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.