“God, what a mess, on the ladder of success/Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung/Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled/It beats pickin’ cotton and waitin’ to be forgotten...” –The Replacements, “Bastards of Young”
I really dug that movie Adventureland, the one where Kristen Stewart was not only amazingly attractive but also intelligent, unlike her Twilight character. In the flick, Jesse Eisenberg plays a college-grad who, when his parents suffer a financial setback, must spend his summer after college graduation working in a shitbag amusement park. I’m not sure if that beats sitting on the couch, but whatever, you could write an entire essay on the topic. When the movie started with “Bastards of Young,” I knew I would love it. Then I started living it—that “graduate unskilled” part really hits close to home. You’ll sit around and feel pretty goddamn forgotten.
As I was telling you several posts back, I vowed to myself never to go back to looking (read: begging) for a job like the one for that god-awful insurance racket. Of course, those were my days of idealism, when I had only watched Season Two of Mad Men two times instead of seven. As I laid on my couch fantasizing about being Don Draper a couple of months ago, I realized I was really starting to lose my shit. All of a sudden, my former pledge to myself became a lie, my mom started ‘coaxing’ (read: pretty much begging) me to find a job, and I started looking for meaningless employment once again.
Over the next couple of days, like some kind of hungry hungry hippo, I started applying to jobs left and right: marketing jobs, editorial jobs, internships, things that sounded like they might be remotely related to the basic ability to read and write. Obviously, I was sitting around everyday waiting for an e-mail or a telephone call in response, which was pretty obtuse considering I’m an out-of-work college grad with minimal real world skills. At this point, I wasn’t even angry, but just so completely bored from drafting cover letter after cover letter that I was fantasizing about jumping out of my bedroom window to check if I still had vital signs.
Then I got what I thought were a couple of big breaks.
Earlier in the summer, my friend offered to put in a word for me at her company, some HR mammoth 20 miles from my house. I did my usual elitist thing and told her I didn’t get a 3.7 at a private college so I could go slum it with 23-year olds with three kids and alleged meth addicts. It was a dick move, I know. Of course, a couple months later, when I was curled up in a blanket on the couch watching whatever bad reality show would have me as a viewer, I decided I’d give the job another shot. I called her, sent her my resume, and bam, I had a phone interview set up in like fifteen seconds.
Now, Albert Einstein once wrote the hardest thing in the world to understand was the income tax. For me, the hardest thing in the world to understand is the fucking personality tests companies give you—as you’ll remember from this, I’m not the biggest fan. I hadn’t really known that these buggers existed until a few months earlier, and even when I applied to a more challenging job during senior year, they at least had the decency to make you submit two writing samples before they deep-sixed your application.
This personality test put the one at that insurance company to shame—it was like 250 questions deep, and I was answering it three bourbons deep. After flying through the “I-can-add-and-subtract-and-know-that-smart-and-intelligent-are-synonyms” portion, I was ready to roll. I dove into that fucker like it was the SAT, but that initial energy really didn’t last. They asked me, “If my boss makes what I think is a bad decision, I would challenge him.” Boom—strongly agree. “If I am required to do repetitive tasks everyday, I become bored.” Obviously, strongly agree.
It was the longest, most mind-numbing thing I’ve ever done to get a job that essentially pays you pennies to hassle people day-in and day-out over the telephone. By the time there were three pages left, I was dog tired, panting, and in the middle of another Makers on the rocks. My earlier energy had all but dried up. Then I saw some of the same questions on page eight that I could have sworn were on the first page of this thing. By now, I figured they were going to start asking really unrelated things like “Crest is the only brand of toothpaste I will ever use” and “My predisposition to fits of swearing and punching makes me a difficult person to work with”, and I’d be so out of it, I’d start agreeing.
The personality test is part of a game that I really didn’t know how to play. From my online research, I deduced that many larger companies use these to weed out potentially unfit candidates. In a bad economy, I guess the test makes things much easier for the employer when they have to deal with 679 people applying to the same dogshit job. Essentially, after you take one of these, the personality test software (such a thing does exist) reduces the applicant to a “green,” “yellow,” or “red” candidate where only “green” people are offered interviews.
What’s more, clues about answering these personality tests are, in many cases, online for everyone’s viewing. (In some cases, you can find an actual answer key for the tests online.) There are a host of websites devoted to telling potential applicants how to answer if they want the job in question. And for the gig I tried to get, essentially a glorified customer service position (“marketing” my left nut—you spend all day cold-calling potential clients), you can find websites that’ll tell you exactly how to answer every single question. So, when they asked about challenging your boss if you thought he/she made a poor or unfair decision, you’re supposed to answer “disagree.” In a position like this, giving your boss shit is akin to fucking his wife. You’re expected to put your head down and deal with whatever comes your way. You can’t assume that assertiveness is good for all positions.
But even if this system “works” by allegedly saving corporations menial amounts of capital each year, I’ve read horror stories about personality profiling. On several message boards, you can read about experienced and struggling workers who’ve been out of work for nearly two years. One woman who was applying to several jobs, a couple below her pay grade, said she couldn’t get past the personality test stage for any of the positions she applied to. Even if she looked at a job description and knew she would do well at it, she couldn’t move forward because the “sacred” personality profile killed her chances.
In essence, the potential employee’s reduced to a type, and there’s not much he/she can do to move beyond it. You can’t get an interview if you show up in the “yellow” column unless there’s a major employee shortage which, in this economy, is as prevalent as a dinosaur egg. Moreover, for monstrous corporations who pass out huge salaries and bonuses each year, the amount of “money saved” by using these types of tests is meaningless. Regardless of whether they use personality tests or not, these companies will continue to successfully function from here to eternity.
My thoughts: these tests are a waste, as useless as SAT scores are to predicting someone’s future success. People who faced an unfortunate series of events in a bad economy are passed over continually, and those who are apparently web-savvy can easily bullshit their way into a job they’re not always qualified for. In sum, it’s possible to beat the system if you’re dishonest.
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
I made it out of this test unscathed, hoping I hadn’t totally blown it. I get a call from the recruiter the next day, all professional, “Good afternoon, how are you today? This is blah blah blah from blah blah blah and I was wondering if you still had that few minutes to talk.” So far, so good. We get through all the crap, and he says, “Okay, now did you have any trouble taking that personality test?” I was about to tell the truth, but I just said no. Then he pulls up the results, and does sort of a half-cough followed by a few moments of silence. Then that thorny bastard lied to me and said, “Well, gee, we don’t have your results yet, and without those, we can’t move forward.” I couldn’t believe they were resorting to this bureaucratic-speak like I was applying for a new driver’s license and forgot to bring the page with my social security number along. Infuriating. He then tells me that, “Well, I’ll get those results hopefully soon, and then I’ll try to reach out to you later in the week. Okay, goodbye now.”
He must have the shortest fucking arms in the entire world. I never heard another word. I called and e-mailed to follow-up, but the only things in my inbox were messages telling me how I could make my dick longer. It’s frighteningly hilarious. It’s remarkable that, from a company pulling in a ton of its earnings by annoying people on the phone, I couldn’t even get someone to call me back with a straight answer.
I quickly closed that very short chapter of my life, resigned to the fact that doing well at a good higher-ed institution is not conducive to getting a job that you don’t need a degree for. Then, I took a long walk in the cold, laid out in some forest somewhere and waited to die.
A fortnight passed. After I started to get my shit together again (somehow still alive), and my mom and I deconstructed the multitude of reasons for that bizarre response from this clown, I had another break for a job, a marketing position that was probably a little out of my league, and that half of my state’s population must’ve applied for. One of my friends helped get my resume over to the marketing manager at this company, and I thought, “YES! At least those two-bit gatekeepers won’t get their grubby hands on it.”
Wrong.
The next day, I was awoken from a peaceful slumber at 10:00 AM (laugh all you want) by some chirpy woman, and I heard the dreaded words: “This is a recruiter from...”. A lump crawled up in my throat. We start talking about my current job (unemployment, occasional freelance writing) and then she asks me a couple of the standard interview questions, “So name a challenge for me, and tell me how you overcame it.” Greatest question ever—I lay down a solid, short response.
In all fairness, I shouldn’t have expected anything from this exchange because the job was just a bit out of my league, and these people’d been interviewing for the same position for over a month.* But of course, the HR fuckers couldn’t just say no, I’m sorry, you’re not qualified—they instead told me, “Well, you have to take a personality test for this job” (immediately I’m grimacing) “and we’ll send it out to you later in the day.” Later in the day, the next day, and the next week, my inbox was empty like the plains of Nebraska.
Seeing as I’m not the hugest fan of personality tests, you can see why that could be interpreted as a blessing in disguise.
Yet, what really bugs me about the people I spoke to was their refusal to be straight with me. I wasn’t raised to be dishonest, and if I doing the job of one of these schmos, my response to an unqualified candidate would just be “better luck next time, kiddo.” I mean, sure, some guys my dad’s age (whose opinions I really don’t respect) are telling me that “This is the way it works now, so you better get on board. You gotta learn to take personality tests and deal with constant rejection. If you work hard, you’ll succeed.” What a load of horse puckey. Do people really believe this Ayn Rand crap in an economy where the middle class is making less than they were in 1978 (inflation’s accounted for)?**
You can deal with not hearing anything when you just submit an application. It’s a pain to wait for a response you know is never coming, but you live with it. But you don’t tell someone they’ll have a phone interview and then, because of some made-up complications (e.g. your personality test “doesn’t check out”), not even bother to reschedule it and ignore further follow-up calls. You don’t say you’re going to e-mail a person something later in the day and then just say “fuck you, have fun.” These idiots behave like a bunch of pussy elementary school kids. They were the ones who used to run away from the kid they didn’t like on the playground instead of telling him/her to eat shit and go away.
Really, I’m not sure if this is a personal attack on these people, or on the companies that employ these spineless shrews. But I contend that it would’ve been more mature for them to simply say, “Look, you don’t have the qualifications for the job” or “Your personality doesn’t match what we look for in a candidate” instead of hanging up the phone. I don’t mind following up or chasing someone to get a job. But I do mind that when a company offers an interview and then reneges on it without any explanation. A little bit of decency, while at first distressing, eventually goes a long way.
Again, this was a learning experience. I will never apply to a job of this sort again. Sure you graduated unskilled, but you’re learning all the same, albeit from the corner of your basement couch watching Leave it to Beaver. At this juncture, I think that repeating the same routine over and over and over and over and over again amounts to this: if insanity is defined as doing something over and over again (e.g. applying to a ton of jobs you are certainly qualified for) and expecting different results (e.g. someone actually calling you back), I must be stone-cold fucking nuts. You really can’t repeat that process forever.
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*Two weeks later, the person who probably would’ve been my immediate supervisor quit. They still haven’t filled his position yet. The lucky bastard who got the job I applied for must be having a hell of a time trying to learn the ropes.
**Aside: If the wall between employer, or really the ‘gatekeepers’ at these companies, and potential employee is so vast, I don’t think we can claim to be a society that prides itself on creativity, originality, and ambition. If personality tests and one-page resumes define us wholly, and we allow them to define us just to “get that first job,” then we are living in some unbelievably sad times. You gotta take Don Draper’s advice here: move forward. Find a workable plan B and run with it.
I really dug that movie Adventureland, the one where Kristen Stewart was not only amazingly attractive but also intelligent, unlike her Twilight character. In the flick, Jesse Eisenberg plays a college-grad who, when his parents suffer a financial setback, must spend his summer after college graduation working in a shitbag amusement park. I’m not sure if that beats sitting on the couch, but whatever, you could write an entire essay on the topic. When the movie started with “Bastards of Young,” I knew I would love it. Then I started living it—that “graduate unskilled” part really hits close to home. You’ll sit around and feel pretty goddamn forgotten.
As I was telling you several posts back, I vowed to myself never to go back to looking (read: begging) for a job like the one for that god-awful insurance racket. Of course, those were my days of idealism, when I had only watched Season Two of Mad Men two times instead of seven. As I laid on my couch fantasizing about being Don Draper a couple of months ago, I realized I was really starting to lose my shit. All of a sudden, my former pledge to myself became a lie, my mom started ‘coaxing’ (read: pretty much begging) me to find a job, and I started looking for meaningless employment once again.
Over the next couple of days, like some kind of hungry hungry hippo, I started applying to jobs left and right: marketing jobs, editorial jobs, internships, things that sounded like they might be remotely related to the basic ability to read and write. Obviously, I was sitting around everyday waiting for an e-mail or a telephone call in response, which was pretty obtuse considering I’m an out-of-work college grad with minimal real world skills. At this point, I wasn’t even angry, but just so completely bored from drafting cover letter after cover letter that I was fantasizing about jumping out of my bedroom window to check if I still had vital signs.
Then I got what I thought were a couple of big breaks.
Earlier in the summer, my friend offered to put in a word for me at her company, some HR mammoth 20 miles from my house. I did my usual elitist thing and told her I didn’t get a 3.7 at a private college so I could go slum it with 23-year olds with three kids and alleged meth addicts. It was a dick move, I know. Of course, a couple months later, when I was curled up in a blanket on the couch watching whatever bad reality show would have me as a viewer, I decided I’d give the job another shot. I called her, sent her my resume, and bam, I had a phone interview set up in like fifteen seconds.
Now, Albert Einstein once wrote the hardest thing in the world to understand was the income tax. For me, the hardest thing in the world to understand is the fucking personality tests companies give you—as you’ll remember from this, I’m not the biggest fan. I hadn’t really known that these buggers existed until a few months earlier, and even when I applied to a more challenging job during senior year, they at least had the decency to make you submit two writing samples before they deep-sixed your application.
This personality test put the one at that insurance company to shame—it was like 250 questions deep, and I was answering it three bourbons deep. After flying through the “I-can-add-and-subtract-and-know-that-smart-and-intelligent-are-synonyms” portion, I was ready to roll. I dove into that fucker like it was the SAT, but that initial energy really didn’t last. They asked me, “If my boss makes what I think is a bad decision, I would challenge him.” Boom—strongly agree. “If I am required to do repetitive tasks everyday, I become bored.” Obviously, strongly agree.
It was the longest, most mind-numbing thing I’ve ever done to get a job that essentially pays you pennies to hassle people day-in and day-out over the telephone. By the time there were three pages left, I was dog tired, panting, and in the middle of another Makers on the rocks. My earlier energy had all but dried up. Then I saw some of the same questions on page eight that I could have sworn were on the first page of this thing. By now, I figured they were going to start asking really unrelated things like “Crest is the only brand of toothpaste I will ever use” and “My predisposition to fits of swearing and punching makes me a difficult person to work with”, and I’d be so out of it, I’d start agreeing.
The personality test is part of a game that I really didn’t know how to play. From my online research, I deduced that many larger companies use these to weed out potentially unfit candidates. In a bad economy, I guess the test makes things much easier for the employer when they have to deal with 679 people applying to the same dogshit job. Essentially, after you take one of these, the personality test software (such a thing does exist) reduces the applicant to a “green,” “yellow,” or “red” candidate where only “green” people are offered interviews.
What’s more, clues about answering these personality tests are, in many cases, online for everyone’s viewing. (In some cases, you can find an actual answer key for the tests online.) There are a host of websites devoted to telling potential applicants how to answer if they want the job in question. And for the gig I tried to get, essentially a glorified customer service position (“marketing” my left nut—you spend all day cold-calling potential clients), you can find websites that’ll tell you exactly how to answer every single question. So, when they asked about challenging your boss if you thought he/she made a poor or unfair decision, you’re supposed to answer “disagree.” In a position like this, giving your boss shit is akin to fucking his wife. You’re expected to put your head down and deal with whatever comes your way. You can’t assume that assertiveness is good for all positions.
But even if this system “works” by allegedly saving corporations menial amounts of capital each year, I’ve read horror stories about personality profiling. On several message boards, you can read about experienced and struggling workers who’ve been out of work for nearly two years. One woman who was applying to several jobs, a couple below her pay grade, said she couldn’t get past the personality test stage for any of the positions she applied to. Even if she looked at a job description and knew she would do well at it, she couldn’t move forward because the “sacred” personality profile killed her chances.
In essence, the potential employee’s reduced to a type, and there’s not much he/she can do to move beyond it. You can’t get an interview if you show up in the “yellow” column unless there’s a major employee shortage which, in this economy, is as prevalent as a dinosaur egg. Moreover, for monstrous corporations who pass out huge salaries and bonuses each year, the amount of “money saved” by using these types of tests is meaningless. Regardless of whether they use personality tests or not, these companies will continue to successfully function from here to eternity.
My thoughts: these tests are a waste, as useless as SAT scores are to predicting someone’s future success. People who faced an unfortunate series of events in a bad economy are passed over continually, and those who are apparently web-savvy can easily bullshit their way into a job they’re not always qualified for. In sum, it’s possible to beat the system if you’re dishonest.
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
I made it out of this test unscathed, hoping I hadn’t totally blown it. I get a call from the recruiter the next day, all professional, “Good afternoon, how are you today? This is blah blah blah from blah blah blah and I was wondering if you still had that few minutes to talk.” So far, so good. We get through all the crap, and he says, “Okay, now did you have any trouble taking that personality test?” I was about to tell the truth, but I just said no. Then he pulls up the results, and does sort of a half-cough followed by a few moments of silence. Then that thorny bastard lied to me and said, “Well, gee, we don’t have your results yet, and without those, we can’t move forward.” I couldn’t believe they were resorting to this bureaucratic-speak like I was applying for a new driver’s license and forgot to bring the page with my social security number along. Infuriating. He then tells me that, “Well, I’ll get those results hopefully soon, and then I’ll try to reach out to you later in the week. Okay, goodbye now.”
He must have the shortest fucking arms in the entire world. I never heard another word. I called and e-mailed to follow-up, but the only things in my inbox were messages telling me how I could make my dick longer. It’s frighteningly hilarious. It’s remarkable that, from a company pulling in a ton of its earnings by annoying people on the phone, I couldn’t even get someone to call me back with a straight answer.
I quickly closed that very short chapter of my life, resigned to the fact that doing well at a good higher-ed institution is not conducive to getting a job that you don’t need a degree for. Then, I took a long walk in the cold, laid out in some forest somewhere and waited to die.
A fortnight passed. After I started to get my shit together again (somehow still alive), and my mom and I deconstructed the multitude of reasons for that bizarre response from this clown, I had another break for a job, a marketing position that was probably a little out of my league, and that half of my state’s population must’ve applied for. One of my friends helped get my resume over to the marketing manager at this company, and I thought, “YES! At least those two-bit gatekeepers won’t get their grubby hands on it.”
Wrong.
The next day, I was awoken from a peaceful slumber at 10:00 AM (laugh all you want) by some chirpy woman, and I heard the dreaded words: “This is a recruiter from...”. A lump crawled up in my throat. We start talking about my current job (unemployment, occasional freelance writing) and then she asks me a couple of the standard interview questions, “So name a challenge for me, and tell me how you overcame it.” Greatest question ever—I lay down a solid, short response.
In all fairness, I shouldn’t have expected anything from this exchange because the job was just a bit out of my league, and these people’d been interviewing for the same position for over a month.* But of course, the HR fuckers couldn’t just say no, I’m sorry, you’re not qualified—they instead told me, “Well, you have to take a personality test for this job” (immediately I’m grimacing) “and we’ll send it out to you later in the day.” Later in the day, the next day, and the next week, my inbox was empty like the plains of Nebraska.
Seeing as I’m not the hugest fan of personality tests, you can see why that could be interpreted as a blessing in disguise.
Yet, what really bugs me about the people I spoke to was their refusal to be straight with me. I wasn’t raised to be dishonest, and if I doing the job of one of these schmos, my response to an unqualified candidate would just be “better luck next time, kiddo.” I mean, sure, some guys my dad’s age (whose opinions I really don’t respect) are telling me that “This is the way it works now, so you better get on board. You gotta learn to take personality tests and deal with constant rejection. If you work hard, you’ll succeed.” What a load of horse puckey. Do people really believe this Ayn Rand crap in an economy where the middle class is making less than they were in 1978 (inflation’s accounted for)?**
You can deal with not hearing anything when you just submit an application. It’s a pain to wait for a response you know is never coming, but you live with it. But you don’t tell someone they’ll have a phone interview and then, because of some made-up complications (e.g. your personality test “doesn’t check out”), not even bother to reschedule it and ignore further follow-up calls. You don’t say you’re going to e-mail a person something later in the day and then just say “fuck you, have fun.” These idiots behave like a bunch of pussy elementary school kids. They were the ones who used to run away from the kid they didn’t like on the playground instead of telling him/her to eat shit and go away.
Really, I’m not sure if this is a personal attack on these people, or on the companies that employ these spineless shrews. But I contend that it would’ve been more mature for them to simply say, “Look, you don’t have the qualifications for the job” or “Your personality doesn’t match what we look for in a candidate” instead of hanging up the phone. I don’t mind following up or chasing someone to get a job. But I do mind that when a company offers an interview and then reneges on it without any explanation. A little bit of decency, while at first distressing, eventually goes a long way.
Again, this was a learning experience. I will never apply to a job of this sort again. Sure you graduated unskilled, but you’re learning all the same, albeit from the corner of your basement couch watching Leave it to Beaver. At this juncture, I think that repeating the same routine over and over and over and over and over again amounts to this: if insanity is defined as doing something over and over again (e.g. applying to a ton of jobs you are certainly qualified for) and expecting different results (e.g. someone actually calling you back), I must be stone-cold fucking nuts. You really can’t repeat that process forever.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
*Two weeks later, the person who probably would’ve been my immediate supervisor quit. They still haven’t filled his position yet. The lucky bastard who got the job I applied for must be having a hell of a time trying to learn the ropes.
**Aside: If the wall between employer, or really the ‘gatekeepers’ at these companies, and potential employee is so vast, I don’t think we can claim to be a society that prides itself on creativity, originality, and ambition. If personality tests and one-page resumes define us wholly, and we allow them to define us just to “get that first job,” then we are living in some unbelievably sad times. You gotta take Don Draper’s advice here: move forward. Find a workable plan B and run with it.
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