Chapter 3: The Fraud

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.