Today I went to a job interview. Nothing unusual about that, except that it was for a door-to-door fund raising sales job. I thought I'd at least go along to an interview, maybe give it a go for a month - harassing people for money in their own home can't be that hard right?
It wasn't looking good after a quick flick through the Facebook page for the company. It had a video of them learning the Haka off of another Kiwi working there. Standing around in a circle in the boardroom, in their professional office attire, doing THE HAKA. Hmm, OK, they aren't afraid to make an idiot of themselves and post it to Facebook - all in the name of team building I suppose.
It got worse when I got to the office though - first thing I saw was a pool table. Then there was the feature wall with motivational quotes vinyl-stickered all over it, and not one, but two TV screens on the wall playing music videos.
The people were very nice, but definitely had their 'I'm such a bubbly people-person ALL THE TIME' mode switched on to full. I'm usually not too bad in an interview, but today I'm sure I came across as shy, meek and not confident at all, partly because I had to try not to laugh at the guy's sales language or the ridiculousness of them doing the Haka (he brought it up).
I also could just not believe that I was sitting there, justifying to someone that I could do a door to door sales job. For me, this is proper scraping the bottom of the barrel stuff, and my heart was so not in it that I couldn't even make myself sound the least bit enthusiastic. I struggled to come up with three points about myself that said why I should be hired, because all I wanted to do was say 'it's obvious to both of us that I just really really need a job, you would hire anyone, and I would never, ever be here otherwise.' To cover, I said that I was a Kiwi and we don't do well with self-promotion...and apparently the other Kiwi guy 'sold his soul' to get this job. I actually said "Yea, I know, he taught you the Haka!"
I think all the people in that office were genuinely nice people, who actually really like their job, and I have nothing against them. I just know that, even if I could do the actual job for a few days, I could not stand it for a full time job (it was 100% commission based too), let alone fit in with a team of overly-bubbly marketers. It's a demeaning enough job without having an atmosphere of FUN!! THERE MUST BE FUN AT ALL TIMES! shoved down your throat. We have so much FUN here that we have a POOL TABLE in our office!! I'm all for a cool work environment but when it's so forced it's just impossible to have any respect for the business.
OK rant over...I would never usually mock things like this but I just thought it was so funny to find myself in this situation, surrounded by cliches and over-enthusiasm. See my next post for why I even did this in the first place.
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