As I enter the third week of my job hunt, and the first time I’ve expanded my search beyond my home state, I wonder this. The Dope has members of so many different professions and I often wonder just how they got into their particular lines of work. Do you always have to be seen in person before you get a job? Also, am I too picky to hope that I could get a job in what I went to school for? Should I just break down and look for a job that I could have gotten without “wasting” all that time? (For the record, my degree is a B.S. in accounting.)
I’ve never heard of anyone getting a job without an in-person meeting, although preliminaries are often done over the phone, by emailing a resume, etc.
Sometimes jobs that are not directly what you studied for will lead to to what you want. Regardless, you will not have wasted your education. Many jobs require a bachelor’s degree and are not specific as to the major, or will take something close.
When I was at university, I got a job tutoring high school students (mainly maths) for a tutoring firm, with only a very brief phone interview. Never met my employer in person. Does that count?
Yes.
Way back in '81 the mister and I decided on the spur of the moment to go hitchhiking. We ended up in Edmonton. (Way over in the next Province. )
The only person we actually knew there was the old man’s uncle. After a couple of days, he called up a friend who worked as manager of the phone room at a major newspaper. I was hired over the phone and didn’t actually lay eyes on the guy until I showed up for my first shift.
That job ended kind of spectacularly. The boss was kind of a jerk, but more that that, he was terminally stupid when drunk. You see, being a friend of Uncle’s, we often saw him after work at our favorite bar, the Grand. (Whatta dive! )
He apparently developed a bit of a thing for my hubby. Not really a problem in itself, although the mister’s quite emphaticly straight. No, the problem came one evening in the Men’s, when the Boss happened to be standing at the next urinal to Mr zoogirl. Guess it was too much for him. He grabbed… :eek:
And got his head introduced to the toilet bowl. :smack:
I didn’t work there anymore.
Wow, zoogirl.
I got a job teaching Italian with a very brief over-the-phone questionnaire. Basically she (the boss) wanted to know:
- How long I had studied/what level I was at;
and - What my schedule was like.
I met her in person my first day of teaching. It was contract, though, and not full-on employment. If I ever want to work for her again, all I have to do is call.
My best friend works for the federal government, and she got her last job with no interview. Just have to make sure all your application paperwork is in order. I was kinda amazed, but it’s true.
I once got a job that, not only did I not have a face to face interview, I didn’t even know I had actually applied for it.
I’d called the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center to see if they were hiring. I spoke with the head nurse for maybe 5 minutes, telling her I had participated in the care of our one and only miserable failure of a bone marrow transplant at the university hospital where I was working in the mid-west. I told her I was moving to Seattle and would like to come in to see their facility.
She was very nice.
When I dropped in a month later, she showed me around and told me I’d be paid for half a day that day, and I would start my regular schedule on the following Monday.(?!)
I’m sure I looked confused, but I just asked what paper work I’d need to fill out and that I’d see her Monday.
Of course, that was in 1978…
A while back I worked for a company doing field computer installs without ever having met my boss in person. A friend of mine got me the job, but he was ranked the same as me. I also got laid off over the phone, while finishing up an onsite install. So really, the whole thing was a little weird.
When my husband and I were moving from the U.S. to Australia, he sent resumes to four different physiotherapy clinics (he’s a physiotherapist…Physical Therapist in America-speak). He did follow-up interviews with all four places. He was offered jobs at all four clinics and accepted one of them.
I got a job with US West (now Qwest) with two phone interviews. It makes sense as the job was speaking with customers over the phone.
It was in their credit department. I was the person you called when you got a late bill or a disconnect notice. I hated that job. I didn’t last long before I quit.
I got my current job without an in-person interview.
Back in 1998-2000, In the heyday of the Computer boom I got several job offers out of the blue off my monster resume without any previous contact at all.
I had a job as a Nintendo demonstrator that I got from a phone interview. Coolest job ever, no bosses to speak of, I just went to the store where they’d rented the space, played Nintendo for 8 hours a day (and occasionally answered the pesky questions the customers so rudely wanted to ask 
) and got paid $9 an hour for it. Considering this was something like 13 years ago - that makes me feel old! - that was pretty good money. Unfortunately it was only for the Christmas season, but hey, it was easy money.
My wife got her part-time job as a nurse after only a phone interview with the neurologist she’s working for.
So far, it’s been over a year, and everyone’s very happy.
I used to be a field representative for Mattel Toys. And yes, I got that job from only a phone interview as well. I used to go out into stores and check their stock levels, build displays, do demonstrations, etc. Great fun!
I did contract work with a dot-bomb years ago for the place I’m at now. They head-hunted me from the place I was at after the dot-bomb bombed. There was no in person interview, but that’s because they already knew me.
I signed on with an industrial temp agency once. If a factory needs a few extra people for a few days, they call the agency. Then the agency calls people like me, and I would get a few days of work. I had met the agency people, but never the ones at the assignments.
One day I got a call from the agency. Could I go to (let’s call it) XYZ Company for three days next week? Yes, I could; and I took down the address and showed up at XYZ at the appointed time. Of course, as with all my assignments, I had never met anybody from XYZ, never spoken with them, and frankly, didn’t even know they existed until I got the assignment.
Three days stretched into eight months, and the only reason I left XYZ was because I was going back to school after a period of years. I must have done something right, because I was working with them like any of their employees–they even trained me on some complicated factory machinery. Other temps came and went (some amazingly quickly), but I seemed to have got a job with XYZ without an interview.
I got my currently job without an in-person interview. I’m an at-home medical transcriptionist. I was hired via a phone interview, then I went to Virginia for a few days of training, and that’s the only in-person contact I’ve had with anybody in the company. Never met my boss or any of my coworkers in person. This is typical for the industry, except for the on-site training, most companies don’t even do that.
I also spent one magical evening as a phone tarot reader. My drivers license was suspended, I lived in the middle of nowhere, and it was 25 dollars an hour, and I owned a deck of tarot cards, so I figured what the heck. I didn’t have an in-person interview for that, either, just an audition over the phone. I couldn’t stand to do it for more than a night because A: The people who called were incredibly stupid, and B: I felt extremely guilty for participating in such a scam, since I considered tarot just a fun game, not something to be taken seriously.