or my opinion on the new Who Wants to be a Millionaire format?
Their office, as it turned out, was located pretty far on the outskirts of the current metro area. Having nothing to do other than participate in the Sisyphean task of continuing to send out resumes and whatnot, I decided to do a dry run over to their office. It took about an hour each way, but I'm glad I did it, if only because the directions they provided were really quite poor. At one point, they told me to go onto the train platform, when what they really meant was go past the train platform. As a result of trusting their directions over my gut, I spent about 15 minutes of my dry run walking the length of a wholly-deserted train platform and back. I only turned around because it didn't seem to be coming to an end anytime soon; I'm half-certain that had I kept going, I would've ended up in Narnia. Ah, employer fail #4, how ubiquitous you are for some strange reason.
There was one another incredibly annoying thing about their office location, which I'm noting just because it's a pet peeve of mine. Their office was located in a corporate park of sorts, and the sidewalk leading to its entrance sloped upward. However, as the parking lot (and presumably the buildings therein) were located on flat ground, the division between the sidewalk and the parking lot was a grassy embankment that naturally got smaller and smaller as you walked further uphill down the sidewalk towards the parking lot entrance. If I had ended up working at this place, every single day I would've had to walk for about two blocks longer than necessary (once block to get to the parking lot entrance, and the other looping back to the building entrance) than if they had just not included the grassy embankment at all, or at least put in some stone steps so I could circumvent the parking lot entrance altogether.
In any case, armed with the knowledge that Narnia was not on the list of landmarks indicating I was heading the right way to their office, I returned the next day for my interview. The first strange thing I noted was that the organization was not listed in the building's directory. I didn't think it was that weird that it wouldn't be engraved on the big stone slab outside, as that kind of recognition could reasonably be reserved for large firms, but isn't a little placard in the building's directory a given? I knew the suite number in spite of this oddity, so I went up to the second floor. The building was eerily deserted, which was rendered even more unfortunate by the labyrinthine hallways that didn't follow any logical design pattern. There were inexplicable walls in places where they didn't have to exist, making me take another path and take, say, three right turns to continue walking down the same way. Despite being a little concerned that the architectural craziness would make me late, I arrived with 10 minutes to spare.
Employer Fail #22: How hard is it to get yourself listed in the building directory?
Once there, I introduced myself at the front desk and was given another generic form to fill out. After finishing it, I attempted to sit there and read, but the secretary insisted on having possibly the most pointless conversation of the year with me. And I paraphrase from memory:
"Oh, you're reading that book. I saw it in the bookstore and I heard it's pretty good!"
"Yeah, I'm learning a lot."
"One of my friends read it and she said she was going to loan it to me. I love things about Nazis and the occult."
"Uh... this doesn't have Nazis... or the occult. It's about the Congo."
"Oh! Well, it looked just like that one! The cover was the same! It had a skeleton on the cover."
"This is a portrait..."
"Oh, well, it was the same colors... But anyway, I hear that's a good book."
I was left wondering whether she meant my book or whatever novelized version of Wolfenstein her friend had referred to her. I guess this lends credence to the "never judge a book by its cover" adage, especially in the case that you can't recognize its cover.
Then, about ten minutes after my interview was supposed to commence, the interviewer appeared out of some kind of bare-bones office that looked like it was hollowed out of the wall. She took my application from the secretary and told me to follow her, pronouncing my name incorrectly in the process. I began to correct her when she cut me off mid-word, snapping, "Come with me, V." So much for feeling valued.
Employer Fail #23: Your organization's interviewers act like they kick puppies for fun.
In a different way, this interview was as much of a farce as the phone-interview-that-wasn't. I was asked a bunch of generic interview questions such as "Rate your communication skills on a scale from 1 to 10," and "How do you define success?" The interviewer was clearly not paying attention to my answers or how they reflected on my communication skills, as she was staring at a piece of notebook paper in her hands and occasionally scribbling in it, though not in tune with my answers. I was actually a little offended when I replied that the person I admired most was my grandfather, because he always did whatever was best for others regardless of the effort it required on his part, and she could only muster an oblivious "Uh-huh" as an acknowledgment of my existence.
Employer Fail #24: Why bother having an interview if you're not going to pay attention to my responses to your banal questions? Why not just cast bones and determine whom you're going to hire that way, if anything that's said is irrelevant to the task at hand?
Then, after she got bored, ran out of generic interview questions, or finished her makeshift Sudoku puzzle, (or all of the above) she gave me a small, well-rehearsed shpiel about the organization and what they did. This was shocking. Although advertising itself as a consulting firm (it even had "consulting" in the name!), the organization was nothing of the sort. Instead, it was a business-to-business sales contractor, i.e. an organization that companies pay to harass other companies about using their products. Yet, nowhere was this previously mentioned, and the aforementioned techno-horror website insisted that it was a consulting firm.
Employer Fail #25: Lying about what your organization actually does, if not explicitly, then by virtue of omission or misnomers.
I was told that I was the last candidate to be interviewed, that they would decide which candidates were to be called back in a few hours, and would let me know by 3:00 that afternoon. My interview was for 11:00 and started at 11:10; I walked out of the office at 11:25. On the way out, a uniformed man with a handcart rode the elevator down with me. He seemed perplexed by the presence of another person in the building, probably because Big Lou told him that for his sake, if anyone found out about their organ-harvesting operation, he'd never see his kids again. For his sake, then, I didn't ask about the contents of the crates on the handcart. He failed to hold a door for me, even though I had previously held another door for him. As expected, I didn't get a call back.
Expressing my disappointment to my mother the next day, she brought up something that has since started to make a lot of sense: everything about this organization sounds like some kind of shell company that only pretends to hire people to keep up appearances. As I ran back over the facts, everything started to fit into place. Sure, the following things are only circumstantial, but it really does make you wonder:
1) The impressively noncommittal and non-descriptive website.
2) I was always told to speak to one of two secretaries, alliteratively initialed JJ and AA. I only ever had email contact with JJ in my repeated forays into communicating with them--I'm not sure AA really exists. Not quite a smoking gun, but still strange.
3) No listing in the building's directory.
4) A tiny office that presumably couldn't fit all the employees they purportedly had, especially if they were "rapidly-expanding." I saw a front desk/reception area, the office/interview room, a small floor area, and a conference room that didn't even have walls around it, but was rather more like a large corner cubicle. Furthermore, the interview room I went into was empty, except for two chairs and a boomerang-shaped white table of surfboard dimensions.
5) Even though I was told that they were interviewing candidates the entire week and that I was the last candidate to be interviewed, I got to the office 10 minutes early and did not see anyone exit the office during my time there. At my other interviews, when multiple candidates are processed in a short period of time, they are crammed in like schedule sardines. This remains the only interview I have been to at which I did not see another candidate at any point.
6) Aside from the secretary and interviewer, the office had no other signs of human life, except that at one point a man in a suit came in, walked one way, then another way, and then exited the office. The secretary said nothing to him, so it's not really clear whether or not he was an employee or just the building tech guy of some sort.
7) At the interview, I was told that decisions would be made quickly, and a group would be hired due to a pressing need. Multiple days a week, I see the exact same listing I initially applied to on Monster. This has been the case every single week since I initially applied--and is probably the biggest indicator that something is dishonest, if not flat-out wrong.
Employer Fail #25: Being a shell company or a front to write off fabricated losses for tax purposes. And if you are going to be this, then at least don't bother to get people to apply to your organization for legitimacy's sake. You're just wasting their time, and yours along with it.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Chapter 2: The Ordeal
If it wasn't for this chapter, this blog probably would have no reason for existing. Everything else, while full of hilarity, has been mild, including the aforementioned six-hour basket of lies, in comparison to this. But this, this was a low blow. Yet, despite that fact, I think I bear less ill will in general to this organization, and the employees therein, than I do towards any other place I've had to endure the application process with. Those in charge of making the hiring decision actually seemed genuinely interested in me and what I had to bring to the table--at least until they weren't.
I was aware of this organization's existence even before they arrived at a local job fair, one that was more than a short walk away. Yet, they were coming, and I made it a point to talk with their representatives nonetheless. The rest of the job fair was full of organizations I had no interest in, so I made the trek solely for one conversation. Before even introducing myself, I asked, "So, the view from your offices is pretty killer?" The representative I voiced that opinion to was taken aback--apparently he didn't expect anyone to have known where their organization was located. But I did. Maybe that gave me a step up. That struck up a conversation, and given that I had already done my research, he couldn't really tell me anything new, short of the fact that they would look over my resume right away. And when he said right away, he meant it. He glanced at it, his eyes lit up, he showed his co-representative, and they stonewalled everyone else in line waiting to hear their shpiel to schedule an interview with me.
There was a minor issue in that I had to be at work in about half an hour at that point, and then would have to make my way all the way back to the site of the job fair for the interview, but that I did. A bigger problem was that they told me that they would hold the interview in the same large, multi-purpose building holding the job fair, but didn't tell me where.
Employer Fail #-4 (or #15): Not giving detailed interview directions.
After returning to the building after work and stumbling around, I finally found a makeshift sign informing me that interviews were, in fact, being held behind the large steel double-doors. Although my interview was scheduled for 4:30, they were predictably running incredibly late, and I was asked politely to sit tight repeatedly. Eventually, though, I had the interview, first with one of the representatives, and then the other. They generally ate everything about me up, and given that they were interviewing two candidates at a time and then just switching, but they continued talking to me rather than concluding my interview (I think they handed me off to one another about 4 times, meaning that my interview actually lasted twice as long as anyone else's), I figured I was some sort of frontrunner, at least among the candidates they encountered at said job fair. I continued chatting (it could hardly be described as interviewing at that point, instead we were talking about the location, traffic, and generally conversing like friends) with the representatives for a long time, and when all the other interviews were finished, I was asked if I would like to take an aptitude test so they could fast-track my application. I agreed, but asked how long it would take first. That turned out to be both a good and a bad move.
The test was slated to take about an hour. I figured that it would be about 6:30 by the time I finished, but when I said this aloud, the response was, "Holy shit? 6:30? We need to make our flight!" I guess that meant no test. Apparently the representatives had lost track of time, and needed to fly home. They gave me rushed instructions to contact the organization's HR department, told me what to send along, and left in a hurry.
Later that night, I sent an email, enclosing the standard resume/cover letter/transcript/writing sample/attached relevant work. The organization is a research institute that uses econometrics to solve quandaries given to them by local and state governments, and I had a fair bit of prior work to choose from.
It took a while before I got a reply. I think at this point, in retrospect, I can say the ordeal had truly begun. In my cover letter, I noted that I had spoken to the two representatives and asked to arrange an on-site interview, including taking whatever test they wanted me to take. Given that I would only be near their offices for about a week during a break from classes, it was imperative that they actually scheduled my interview for the right date. Weeks passed. I began to get nervous.
Employer Fail #16: Loafing on scheduling an interview. How hard is it to add me to a datebook?
On the day before I left to spend my week-long break in the vicinity of their offices, I finally received an email. Unfortunately, given the type of email it was, I almost wish I hadn't received anything. Yes, the interview was scheduled for an acceptable date and time, but they got both the position I was applying for wrong, and were asking me to send them writing samples, work samples, and coding samples before the interview. I had already sent writing samples and work samples, and during the initial interview I was told that work samples would be fine as a replacement for coding samples, provided that the work had the results of coding in it.
Employer Fail #17: Not paying close enough attention to my emails to know which position I was applying for, or which of the application materials I was required to submit and had already submitted.
Frantic, I shot an email back, about how I was actually applying for this other position, that I had already sent the samples, and that as I explained in the first interview, I didn't have coding samples available (I had done the coding work for the couple of projects that required it either on computers that didn't belong to me, or that did but had since died ignoble deaths) in raw form. I attached the samples again, for good measure. I had no idea what this meant for my interview status, and I never got a reply acknowledging either my new email, or that they had made a mistake in their message.
A few days later, I arrived at their offices for my interview. The front desk secretary was the same woman that had emailed me my interview time, and she informed me that she received my email concerning the correct position I was applying for. An apology would have killed her, apparently.
The interview process generally involved me going around and talking to various employees about what they do and what I've done. Some were nice and interested, some pretended to be nice and interested, and some were too busy to really care about my presence, despite being assigned to interview me. Over the course of the 4 hours that I spent there, I ended up talking to about 10 different employees, or about 1/7th of their total staff. By the end, I had no questions of my own, and was giving the same few answers to everyone. Refreshingly, most didn't ask hackneyed interview questions, but were just excited to discuss their own work and get my take on it. I would have been annoyed that my interview was scheduled for 1:00-3:00 but ran twice as long, but having endured "The Ruse" about a month before, I just couldn't get worked up about an extra two hours. Furthermore, it ran long because I had to sit around a lot as people finished their meetings and got ready to see me, as opposed to because they decided to up and lie to me.
The first man I interviewed with, however, managed to terrify me by talking about his own research, and then giving me a crazy statistics question out of the blue. I had no pen and paper, and I probably couldn't have done it even if I did, so I offered up a wrong answer, which displeased him. He was pretty high up in the organization, so I thought I had doomed my chances then and there, but everyone else was sufficiently understanding and laid back to ease my mind.
What also eased my mind was the aforementioned test. It was really rather simple, except for the last question, which required me to remember a formula I hadn't used in 2 years and had correspondingly forgotten. That, above all else, gave me confidence that counterbalanced the blindsiding of the first interviewer.
The only other things of note were that one of the interviewers mocked me for wearing a suit, as their employees generally wore t-shirts and shorts or a polo at the very top end, and that at the interview's conclusion, I was told I would be notified one way or another the following week.
I did get notified the following week. But not with a job offer, or a rejection, but rather an email from the aforementioned front desk secretary that had two further "evaluations" attached to it. Once again, they were of the 24-hour timed variety. One was a writing assignment, the other involved data manipulation in Excel that was easy, but was also easy to get wrong if you rushed through it too quickly. Luckily, I had little in the way of other things to do that day, so I was able to take my time and make sure that I didn't commit any harmful oversights. Still, employer fail #3 was now in full effect. Upon submitting these, I was once again subjected to radio silence of the email variety. No responses, neither to my completed assignments, nor to the follow-up emails I sent to the representative/interviewer that was handling my candidacy and the front desk secretary.
Employer Fail #18: General communication failure.
A few weeks after that, I got another email from the front desk secretary, not acknowledging receipt of my previous evaluation assignments, but rather containing a whole new one. This one was a more involved endeavor, requiring me to read a technical document and then summarize and evaluate it. While it wasn't difficult, it did involve writing about 10 pages' worth of material, again in a 24-hour period. I finished that, sent it in within a few hours of receiving it, and sent it in, only to be shut out again.
Over a month passed. I eventually stopped considering the possibility that anyone would get back to me, in part because I had heard that someone I had once taken a class with had heard back from them in the affirmative about a week after my on-site interview (and presumably hers as well). If she hadn't been subjected to additional tests, what was going on? Probably nothing good. It seemed to me that they were just searching for a reason to reject me.
(The thing that really stung here is that she was a Psych major. And yes, say what you will about a liberal arts education, and so on, but this is primarily an economics-based firm that deals with econometric analysis. I don't know how rigorous quantitative courses in the psychology curriculum are, but to this day I remain baffled as to how she got a position for which econometric aptitude was the primary qualifier.)
Then, one day, I got a phone call. Or rather, a voicemail, as I apparently missed the call. It was from the employee I had initially talked to at the job fair. The voicemail didn't say much, just that I should contact him. I was going to do just that, when I received an email from him as well. It said, in its body: "Hey. Somehow we got busy here and completely forgot about you." No apology. No explanation for what that meant, no indication of whether I had gotten the job, just in a delayed manner, or whether they had forgotten to inform me of my rejection. No explanation for the series of evaluation assignments they made me do, or the silence I was subjected to in the meanwhile. And when I replied concerning a continuation of the application process, I got nothing once more.
In 6th grade, in one of those large textbooks that functions as a collection of random short stories and grammar lessons, I once had to read a tale from Africa that had the moral of, "A man is not truly dead until he is forgotten." I think it involved ghosts of some sort, and probably skeletons. Now, I don't think this ordeal killed me, as it would be pretty weird if I were typing this as some sort of Africa folktale ghost/skeleton. But, it did take the wind out of my sails. As you may have noticed, I can't even try to find the humor in this whole situation, even many months in retrospect. It was a waste of time, through and through, and a wholly unfair waste of time with no clarity and no closure. But don't worry, at least it gets a lot more hilarious and less depressing from here on out.
Employer fail #19: Forgetting I exist, especially after being very much aware of my existence and all the things that entails for months.
I was aware of this organization's existence even before they arrived at a local job fair, one that was more than a short walk away. Yet, they were coming, and I made it a point to talk with their representatives nonetheless. The rest of the job fair was full of organizations I had no interest in, so I made the trek solely for one conversation. Before even introducing myself, I asked, "So, the view from your offices is pretty killer?" The representative I voiced that opinion to was taken aback--apparently he didn't expect anyone to have known where their organization was located. But I did. Maybe that gave me a step up. That struck up a conversation, and given that I had already done my research, he couldn't really tell me anything new, short of the fact that they would look over my resume right away. And when he said right away, he meant it. He glanced at it, his eyes lit up, he showed his co-representative, and they stonewalled everyone else in line waiting to hear their shpiel to schedule an interview with me.
There was a minor issue in that I had to be at work in about half an hour at that point, and then would have to make my way all the way back to the site of the job fair for the interview, but that I did. A bigger problem was that they told me that they would hold the interview in the same large, multi-purpose building holding the job fair, but didn't tell me where.
Employer Fail #-4 (or #15): Not giving detailed interview directions.
After returning to the building after work and stumbling around, I finally found a makeshift sign informing me that interviews were, in fact, being held behind the large steel double-doors. Although my interview was scheduled for 4:30, they were predictably running incredibly late, and I was asked politely to sit tight repeatedly. Eventually, though, I had the interview, first with one of the representatives, and then the other. They generally ate everything about me up, and given that they were interviewing two candidates at a time and then just switching, but they continued talking to me rather than concluding my interview (I think they handed me off to one another about 4 times, meaning that my interview actually lasted twice as long as anyone else's), I figured I was some sort of frontrunner, at least among the candidates they encountered at said job fair. I continued chatting (it could hardly be described as interviewing at that point, instead we were talking about the location, traffic, and generally conversing like friends) with the representatives for a long time, and when all the other interviews were finished, I was asked if I would like to take an aptitude test so they could fast-track my application. I agreed, but asked how long it would take first. That turned out to be both a good and a bad move.
The test was slated to take about an hour. I figured that it would be about 6:30 by the time I finished, but when I said this aloud, the response was, "Holy shit? 6:30? We need to make our flight!" I guess that meant no test. Apparently the representatives had lost track of time, and needed to fly home. They gave me rushed instructions to contact the organization's HR department, told me what to send along, and left in a hurry.
Later that night, I sent an email, enclosing the standard resume/cover letter/transcript/writing sample/attached relevant work. The organization is a research institute that uses econometrics to solve quandaries given to them by local and state governments, and I had a fair bit of prior work to choose from.
It took a while before I got a reply. I think at this point, in retrospect, I can say the ordeal had truly begun. In my cover letter, I noted that I had spoken to the two representatives and asked to arrange an on-site interview, including taking whatever test they wanted me to take. Given that I would only be near their offices for about a week during a break from classes, it was imperative that they actually scheduled my interview for the right date. Weeks passed. I began to get nervous.
Employer Fail #16: Loafing on scheduling an interview. How hard is it to add me to a datebook?
On the day before I left to spend my week-long break in the vicinity of their offices, I finally received an email. Unfortunately, given the type of email it was, I almost wish I hadn't received anything. Yes, the interview was scheduled for an acceptable date and time, but they got both the position I was applying for wrong, and were asking me to send them writing samples, work samples, and coding samples before the interview. I had already sent writing samples and work samples, and during the initial interview I was told that work samples would be fine as a replacement for coding samples, provided that the work had the results of coding in it.
Employer Fail #17: Not paying close enough attention to my emails to know which position I was applying for, or which of the application materials I was required to submit and had already submitted.
Frantic, I shot an email back, about how I was actually applying for this other position, that I had already sent the samples, and that as I explained in the first interview, I didn't have coding samples available (I had done the coding work for the couple of projects that required it either on computers that didn't belong to me, or that did but had since died ignoble deaths) in raw form. I attached the samples again, for good measure. I had no idea what this meant for my interview status, and I never got a reply acknowledging either my new email, or that they had made a mistake in their message.
A few days later, I arrived at their offices for my interview. The front desk secretary was the same woman that had emailed me my interview time, and she informed me that she received my email concerning the correct position I was applying for. An apology would have killed her, apparently.
The interview process generally involved me going around and talking to various employees about what they do and what I've done. Some were nice and interested, some pretended to be nice and interested, and some were too busy to really care about my presence, despite being assigned to interview me. Over the course of the 4 hours that I spent there, I ended up talking to about 10 different employees, or about 1/7th of their total staff. By the end, I had no questions of my own, and was giving the same few answers to everyone. Refreshingly, most didn't ask hackneyed interview questions, but were just excited to discuss their own work and get my take on it. I would have been annoyed that my interview was scheduled for 1:00-3:00 but ran twice as long, but having endured "The Ruse" about a month before, I just couldn't get worked up about an extra two hours. Furthermore, it ran long because I had to sit around a lot as people finished their meetings and got ready to see me, as opposed to because they decided to up and lie to me.
The first man I interviewed with, however, managed to terrify me by talking about his own research, and then giving me a crazy statistics question out of the blue. I had no pen and paper, and I probably couldn't have done it even if I did, so I offered up a wrong answer, which displeased him. He was pretty high up in the organization, so I thought I had doomed my chances then and there, but everyone else was sufficiently understanding and laid back to ease my mind.
What also eased my mind was the aforementioned test. It was really rather simple, except for the last question, which required me to remember a formula I hadn't used in 2 years and had correspondingly forgotten. That, above all else, gave me confidence that counterbalanced the blindsiding of the first interviewer.
The only other things of note were that one of the interviewers mocked me for wearing a suit, as their employees generally wore t-shirts and shorts or a polo at the very top end, and that at the interview's conclusion, I was told I would be notified one way or another the following week.
I did get notified the following week. But not with a job offer, or a rejection, but rather an email from the aforementioned front desk secretary that had two further "evaluations" attached to it. Once again, they were of the 24-hour timed variety. One was a writing assignment, the other involved data manipulation in Excel that was easy, but was also easy to get wrong if you rushed through it too quickly. Luckily, I had little in the way of other things to do that day, so I was able to take my time and make sure that I didn't commit any harmful oversights. Still, employer fail #3 was now in full effect. Upon submitting these, I was once again subjected to radio silence of the email variety. No responses, neither to my completed assignments, nor to the follow-up emails I sent to the representative/interviewer that was handling my candidacy and the front desk secretary.
Employer Fail #18: General communication failure.
A few weeks after that, I got another email from the front desk secretary, not acknowledging receipt of my previous evaluation assignments, but rather containing a whole new one. This one was a more involved endeavor, requiring me to read a technical document and then summarize and evaluate it. While it wasn't difficult, it did involve writing about 10 pages' worth of material, again in a 24-hour period. I finished that, sent it in within a few hours of receiving it, and sent it in, only to be shut out again.
Over a month passed. I eventually stopped considering the possibility that anyone would get back to me, in part because I had heard that someone I had once taken a class with had heard back from them in the affirmative about a week after my on-site interview (and presumably hers as well). If she hadn't been subjected to additional tests, what was going on? Probably nothing good. It seemed to me that they were just searching for a reason to reject me.
(The thing that really stung here is that she was a Psych major. And yes, say what you will about a liberal arts education, and so on, but this is primarily an economics-based firm that deals with econometric analysis. I don't know how rigorous quantitative courses in the psychology curriculum are, but to this day I remain baffled as to how she got a position for which econometric aptitude was the primary qualifier.)
Then, one day, I got a phone call. Or rather, a voicemail, as I apparently missed the call. It was from the employee I had initially talked to at the job fair. The voicemail didn't say much, just that I should contact him. I was going to do just that, when I received an email from him as well. It said, in its body: "Hey. Somehow we got busy here and completely forgot about you." No apology. No explanation for what that meant, no indication of whether I had gotten the job, just in a delayed manner, or whether they had forgotten to inform me of my rejection. No explanation for the series of evaluation assignments they made me do, or the silence I was subjected to in the meanwhile. And when I replied concerning a continuation of the application process, I got nothing once more.
In 6th grade, in one of those large textbooks that functions as a collection of random short stories and grammar lessons, I once had to read a tale from Africa that had the moral of, "A man is not truly dead until he is forgotten." I think it involved ghosts of some sort, and probably skeletons. Now, I don't think this ordeal killed me, as it would be pretty weird if I were typing this as some sort of Africa folktale ghost/skeleton. But, it did take the wind out of my sails. As you may have noticed, I can't even try to find the humor in this whole situation, even many months in retrospect. It was a waste of time, through and through, and a wholly unfair waste of time with no clarity and no closure. But don't worry, at least it gets a lot more hilarious and less depressing from here on out.
Employer fail #19: Forgetting I exist, especially after being very much aware of my existence and all the things that entails for months.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Mini-Fail #1: The Hey-Guys-I-Have-Trouble-Understanding-Things-Like-Numbers-and/or-Words
In terms of chronology, this little series of incidents actually took place before the six-hour interview of death, but it's a little too trifling to really feel like a genuine fail in my mind.
At the aforementioned job fair, before encountering representative-that-is-apparently-terrified-of-job-fairs, I walked past a table with some really enthusiastic guys attempting to capture an audience, or whatever you call it when you're making a pitch to desperate college students about attempting to gain a position at your organization. I didn't really have much of an interest in their firm (medical software/IT), but as I stopped to briefly chat with one of the presenters, I could see him trying to peer at the resumes I was holding in my hand so I saved him the trouble of straining his eyes by handing him one. He looked over it. "Wow, Phi Beta Kappa as a junior!" he said before adding in a weirdly suggestive tone, "You know, I was Phi Beta Kappa as a senior." I didn't quite know how to respond. Did he expect me to invite him down the block for coffee because of this? I probably just stood there with a vaguely perturbed look on my face. I guess my resume made some kind of impression on him, because he started making a pitch to me in a frenzy. I gave him my email address so that he could set up a phone interview, and mercifully took my leave before his enthusiasm triggered some kind of chain reaction that would have killed him--or me.
As I walked away and amongst the other tables and booths at the job fair, I heard some kind of hubbub behind me. Like, someone running, or yelling a name, or something. Turns out it was Mr. Enthusiastic, running full speed after me, his suit jacket flapping behind him and making him look like some kind of creepily gung-ho superhero.
"Wait, wait! I forgot to ask you, are you legally allowed to work within the US?"
"Yes?"
"Oh. Okay. Good."
He walked back to his booth, his jacket no longer resembling a cape.
Maybe a week later, I got an email from said firm's HR department, telling me that they would be doing phone interviews over the next 4 days, and if I could send them a schedule of my availability between such and such hours. Given a time zone difference between their company headquarters and my location at the time, I sent them a very detailed message noting said time difference and telling them what times they were allowed to call both according to their local time zone, and mine. I figured this was foolproof. I also figured it was foolproof that I wrote explicitly in the email: "On these days, I have work starting at 2:30 (my local time). I do not know how long you expect the phone interview to take, but I would appreciate it if you scheduled my interview for far enough in advance so that I did not have to come in late for work." In fact, 2:30-4:00 was the only time I gave them for the day they ended up scheduling the interview for that I was not available.
A few days later, I get a confirmation email: "Your interview has been scheduled for 2:30 on Thursday." 2:30. Not 2:20, which would have proven to me that they could at least understand how numbers worked, even if they didn't possess the ability to read my helpful note about not wanting to miss work. 2:30. Classy.
Employer Fail #12: Not being able to understand numbers, or perhaps the words "these are the times when I am unavailable" to the extent that you end up scheduling interviews explicitly when I told you I couldn't do them.
If they didn't care about my availability, why even make me submit a schedule for their consideration in the first place? And furthermore, if they did care about my availability but making me miss the first half-hour of work was the only way they could square the scheduling circle, why not send a thoughtful note informing me that that was the case and apologizing for the inconvenience? At this point my indifference towards their organization became contempt--why would anyone want to work for a place where HR can't read or identify numbers properly (or both)?
Ah, but this wasn't it. Prior to my phone interview, they expected me to take a personality test of sorts. If I knew what I was getting into, I would have had the screen capture key ready, because the images would have been priceless to demonstrate my point. The personality test contained a lot of generic questions that you might find on a Myers-Briggs or something similar, but it also contained completely off the wall questions that made no sense. Here are a couple, reconstructed from memory rather accurately because of their ridiculousness:
Sun is to basketball as moon is to ____
A) Football
B) Tennis ball
C) Shuttlecock
D) Frisbee
What in the world could that even refer to? I mean, if golf ball or volleyball were possible choices, that would've been one thing. But as it is, this just seems like an attempt at pseudo-Freudian divination. "Oh, look, applicant #481516 selected 'tennis ball.' You know what that means. He's a secret communist, and communists never do well in this position!" Maybe the test concludes that if you select "frisbee," you're an alcoholic. Who knows. Moving on:
Tiger is to hunt as fish is to ___
A) Gar
B) Marlin
C) Tuna
D) Mackerel
Okay, so, let's see. First off, the analogy is presumably reversed. A tiger is a type of cat, and in this question it takes the primary position in the first formulation. Yet, all of the choices are types of fish, but they are in the latter place in the second formulation. Even if we consider it to mean "fish" the verb, so it can parallel "hunt," we end up with a series of bizarre questions. Are they referring to tigers hunting and want to know which of the fishes listed fishes for other fish? Are they saying that tigers get hunted and want to know which of the listed fishes are fished for? Are they making all of this up, branding some of us closeted crossdressers for selecting "gar" and then recommending that we get hired for the sake of promoting office diversity while laughing all the way to the bank? Curiouser and curiouser. However, none of it is as ridiculous as this existential trainwreck:
All is to some as some is to ___
A) None
B) Half
C) Some
D) A few
If you choose "none," you're hopelessly depressed and will only jeopardize office morale. If you choose "half," you're a psychotic perfectionist whose commitment to exactitude will irreparably drag down your productivity. If you choose "some," you don't make sense, since "some is to some" doesn't really work in an analogy, but they'll probably hire you anyway. If you choose "a few," you're a haphazard lout who can't be bothered to effectively quantify anything. Hey, I think I'm getting the hang of this. Too little too late, though.
Employer Fail #13: Subjecting applicants to personality tests that are more obnoxious than the most poorly-composed quizzes on Quizilla.
Maybe they should've just linked me to a "Which Twilight character are you?" quiz on Facebook and gone from there.
Of course, what can you expect from a personality test website that features this guy as their front-and-center image? What kind of message does that send? "If you use our software, only men that sit leaning uncomfortably forward with creepy vaguely-pedophile smiles will be recommended for hiring!" Sounds like a winner to me. Or, as we can see by their banner image, "We're all different, except for our inability to wear anything but solid colors and look anything but immensely uncomfortable as we form a weird makeshift human centipede!" Lastly, if you go here you'll see one of the classiest sleight-of-hands for self-promotion I've ever encountered. Apparently, an in-house study of their own software revealed the employees selected by their arcane methods were more effective than other employees? Nah, there's no conflict of interest there. Furthermore, the chart they conveniently provide clearly lists "sales" on the Y-axis, yet the explanatory blurb writes that all average "productivity" is enhanced by virtue of hiring according to the software recommendations. But what if your firm doesn't do sales? Answer: Who cares, you probably selected "marlin" on question #23 of our personality assessment, you secret communist! We wouldn't sell to you anyway!
Aside from the aforementioned poor timing, there isn't really much to report about the phone interview. The man I talked to was incredibly humorless, which made for a pretty dreary experience. My lack of enthusiasm for their whole operation was almost certainly transparent, and I knew that I had lost the position just about as soon as he asked me if I was willing to permanently relocate to their company headquarters outside of Madison, WI and all I could muster was a "Well, if that's what the job requires..." I mean, there's not really any way that I'm getting excited about Madison, of all things, and the job is 80% travel, so it seems very harsh to require me to put down money for a lease in an area I don't really care for if I'm going to be away from the place I'm paying rent for 4 days a week.
Employer Fail #14: Requiring employees whose job consists mostly of traveling to live right by company headquarters, as opposed to living maybe a couple of hours out and commuting if, for whatever reason, they really need to come to the office.
Interestingly, 3 acquaintances of mine now work for this organization. I guess they answered "shuttlecock" when given the chance.
At the aforementioned job fair, before encountering representative-that-is-apparently-terrified-of-job-fairs, I walked past a table with some really enthusiastic guys attempting to capture an audience, or whatever you call it when you're making a pitch to desperate college students about attempting to gain a position at your organization. I didn't really have much of an interest in their firm (medical software/IT), but as I stopped to briefly chat with one of the presenters, I could see him trying to peer at the resumes I was holding in my hand so I saved him the trouble of straining his eyes by handing him one. He looked over it. "Wow, Phi Beta Kappa as a junior!" he said before adding in a weirdly suggestive tone, "You know, I was Phi Beta Kappa as a senior." I didn't quite know how to respond. Did he expect me to invite him down the block for coffee because of this? I probably just stood there with a vaguely perturbed look on my face. I guess my resume made some kind of impression on him, because he started making a pitch to me in a frenzy. I gave him my email address so that he could set up a phone interview, and mercifully took my leave before his enthusiasm triggered some kind of chain reaction that would have killed him--or me.
As I walked away and amongst the other tables and booths at the job fair, I heard some kind of hubbub behind me. Like, someone running, or yelling a name, or something. Turns out it was Mr. Enthusiastic, running full speed after me, his suit jacket flapping behind him and making him look like some kind of creepily gung-ho superhero.
"Wait, wait! I forgot to ask you, are you legally allowed to work within the US?"
"Yes?"
"Oh. Okay. Good."
He walked back to his booth, his jacket no longer resembling a cape.
Maybe a week later, I got an email from said firm's HR department, telling me that they would be doing phone interviews over the next 4 days, and if I could send them a schedule of my availability between such and such hours. Given a time zone difference between their company headquarters and my location at the time, I sent them a very detailed message noting said time difference and telling them what times they were allowed to call both according to their local time zone, and mine. I figured this was foolproof. I also figured it was foolproof that I wrote explicitly in the email: "On these days, I have work starting at 2:30 (my local time). I do not know how long you expect the phone interview to take, but I would appreciate it if you scheduled my interview for far enough in advance so that I did not have to come in late for work." In fact, 2:30-4:00 was the only time I gave them for the day they ended up scheduling the interview for that I was not available.
A few days later, I get a confirmation email: "Your interview has been scheduled for 2:30 on Thursday." 2:30. Not 2:20, which would have proven to me that they could at least understand how numbers worked, even if they didn't possess the ability to read my helpful note about not wanting to miss work. 2:30. Classy.
Employer Fail #12: Not being able to understand numbers, or perhaps the words "these are the times when I am unavailable" to the extent that you end up scheduling interviews explicitly when I told you I couldn't do them.
If they didn't care about my availability, why even make me submit a schedule for their consideration in the first place? And furthermore, if they did care about my availability but making me miss the first half-hour of work was the only way they could square the scheduling circle, why not send a thoughtful note informing me that that was the case and apologizing for the inconvenience? At this point my indifference towards their organization became contempt--why would anyone want to work for a place where HR can't read or identify numbers properly (or both)?
Ah, but this wasn't it. Prior to my phone interview, they expected me to take a personality test of sorts. If I knew what I was getting into, I would have had the screen capture key ready, because the images would have been priceless to demonstrate my point. The personality test contained a lot of generic questions that you might find on a Myers-Briggs or something similar, but it also contained completely off the wall questions that made no sense. Here are a couple, reconstructed from memory rather accurately because of their ridiculousness:
Sun is to basketball as moon is to ____
A) Football
B) Tennis ball
C) Shuttlecock
D) Frisbee
What in the world could that even refer to? I mean, if golf ball or volleyball were possible choices, that would've been one thing. But as it is, this just seems like an attempt at pseudo-Freudian divination. "Oh, look, applicant #481516 selected 'tennis ball.' You know what that means. He's a secret communist, and communists never do well in this position!" Maybe the test concludes that if you select "frisbee," you're an alcoholic. Who knows. Moving on:
Tiger is to hunt as fish is to ___
A) Gar
B) Marlin
C) Tuna
D) Mackerel
Okay, so, let's see. First off, the analogy is presumably reversed. A tiger is a type of cat, and in this question it takes the primary position in the first formulation. Yet, all of the choices are types of fish, but they are in the latter place in the second formulation. Even if we consider it to mean "fish" the verb, so it can parallel "hunt," we end up with a series of bizarre questions. Are they referring to tigers hunting and want to know which of the fishes listed fishes for other fish? Are they saying that tigers get hunted and want to know which of the listed fishes are fished for? Are they making all of this up, branding some of us closeted crossdressers for selecting "gar" and then recommending that we get hired for the sake of promoting office diversity while laughing all the way to the bank? Curiouser and curiouser. However, none of it is as ridiculous as this existential trainwreck:
All is to some as some is to ___
A) None
B) Half
C) Some
D) A few
If you choose "none," you're hopelessly depressed and will only jeopardize office morale. If you choose "half," you're a psychotic perfectionist whose commitment to exactitude will irreparably drag down your productivity. If you choose "some," you don't make sense, since "some is to some" doesn't really work in an analogy, but they'll probably hire you anyway. If you choose "a few," you're a haphazard lout who can't be bothered to effectively quantify anything. Hey, I think I'm getting the hang of this. Too little too late, though.
Employer Fail #13: Subjecting applicants to personality tests that are more obnoxious than the most poorly-composed quizzes on Quizilla.
Maybe they should've just linked me to a "Which Twilight character are you?" quiz on Facebook and gone from there.
Of course, what can you expect from a personality test website that features this guy as their front-and-center image? What kind of message does that send? "If you use our software, only men that sit leaning uncomfortably forward with creepy vaguely-pedophile smiles will be recommended for hiring!" Sounds like a winner to me. Or, as we can see by their banner image, "We're all different, except for our inability to wear anything but solid colors and look anything but immensely uncomfortable as we form a weird makeshift human centipede!" Lastly, if you go here you'll see one of the classiest sleight-of-hands for self-promotion I've ever encountered. Apparently, an in-house study of their own software revealed the employees selected by their arcane methods were more effective than other employees? Nah, there's no conflict of interest there. Furthermore, the chart they conveniently provide clearly lists "sales" on the Y-axis, yet the explanatory blurb writes that all average "productivity" is enhanced by virtue of hiring according to the software recommendations. But what if your firm doesn't do sales? Answer: Who cares, you probably selected "marlin" on question #23 of our personality assessment, you secret communist! We wouldn't sell to you anyway!
Aside from the aforementioned poor timing, there isn't really much to report about the phone interview. The man I talked to was incredibly humorless, which made for a pretty dreary experience. My lack of enthusiasm for their whole operation was almost certainly transparent, and I knew that I had lost the position just about as soon as he asked me if I was willing to permanently relocate to their company headquarters outside of Madison, WI and all I could muster was a "Well, if that's what the job requires..." I mean, there's not really any way that I'm getting excited about Madison, of all things, and the job is 80% travel, so it seems very harsh to require me to put down money for a lease in an area I don't really care for if I'm going to be away from the place I'm paying rent for 4 days a week.
Employer Fail #14: Requiring employees whose job consists mostly of traveling to live right by company headquarters, as opposed to living maybe a couple of hours out and commuting if, for whatever reason, they really need to come to the office.
Interestingly, 3 acquaintances of mine now work for this organization. I guess they answered "shuttlecock" when given the chance.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Chapter 1: The Ruse
At one point, I was convinced that not only was there a great job out there for me, but that I would get it. While I wasn't immediately disabused of this notion, my first application process for a full-time, long term position pretty much signaled that finding a job was going to be somewhere between sticking your hands in boiling water and eating nails with chopsticks on the fun meter.
This ordeal, like many, began at a job fair. I went up to a table on an organization that I had already done research on that was offering a position that appealed to me: political research. Upon approaching the table, the designated talking head/recruiter attempted to give me the same shpiel she presumably gave everyone, but there were two problems: one, I had already done my research and didn't need any convincing to apply; two, she looked about as terrified of being there as Strom Thurmond was of racial integration.
Employer Fail #1: Your organization's representative is too busy contemplating fleeing from her table in terror to effectively communicate with prospective applicants.
I signed up for an interview, jotting down my phone number and email address. This didn't seem to reduce her terror, but at least it didn't increase it, either.
I heard nothing back from these guys until the afternoon before the day my interview was scheduled--about 22 hours before I was supposed to show up at a location of their choosing. As can be expected when an organization achieves a Jabba the Hut-like bloating, there was absolutely no one to contact concerning my interview, its location, or anything of that sort.
Employer Fail #2: Resembling Jabba the Hut in any way, including being so large that the diseconomies of scale really start to sting. Corollary: Actually being Jabba the Hut.
The call I got confirming my interview luckily established its location as pretty close by, a surprising measure of hassle-reduction not usually seen by employers. Additionally, I recognized the person placing the confirmation call as someone I had shared a class with. Even though she must have seen and said my name multiple times, she apparently didn't make this connection, despite the fact that we regularly interacted within the context of said class.
Nor did she make this connection at the interview, at least not while it was officially ongoing. The interview itself was pretty standard fare: "Why do you want to do this position?" "What do you know about carrying out political research?" When it came to her talking about the job itself, she focused on the not-that-generous pay (albeit with health insurance!) and the fact that each job had a "canvassing" requirement that was to be done for about two weeks. No big deal, right? Then, towards the conclusion, in what would turn out to be a profound verbal sleight of hand (sleight of tongue?), she said that I was obviously smart enough to be considered, and that she had no qualms about extending me an invitation to a second-round interview that Saturday right then and there. Sounds good, I figured. She promised to send along directions/instructions for said interview as soon as she could. I asked how long it would take, to which I received an answer of: "Oh, two, maybe two-and-a-half hours."
(In case you were wondering, as I was getting ready to leave the interview room, she finally did realize that we had a class together. I had to remind her which class it was, though. At that point, it had been less than a year since that course ended.)
Things began going downhill soon after, but I didn't quite recognize it in time to save myself any trouble. The interview site was about an hour away; that's more like the insensitive employers I've come to know and loathe. Additionally, I was sent a notification that I would be required to produce a document, a speech on a topic to be given later, and I would have 24 hours from the time this assignment was sent to write it up and send it in. For reasons to be soon revealed, I doubt anyone actually read these--it was more a measure to weed out applicants by exacting a pound of flesh.
The thing with giving someone a 24-hour window to complete some kind of evaluation assignment is that it doesn't make sense. If your goal is to judge how well an applicant responds to deadlines and time pressure, why not give them a time period that is just long enough for the assignment to be completed? If your goal is to see an applicant's top level of performance, that is, a quality of work that does not take time spent as a factor, why have it be time-sensitive at all? As it is, such assignments are rather pointless and serve only to disrupt one's schedule: you have to put in a maximum of effort in case another applicant has less on their platter and is going to do so anyway. This ends up evaluating nothing other than applicant's willingness to put their other obligations aside for the sake of being considered for the position: a better candidate might have less free time to spare in the window you arbitrarily chose.
Employer Fail #3: Time-sensitive evaluation assignments.
The Saturday of the interview, I headed out to make the trek over. Braving traffic and unfortunate urban-planning conundrums, I get dropped off outside of a gigantic, sprawling building with an equally sizable empty plaza attached to it to boot. The building is completely unmarked, and only after seeing dozens of other people ostensibly headed somewhere does it become clear that the entrance to said building is actually on its side. Well, no, the entrance is in the front, but apparently since it's a weekend said entrance is closed, and no one thought to put up a sign of any sort.
Employer Fail #4: Your detailed interview directions fail.
At this point it already dawned on me that this was some kind of unconsidered animal. Like a mix between a lobster and a hammerhead shark, only of the interview variety. It was a group interview, and then some. As we were led through an elevator lobby and to a different floor, I calculated about 40 people there with me. By the time everyone had filtered in, the number was probably closer to 60. Walking into the door for the cramped set of suites to be utilized as the staging ground for said group interview, we were handed agendas. The eyesore: the interview was supposed to run from 11:00 (when I got there) to 5:15. Maybe two-and-a-half hours indeed. Furthermore, nowhere on the agenda was there anything about food. Everyone that bothered to ask about length had been lied to, and as the afternoon wore on people were scavenging in their backpacks for leftover granola bars and sharing handful of trail mix to ease the hunger pangs.
Employer Fail #5: Lying about the length of an interview.
Employer Fail #6: Not providing food at your 6-hour interview that happens to run through lunch time.
The interview itself was generally as obnoxious as group interviews are, or at least I imagine them to be. Luckily, I've never had to attend one other than this fiasco. We were apportioned into smaller groups that rotated among different stations. At least, we were apportioned theoretically, as the brilliant planners behind this whole thing didn't account for things running a little long and eventually the schedule began to resemble an inner-city tunnel with corrections graffitied upon corrections. By 5:45 (yes, it ran that long) few people were able to even attend their last station, as the schedule had become unmanageable.
Employer Fail #7: Not considering issues of timing when creating a schedule for group interviews. Actually, bothering to create an intricate group interview schedule and failing in any way, because that's just annoying.
Employer Fail #8: Having your 6-hour interview run longer than expected.
The stations were your run-of-the-mill stuff. "Solve a problem together." "Write something responding to this prompt in the time alloted." There were two individual interviews, although they seemed pointless given that they were complete rehashes of the first interview, and that one of the stations involved watching an inspirational/motivational video about the organization and its employees.
Employer Fail #9: No one wants to watch your company's videos. Seriously.
This sort of stuff went on the entire time, with much confusion, schedule failure, and hunger.
I have saved the biggest fail for last, however. At about the halfway point, everyone gathered in the "conference room" (which probably had a maximum capacity of about 20 people, and was being used to fit 70) for an "exercise." What was this exercise? "Canvassing." Yep, canvassing in quotes. My first thought was, if canvassing was such a small deal, as described in the first interview, why are they bothering to devote over an hour of our interview time to it? As for why the quotation marks around the term were necessary, well, let's consult Wikipedia:
"The main purpose of canvassing is to perform voter identification - how individuals are planning to vote - rather than to argue with or persuade voters."
And, as someone applying for a job in political research, that definition makes sense. You need to know how voters are oriented before attempting to formulate policy. Yet, this organization had a very different outlook--we did the other kind of "canvassing," the obnoxious kind where you attempt to persuade individuals to support your cause, preferably financially. Pretty much none of the applicants there wanted to do this, and it showed. As the applicant pool was broken up into small groups and let loose on the local environs (which consisted of a predominantly Korean neighborhood), many chose to just kind of stray out of sight rather than go and bug pedestrians about supporting initiatives for public transit. If anything, it did create camaraderie among me and my cohorts, but the kind of camaraderie where we all just silently seethed at the organization for making us do this for a shot at securing a livelihood.
Employer Fail #10: Being duplicitous about the job's requirements, especially when they have less to do with the position than what is being advertised.
At that point I realized that me getting this job was a longshot--they didn't want me to do anything other than be a solicitation lackey. Which would be fine, as we all know that NGOs could use all the help they can get, especially from motivated people. But lying about it? Not a way to win points.
As the interview drew mercifully to a close, one of the head honchos told the applicants that if they had not yet sent in their evaluation assignment, they could do so at any point. So, why the 24-hour window that was stressed in the assignment prompt? Were these things even read, by anyone? Or were they just another way to weed out some and waste others' time? Someone probably knows the answer, although at this point I'm not sure anyone really cares as to what it is.
Employer Fail #11: Effectively discarding evaluation assignments that you asked for.
A few things emerged in retrospect. One was that, out of curiosity, I Googled the organization but went beyond pages describing it. I found news articles about former employees and disgruntled bloggers decrying such duplicity on an even grander scale: apparently, the entire position basically exists as a way to get you to serve as a petitioner/fundraiser. They withhold some of your salary unless you meet certain fundraising quotas, push the quotas higher again and again, and keep putting off your political research work by informing you that you have to meet (once more, say it with me) quotas before you can pursue other tasks. Wonderful.
Another was that one of my friends had missed his first interview with the same organization--he plain forgot. Yet, nonetheless, they sent him an invite to the second interview. Clearly, what my former classmate taught me was more sugar than substance.
Not that it matters, though--I don't speak Korean and hence wasn't able to be a solicitor very well in the hour allotted. Hilariously, a lot of female applicants walked away very successful from that exercise. Successful, but creeped out, as apparently many men agreed to sign statements of support if it meant being able to hit on them in the process.
I grabbed a ride home hungry, tired, and frustrated that I had been strung along. I'd be strung along again, albeit in a much less harrowing way.
This ordeal, like many, began at a job fair. I went up to a table on an organization that I had already done research on that was offering a position that appealed to me: political research. Upon approaching the table, the designated talking head/recruiter attempted to give me the same shpiel she presumably gave everyone, but there were two problems: one, I had already done my research and didn't need any convincing to apply; two, she looked about as terrified of being there as Strom Thurmond was of racial integration.
Employer Fail #1: Your organization's representative is too busy contemplating fleeing from her table in terror to effectively communicate with prospective applicants.
I signed up for an interview, jotting down my phone number and email address. This didn't seem to reduce her terror, but at least it didn't increase it, either.
I heard nothing back from these guys until the afternoon before the day my interview was scheduled--about 22 hours before I was supposed to show up at a location of their choosing. As can be expected when an organization achieves a Jabba the Hut-like bloating, there was absolutely no one to contact concerning my interview, its location, or anything of that sort.
Employer Fail #2: Resembling Jabba the Hut in any way, including being so large that the diseconomies of scale really start to sting. Corollary: Actually being Jabba the Hut.
The call I got confirming my interview luckily established its location as pretty close by, a surprising measure of hassle-reduction not usually seen by employers. Additionally, I recognized the person placing the confirmation call as someone I had shared a class with. Even though she must have seen and said my name multiple times, she apparently didn't make this connection, despite the fact that we regularly interacted within the context of said class.
Nor did she make this connection at the interview, at least not while it was officially ongoing. The interview itself was pretty standard fare: "Why do you want to do this position?" "What do you know about carrying out political research?" When it came to her talking about the job itself, she focused on the not-that-generous pay (albeit with health insurance!) and the fact that each job had a "canvassing" requirement that was to be done for about two weeks. No big deal, right? Then, towards the conclusion, in what would turn out to be a profound verbal sleight of hand (sleight of tongue?), she said that I was obviously smart enough to be considered, and that she had no qualms about extending me an invitation to a second-round interview that Saturday right then and there. Sounds good, I figured. She promised to send along directions/instructions for said interview as soon as she could. I asked how long it would take, to which I received an answer of: "Oh, two, maybe two-and-a-half hours."
(In case you were wondering, as I was getting ready to leave the interview room, she finally did realize that we had a class together. I had to remind her which class it was, though. At that point, it had been less than a year since that course ended.)
Things began going downhill soon after, but I didn't quite recognize it in time to save myself any trouble. The interview site was about an hour away; that's more like the insensitive employers I've come to know and loathe. Additionally, I was sent a notification that I would be required to produce a document, a speech on a topic to be given later, and I would have 24 hours from the time this assignment was sent to write it up and send it in. For reasons to be soon revealed, I doubt anyone actually read these--it was more a measure to weed out applicants by exacting a pound of flesh.
The thing with giving someone a 24-hour window to complete some kind of evaluation assignment is that it doesn't make sense. If your goal is to judge how well an applicant responds to deadlines and time pressure, why not give them a time period that is just long enough for the assignment to be completed? If your goal is to see an applicant's top level of performance, that is, a quality of work that does not take time spent as a factor, why have it be time-sensitive at all? As it is, such assignments are rather pointless and serve only to disrupt one's schedule: you have to put in a maximum of effort in case another applicant has less on their platter and is going to do so anyway. This ends up evaluating nothing other than applicant's willingness to put their other obligations aside for the sake of being considered for the position: a better candidate might have less free time to spare in the window you arbitrarily chose.
Employer Fail #3: Time-sensitive evaluation assignments.
The Saturday of the interview, I headed out to make the trek over. Braving traffic and unfortunate urban-planning conundrums, I get dropped off outside of a gigantic, sprawling building with an equally sizable empty plaza attached to it to boot. The building is completely unmarked, and only after seeing dozens of other people ostensibly headed somewhere does it become clear that the entrance to said building is actually on its side. Well, no, the entrance is in the front, but apparently since it's a weekend said entrance is closed, and no one thought to put up a sign of any sort.
Employer Fail #4: Your detailed interview directions fail.
At this point it already dawned on me that this was some kind of unconsidered animal. Like a mix between a lobster and a hammerhead shark, only of the interview variety. It was a group interview, and then some. As we were led through an elevator lobby and to a different floor, I calculated about 40 people there with me. By the time everyone had filtered in, the number was probably closer to 60. Walking into the door for the cramped set of suites to be utilized as the staging ground for said group interview, we were handed agendas. The eyesore: the interview was supposed to run from 11:00 (when I got there) to 5:15. Maybe two-and-a-half hours indeed. Furthermore, nowhere on the agenda was there anything about food. Everyone that bothered to ask about length had been lied to, and as the afternoon wore on people were scavenging in their backpacks for leftover granola bars and sharing handful of trail mix to ease the hunger pangs.
Employer Fail #5: Lying about the length of an interview.
Employer Fail #6: Not providing food at your 6-hour interview that happens to run through lunch time.
The interview itself was generally as obnoxious as group interviews are, or at least I imagine them to be. Luckily, I've never had to attend one other than this fiasco. We were apportioned into smaller groups that rotated among different stations. At least, we were apportioned theoretically, as the brilliant planners behind this whole thing didn't account for things running a little long and eventually the schedule began to resemble an inner-city tunnel with corrections graffitied upon corrections. By 5:45 (yes, it ran that long) few people were able to even attend their last station, as the schedule had become unmanageable.
Employer Fail #7: Not considering issues of timing when creating a schedule for group interviews. Actually, bothering to create an intricate group interview schedule and failing in any way, because that's just annoying.
Employer Fail #8: Having your 6-hour interview run longer than expected.
The stations were your run-of-the-mill stuff. "Solve a problem together." "Write something responding to this prompt in the time alloted." There were two individual interviews, although they seemed pointless given that they were complete rehashes of the first interview, and that one of the stations involved watching an inspirational/motivational video about the organization and its employees.
Employer Fail #9: No one wants to watch your company's videos. Seriously.
This sort of stuff went on the entire time, with much confusion, schedule failure, and hunger.
I have saved the biggest fail for last, however. At about the halfway point, everyone gathered in the "conference room" (which probably had a maximum capacity of about 20 people, and was being used to fit 70) for an "exercise." What was this exercise? "Canvassing." Yep, canvassing in quotes. My first thought was, if canvassing was such a small deal, as described in the first interview, why are they bothering to devote over an hour of our interview time to it? As for why the quotation marks around the term were necessary, well, let's consult Wikipedia:
"The main purpose of canvassing is to perform voter identification - how individuals are planning to vote - rather than to argue with or persuade voters."
And, as someone applying for a job in political research, that definition makes sense. You need to know how voters are oriented before attempting to formulate policy. Yet, this organization had a very different outlook--we did the other kind of "canvassing," the obnoxious kind where you attempt to persuade individuals to support your cause, preferably financially. Pretty much none of the applicants there wanted to do this, and it showed. As the applicant pool was broken up into small groups and let loose on the local environs (which consisted of a predominantly Korean neighborhood), many chose to just kind of stray out of sight rather than go and bug pedestrians about supporting initiatives for public transit. If anything, it did create camaraderie among me and my cohorts, but the kind of camaraderie where we all just silently seethed at the organization for making us do this for a shot at securing a livelihood.
Employer Fail #10: Being duplicitous about the job's requirements, especially when they have less to do with the position than what is being advertised.
At that point I realized that me getting this job was a longshot--they didn't want me to do anything other than be a solicitation lackey. Which would be fine, as we all know that NGOs could use all the help they can get, especially from motivated people. But lying about it? Not a way to win points.
As the interview drew mercifully to a close, one of the head honchos told the applicants that if they had not yet sent in their evaluation assignment, they could do so at any point. So, why the 24-hour window that was stressed in the assignment prompt? Were these things even read, by anyone? Or were they just another way to weed out some and waste others' time? Someone probably knows the answer, although at this point I'm not sure anyone really cares as to what it is.
Employer Fail #11: Effectively discarding evaluation assignments that you asked for.
A few things emerged in retrospect. One was that, out of curiosity, I Googled the organization but went beyond pages describing it. I found news articles about former employees and disgruntled bloggers decrying such duplicity on an even grander scale: apparently, the entire position basically exists as a way to get you to serve as a petitioner/fundraiser. They withhold some of your salary unless you meet certain fundraising quotas, push the quotas higher again and again, and keep putting off your political research work by informing you that you have to meet (once more, say it with me) quotas before you can pursue other tasks. Wonderful.
Another was that one of my friends had missed his first interview with the same organization--he plain forgot. Yet, nonetheless, they sent him an invite to the second interview. Clearly, what my former classmate taught me was more sugar than substance.
Not that it matters, though--I don't speak Korean and hence wasn't able to be a solicitor very well in the hour allotted. Hilariously, a lot of female applicants walked away very successful from that exercise. Successful, but creeped out, as apparently many men agreed to sign statements of support if it meant being able to hit on them in the process.
I grabbed a ride home hungry, tired, and frustrated that I had been strung along. I'd be strung along again, albeit in a much less harrowing way.
Inauguration
Over the last couple of months, my mother keeps telling me not to worry, because when I do find gainful employment, I won't even be able to remember what life was like before the daily grind. That strikes me as unlikely, yet possible. The question then becomes whether I really want to forget this time in my life. Sure, trying to find a job has been full of disappointment, frustration, self-loathing, and a general sense of dejection. But it's also been a veritable cornucopia of unintentional hilarity, unprecedented ridiculousness, and generally, massive quantities of fail.
As such, this blog will exist as a record of the absurdities I have encountered and will continue to encounter as I continue to flail around in search of someone that will hire me. I'll try to make it funny, but I can't guarantee that my own prose will be more comical than some of the stuff my applicant self has been subjected to. I won't try to make it educational (okay, well, maybe a little?) but if you read it, you'll probably come away having learned something about the inanity, ineffectiveness, and general ridiculousness of the job market.
The general idea is to recount in amusing detail each of the encounters I have had with organizations that ostensibly showed interest in me for a position. (If you're wondering why I say "theoretically," wait for Chapter 3.) How long this takes me, fittingly, depends on my luck in the near future: the more interviews I get called out for, the less time I have to write down my recollections; the more times I get implicitly or explicitly rejected, the longer I have to sit, stew, and ineffectively lash out at Lady Luck with a torrent of words.
But, if I happen to come upon something hilarious and/or upsetting in my job-seeking endeavors ahead, I'll make a note of it here. Oftentimes, the oddities that I don't end up being involved in are just as hilariously puzzling as the ones that do manage to ensnare me. So, basically, stay tuned for fun. Or don't.
(Side note: By virtue of being from the internet, I realize that blogs can essentially function as ego-avatars. Because, when they are unread, they have the potential to shatter beliefs in the author's conceptions of their own ingenuity or wittiness, I'm going to go ahead and note that as aforementioned, this particular blog exists as a record moreso than a rostrum.)
As such, this blog will exist as a record of the absurdities I have encountered and will continue to encounter as I continue to flail around in search of someone that will hire me. I'll try to make it funny, but I can't guarantee that my own prose will be more comical than some of the stuff my applicant self has been subjected to. I won't try to make it educational (okay, well, maybe a little?) but if you read it, you'll probably come away having learned something about the inanity, ineffectiveness, and general ridiculousness of the job market.
The general idea is to recount in amusing detail each of the encounters I have had with organizations that ostensibly showed interest in me for a position. (If you're wondering why I say "theoretically," wait for Chapter 3.) How long this takes me, fittingly, depends on my luck in the near future: the more interviews I get called out for, the less time I have to write down my recollections; the more times I get implicitly or explicitly rejected, the longer I have to sit, stew, and ineffectively lash out at Lady Luck with a torrent of words.
But, if I happen to come upon something hilarious and/or upsetting in my job-seeking endeavors ahead, I'll make a note of it here. Oftentimes, the oddities that I don't end up being involved in are just as hilariously puzzling as the ones that do manage to ensnare me. So, basically, stay tuned for fun. Or don't.
(Side note: By virtue of being from the internet, I realize that blogs can essentially function as ego-avatars. Because, when they are unread, they have the potential to shatter beliefs in the author's conceptions of their own ingenuity or wittiness, I'm going to go ahead and note that as aforementioned, this particular blog exists as a record moreso than a rostrum.)
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