I got my current job with no interview, or even an application.
I had a friend who was working there as a contractor. They wanted somebody full-time to do essentially what he was already doing. He didn’t want to be a full-time employee and recommended me. I was working somewhere else but it was a good job so I took a chance.
Until the day I started I had never met or talked to anyone else there.
That was over six years ago. I’m still here and it’s the best job I’ve ever had.
Always is a big word, so I’ll have to amend it to usually. In the cases that you aren’t, I suspect that it will only be because you have a contact inside.
No, I don’t think you are too picky. I have to believe that there are accounting jobs out there. That is just my opinion though.
In the 25 years I’ve been a freelance cameraman, I’ve never interviewed for a job. No wait, once, in about 1979, for the General Counsel of a hospital in Philly. I think they were afraid I was too young to be able to shoot the footage they need to have shot. I got the gig. That might be the only time.
Word of mouth, and a demo reel, then an agent had me going pretty well there.
Cartooniverse
The job I’m starting on Monday I was offered after one 25 minute phone interview. I’ll be programming for a consulting company for a different company who has a state computer system contract. I was utterly amazed by it all.
It was sort of in person. I once got a job when I was 16 while hitchhiking to my job at Burger King. Dude picked me up and on the way asked if I wanted a better job. I said…“ya think.” He said come to the Subbase, get your pass and start Monday. I blew off the other job before even going, and sure enough there was a pass at the gate for me. Got my uniform and went to work as a Locker Room Attendant. I ended up a storekeeper for the CMO, making some damn fine money by 17 yrs. old.
The two companies that I work for part-time required lots of detailed paperwork during the online application process. After the paperwork was completed I had to pass a test to get hired. But I never went through an in person interview process.
This is good because I’ve found I generally suck at interviews. I get very, very, very, very nervous before and during.
Wow. 25 dollars an hour to make BS up would give me some serious temptation to forget about “fighting ignorance” forever. 
I got my second flying job without an interview. I had had my days dropped down to 2 per week at my previous job and couldn’t afford to live on the money I was earning from that. The day that my hours were dropped, I heard that another company doing very similar work in a near by town had recently fired a pilot (for crashing, basically.) I rang the boss, asked if he had any work available, and within a couple of weeks I was employed full time by him.
My next flying job after that also came without any first person contact, although we talked quite a bit more on the phone as it was to involve moving to a different country, and I had to supply a lot of paperwork.
Same here - phone company. They found my resume online somewhere, and called me up to ask if I wanted to go to the local billing office and take what they call the UTB, for universal test battery. Two days of written multiple-guess tests, for a total of about 8 or 10 hours. I did well, and a week later I got a call offering me a job and a wage. I put the phone down for a moment to do a cartwheel, then picked it back up and accepted.
I don’t know if the no interview thing was because of some union rule, or if it’s simply too difficult to require face to face interviews in a company that has offices all over the country. You’d either need to spread your HR people all over the country, or require all potential hires to travel to your HQ for the interview.
I once got a very well-paid web 3-month web development gig with a very large telecom firm with nothing more than a copy of my online resume and a 5-minute phone interview with a member of the agency that hired me. Of course, I had to work in Microsoft FrontPage, but what the hell, stuff happens. They hired about 15 of us off the streets to update their intranet prior to a merger. It was very much a one-time shot, but looks nice on my resume. Except for that FrontPage stuff.
I got the job I have now with no interview. I came in as a library temp and when the Web site manager left, they considered me for the position, and I got it. Going on 9 years now…
I got a job as a lifeguard in 1970 with just a phone interview. I got my current job as a software developer with no interview at all, but I had worked for the company as a consultant for a couple of months a few years before I got the full-time employee gig. I guess that really doesn’t count.
I’m about to start a new job, and it’s a relatively senior position.
They had very tight timelines for interviews because some members of the panel were coming from interstate, but I had an important meeting in my current job at the time they had the interviews scheduled, so we did the interview by phone.
I did meet one member of the interview panel very briefly the previous day, but only for a few minutes.
I’ve been on an interview panel where one of the applicants had a phone interview and got the job.
Yeah, once I connected with someone via email. He knew of my name and reputation and wanted someone like me. We didn’t even talk on the phone. We did meet in person but by that point I’m pretty sure that as long as I didn’t drool all over him it was a done deal. Within minutes at the face-to-face meeting we were negotiating.
i’m doing internet research for my uncle. i go to school in buffalo, deal with a guy that works in virginia, and my uncle is in manhattan.
no interview necessary.
My Dad worked in insurance, but was a fine keyboard player. He wanted to buy an electric organ once and went to Harrods (big London store).
They showed him a decent instrument and said he could try it out.
He played for a bit, a crowd gathered to listen and they offered him a job playing full-time!
A friend of mine set me up to talk with the vice president of a company recently that called me (after having seen my resume and talked to my friend) and said “We just want to see what we have to do to get you over here.” I spoke with my friend before the two in-face interviews I went out on and he told me then that they were going to hire me and knew exactly where I would be placed.
So technically, I haven’t been hired yet and I have gone in for two interviews, but was told they were going to hire me before the interviews even happened.
I got my first teaching job in Japan with just an application letter and a brief phone conversation. Granted, I found out after moving to Japan and working there a while that the reason they did this was because they’d burned so many bridges with the local foreigner community that it was impossible for them to get new teachers except by hiring directly from overseas. If anything, they probably would have tried to stop me from coming over first as a tourist and meeting them in person, as I probably would have talked with other teachers in town and found a better school.
In the end, it wasn’t all that bad (at least, I didn’t have it as bad as some teachers and got along well with the boss). It actually won me a bit of respect when other teachers heard I’d actually managed to complete an 18-month contract there.
I haven’t ever gotten a job without an in-person interview, but I have gotten my last several jobs with only one personal visit. I think I’ve been pretty lucky that way; I’ve never had to go through an initial HR interview, but was usually first interviewed by my actual future boss. That’s probably why they only needed to conduct one interview. Or, if I was initially interviewed by an HR specialist, then the future manager was called in right then and there.
I got my first job after law school by telephone interview, a law clerk for a federal judge. The judge was so busy I just had to be available for a phone interview for several hours one day, as in “the judge will call you sometime between 2 and 5.” I may be the only federal law clerk in history to have a sucessful interview with a ring in my nose (I took it out before I started). The first time I met the judge face to face was my first day on the job.