So last week, my grad school advisor sent along an e-mail he got from the career center advertising for court reporters. I sent my resume and got a call back the next day, when we scheduled an interview for yesterday.
I showed up to find an empty office. I don’t mean no one else was waiting. I mean an empty office. No receptionist, no other employees working, no one. There were a few desks, but only one computer. :dubious:
There was, however, a stack of magazines on the chair next to me. I flipped through, hoping to find one with a cover date before September that had been sent to that address. I found one dated May. I relaxed a bit.
So the woman who was supposed to interview me, and who is not the HR manager (this detail is important), came in from wherever it was she had been, gave me an application to fill out and some spelling and proofreading tests. I did that in nothing flat, including writing out the proofreading test with the appropriate corrections. I handed the whole packet to the puzzled interviewer, who seemed flummoxed that I would go through the trouble of re-writing the whole paragraph just to fix “a few mistakes”.
So the interview begins. The interviewer asked me what I know about court reporting. A lot more than some of their other applicants, if her comments are anything to go by. She went into the job description and so forth. Normal stuff, pretty much.
Then it got weird.
Apparently, I need a hard-disk recorder. Not a problem; I know where to get those fairly inexpensively, and I’ve used them and have a model that I am comfortable with. No dice. I have to get the recorder through them for which they’ll deduct the cost from my paycheck over the course of “months,” not specifying how much the actual cost is, or how many “months” it would take to pay for it.
She went into the compensation package, which seems ridiculously low. They do pay travel expenses, but the salary is around $25,000 a year. Mileage reimbursement is $0.24 cents a mile, nine cents below the going rate. At that point, she strongly implied that higher reimbursement rates and salaries eat into the company’s profits.
It also turns out that, despite what the ad says, they have no health insurance. At this point, she told me she assumed I can get insurance through my husband. :dubious: I tell her I can’t, and she said, “Well, I thought you could.”
Moving right along. She asked me a few more questions, including one that was out of nowhere. She asked, “What’s your dream job?” I know this is a standard interview question, but this time, it was apropos of nothing. Then she asked whether I went to college right out of high school, or if I waited a while. Questions alluding to age, religion, race, ethnic background, and so forth are right out.
I’m not going to have any problems turning down this dream job. Since I want to help them avoid a potential discrimination lawsuit, and because I’m nice that way, I might let the real HR manager know that her proxy is asking illegal and inappropriate questions.
Robin