This post started out life as an email to some friends describing how a recent job interview went but grew to such epic proportions that I decided to cross post it on my website and here in the Pit. I’m not sure if this qualifies as much of a rant but the company, and business practices, in question are certianly Pit worthy so here ya go.
Blarg.
So I had another job interview on Wenesday. It was with a a marketing consulting firm, Jenlyn Consulting, which is icky but not unaceptable given my education and lack of income. It was a short, preliminary interview about 15 minutes. The job was described to me as management training and that I’d be working with clients developing advertising and PR campaigns and other related work, with some outside/inside sales work, presumably to bring in new clients to the firm I was interviewing with. Ok fine, not ideal but my education qualifies me for it and I have enough experience doing similar work to know I can do what he described. He tells me that during a hiring phase they’ll talk to ~30 people a day in short interviews like this one and call back 3-4 of them for a second interview which lasts all day. In this all day interview the candidate would shadow an acct exec in the field for a day to get a chance to evaluate how the
company worked and for the acct exec to get a chance to really learn a lot about the candidate. This seemed like a really neat way of doing things to me, so I was pretty excited when they called me back that afternoon to schedule a second interview, which was Friday.
I show up at 9, as requested, armed with a sharp suit, clipboard and yet another copy of my resume. There are four other people there for similar interviews in the waiting area, looks about right from what I was told so far. Idle chit-chat revealed the other candidates to be little different than me, all young college grads in their early to mid twenties, all with similar expectations about this job as me. After a short wait I get called back to one of the offices and meet the acct exec I was assigned to for the day, Lisa, an attractive black lady in her mid to late twenties. Before we leave Jared (the dude I talked to on Wenesday) explains to me how things will go today - for the first half of the day I should hold most of my questions and simply observe Lisa and answer any questions she has. At lunch she’ll explain to me the company structure, compenstation package and other important info. After I should feel free to ask as many questions as I want. Sounds reasonable to me, I think, this is an
interview after all so some structure is expected. We leave we office to begin our field work for the day. We get along well from the start and at this point I’m still excited and looking forward to the day.
Once we get into her car (which looks very much like an office) she reads my resume and makes a few comments and asks some questions (and as is often the case half of them are about Alaska) about my education and work experience. Pretty normal interview questions. She also complimented, gratuitously in my opinion, about how smart I must be to have learned so much about computers while also earning a business degree. When she finished with my resume we hit the road and she begins describing one her clients. This is where things start to get to confusing. She begins talking about the client, Quill Office Supplies, describing what they sell, how long they’ve been around etc… Now at this point I’m thinking that she works on their account and that we are going to their office to discuss whatever it is we do for them. I figured we’d visit a couple of established clients like Quill and then do some sales work for companies that were thinking of signing up with Jenlyn and then go off and do some marketing work. This is what I was told the company did afterall so I don’t think this was an unreasonable assumption to make.
As it turns out we were going to be spending the day flogging office supplies! What fun. Not only would we be spending the day flogging office supplies we were doing so by cold calling buisinesses! She explained to me early in the day that this was just part of the management training everyone at the company went through, this kind of sales work was only temporary, just to give new management trainees insight into how all parts of the business works. I’ve been out of work long enough that I was willing to swallow my early doubts and give her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the compensation package will make amends for the thankless work I could look forward to during training. We finally find the building she was in the day before and pick up where she left off on the fifth floor.
It is now 10:30. The first open office we find belongs to a lawyer, an immigrant from somewhere in West Africa, probably Nigeria judging from the files I spotted on his desk. Lisa begins her sales pitch:
Impressivly this was all said without stopping to breath, or to think for that matter. We were there for over an hour. This hour included a tech support call to HP in order to prove to her that his printer did indeed require him to use both a color and a BW cartridge in order to print, despite her insistance that she knew this printer didn’t need the color cart. In the end he bought a case of paper and four printer carts. She kept trying to push a lot of other small sales on him - “Post-its only 3.99 for a dozen!” - until he got so annoyed he almost cancled the order. This was the only sale she made all day. For the rest of the morning I watched her ignore “no soliciting” signs, argue with people about their choice of office supply suppliers and in general make a huge nuisance out of herself. If people said they were busy and asked her to leave a catalog so they could peruse it at their liesure she argued wtih them, if they said they were happy with office depot she stared quoting paper prices. It looked as though she was trying her best to turn people off from the company she was selling for if they weren’t willing to drop what they were doing to order from her right then and there. This behaviour seemed anathema to what I had previously been taught about good selling techniques. Other oddities I noticed were her lack of business cards and unwillingless to leave a phone number so interested but busy people could call her back and order through her instead of the 1-800 number on the catalogs she was leaving behind.
At lunch everything became clear to me when she explained how people were paid at Jenlyn. There are four stages of employment at this place. During the first two, which can last about a year, you are paid only by commission, more to the point you are only paid a commission when the customer placed an order directly though you wnen you are in the their office. Nada for follow up sales, nada for sales made because you left a catalog in an office and no resourcecs (like a desk or a phone) in place to let potential customers follow up and place an order on their own time. You wanna get paid you have to close while in their office. At the third stage of employment you become an assistant manager and get a $1000/week salary and a 10% commission on all sales made through your office and your feild sales commission doubles, from 25% to 50%. When you make manager/owner you’re given your own office to run, a larger salary and earn 20% commision on all the sales generated through your office. See it’s a pyramid scheme. The people at the top, who have made it through their “training” period, don’t do any work other than recruit new people, once you’ve made it to the top you just collect on hard work of new recruits. I’m certian that at least 90% of new employees will burn out while in commission land waiting for an assistant manager job to open, I’d be surprised if a similar percentage of candidates didn’t tell them to fuck off by the end of interview day.
When Lisa gave me this speil she was rather less cynical about it than I have been, but I couldn’t help but sense a sort of quiet desperation in her tone as she cheerily described the benefits of commision only work and the advancement opportunities it offered a motivated employ. It was as if by convincing me that it was a good deal she could validate her own decision to join the company. Right then and there I pretty much gave up on this job. If I hadn’t been thirty miles from my car I’d would’ve left when we finished lunch but I didn’t have that luxury, I was her hostage for the rest of the day. I suppose I could’ve demanded that she return me to my vehical so I could leave but I don’t think I could have done that without being confrontational and I really didn’t want to vent on this poor woman, she hadn’t really done anything wrong, other than to take shitty, thankless job that could easily cost her more than it brings in. So yes I stuck around with her for the rest of day. Plus I’m not entirely sure what would’ve happened if I’d asked to end the “interview” early.
After lunch I was simply bored and disinterested, and not a little embarassed about being around during her horrible sales pitches. One thing that still confuses me is how seriously and personaly Lisa took it if the people she barged in on weren’t as interested in saving 10% on their office supplies as she was. What really got on my nerves is that after getting shown the door she would grouse to me about how stupid and unprofessional the office managers we met were. I eventually started pointing out that maybe they had more important things to worry about on a Friday afternoon than how much their paper cost. My observations had no effect on her attitude. It took all of my willpower to resist sabotaging (not that she needed any help) her sales pitches or otherwise behaving badly. When she decided to stop at a Hooters to try and make a pitch to the manager I was sorely tempted to walk up to the bar and order a beer, and then start griping to the bar tender about what a shitty day I was having ;-> There was one amusing incident that’s worth mentioning. There were several hotels in the area we were working, so we’d go in and try to sell them office supplies. At one of them there was a largish group of old ladies checking in. When Lisa and I walked in everyone stopped talking and stared at us. It was really disconcerting. They obviously thought we were checking in together (remember I mentioned she was black) and did not approve. Also given the way we were dressed, it was probably also assumed that we’d only keep the room for a few hours, ya know for a little inter-office, inter-racial nookie. We got a good laugh out of that one when we got back to the car. That actually was the high point of the day.
At the end of the day Lisa was approximately twenty-five dollars richer as a resulf of the one sale she made, factoring in the cost of lunch and gas spent she probably barely broke even for the day. When we finally got back to the office I politely told her that I don’t think this is the job for me and walk out. Despite my good manners I’m really quite pissed off about the whole affair. I was lured into to applying with a misleading job ad, further led along with a misleading job description during the first interview and then held hostage for half a day before the nature of the job was fully explained to me. If either the job ad, or the first interview included any mention of comission only work I wouldn’t have bothered going a step further and wouldn’t have wasted half a week dealing with these fuckers.
Oh wait this is the Pit I almsost forgot to add: asshatted goat felching livestock fuckers!