yeah, we just went there.
My first interview of the week was with Vector. I’m giving Vector Marketing its own post and title because I want it to show up on search engines for people looking to research the company. That’s how strongly I disdain Vector. They are both dishonest and they don’t create any real value; they exploit people for profit.
On careerbuildr.com (a site I cannot in good conscious recommend for job searchers), they have multiple listings, and the job sounds somewhat glamorous. They have tag lines like “start your career in marketing and sales” and “base rate of $17.70, no experience required”. The job looks attractive, and I’m a little bit embarrassed to have taken the bait. I feel like a fool, but at least I didn’t take the job.
Let’s start from the beginning. Getting the interview was a synch; I think they even send out letters to random people in the area (one tell tale sign of a pyramid scheme is an employer trying to sell themselves to potential employees).
The actual interview lasted maybe 4 minutes, and consisted of some pretty basic canned interview questions. Anyone without severe retardation (and maybe even one kid who was) was asked back for a 2nd interview, conveniently scheduled directly after the first interview. The first round of interviews took maybe 30 minutes for a group of 20 kids, aged anywhere from mid high school to college age. The interviewer and her cohort just made everyone who wasn’t retarded wait around for this “second interview” that started a bit later.
It was a group interview, and 18 of the 20 kids were still there. She started out by saying how competitive this job is – “as you can see, not everyone was asked back for a second interview” (They pretty much were, minus the kid with snot all over his shirt).
Already my bullshit radar is flashing red, but what was about to proceed made me genuinely angry. The interviewer (Anik Anderson, and no, I have no problem calling you out personally) kept feeding these (DUMB!) kids canned questions, for example: “besides the money, the best thing you will take away from this job is experience… what do you think they main thing employers look for is?” “Experience!!!”- 18 morons enthusiastically chimed in.
Anik Anderson had them eating out of the palm of her hand, and it was sickening. She asked no less than 16 of these easy canned questions, and I didn’t start counting until I realized what was going on. Everyone was pumped up, they felt like the interview was going great (they knew all the answers!) except for me apparently. The funny thing was that these planted questions really did increase enthusiasm and confidence, so some of the kids who should have probably kept quiet seized the opportunity to chime in inappropriately. Some people even answered the questions incorrectly!
The remainder of the interview was a well concealed sales pitch to us about a knife set- the parent company is Alcast, a cutlery manufacturer. We were to sell knives, “But we won’t make you cold call or go door to door!”- I almost wish that was the case, the alternative was just as bad: Our preliminary sales were to be with close family members, people we knew, etc. This was framed as “paid training” but its true purpose was obvious to me. The kids would go sell a few $400 dollar knife sets to relatives who would reluctantly buy out of pity. The kids would never make more than a few grand for the company, keeping them in a low commission bracket of 10-20% percent (probably just ten, you have to push over $1000 of knives to get into the 2nd bracket). To ad more straw to the camel’s sagging back, she shamelessly plugged the company for letting us keep the money we earned during “training”. The real training was a 4 day sales pitch class, and was not paid.
But Ms. Anderson had an answer for everything. “We pay you a high base rate of 17.70 per house visit, because we don’t want pushy sales people. How do sales people act when they are paid on commission?” (This is the question some kid screwed up… instead of saying “pushy!” he went off on some tangent about how he was treated poorly by a sales person at Wal-Mart. It was hilarious). So yeah, they pay you $17.70 per visit, but that doesn’t include the time you spend finding and setting up the appointment, or getting there, not to mention the gas you wasted if you have to drive there. And it certainly won’t pay for the trust you’ve broken with family members by trying to sell them overpriced knives from an evil corporation. Oh, and you don’t get the commission and the base rate. Just whichever is more. So basically the base rate.
During the whole presentation there were a number of lame demonstrations that had the whole crowd amazed (minus my non-conforming, non-cucumber self). She cut a penny with a pair of scissors, and had us cut some rope with their knives vs. the competition, and a piece of leather too. Pretty impressive except I don’t need to be cutting pennies, rope, or leather; and I don’t need to be paying $100 for a knife or scissors either.
I think the ass-suckery reached a high point during the leather cutting presentation. Instead of just having one demonstrator do the demo (like with the rope and penny), Anika Anderson had all 18 interviewees cut a piece of leather with the competitions knife, then with theirs, 1 by moronic 1. This was nauseating not only because it took forever (20 awkward minutes) to prove the same point (I get it, if I ever need to cut an ass-load of leather I will be sure to use your brand steak knife, thank you) but every kid had a different little suck-up line for after they cut the leather: “Wow!”, “Amazing!”, “that’s incredible!”, “It’s like cutting butter!” (at this point the group’s vocabulary had been sufficiently taxed; hilarity ensued. Right after the cutting butter comment, some kid said-no joke- “It’s like cutting margarine!” ). The cream filling in the donut came when a couple of kids actually did cut the leather with the competition’s knife. “Wow, we’ve got a strong one here!” Maybe, Anika. Or maybe your knives just suck at life.
I really wanted to leave, I also wanted to get up and yell at the kids- it was plainly obvious each and every one of them was going to get the damn job, so why did they feel it necessary to suck up so unequivocally? More sellers meant more pity sales for the company, and no real risk. Worse case scenario for Vector: they hire an extremely dense kid who manages to lose the demo knife set- Vector simply collects the deposit in full. There is no downside to giving more people a “job”.
Another thing that upset me was Ms. Anderson kept saying things like “the reason you don’t need sales experience is these products practically sell themselves, it’s not the salesperson’s skills at all!” Great, so now it’s in the open that we’re talentless chumps. I’m glad we cleared that up. I had to agree with her though, if you put these knives in the hands of enthusiastic kids who would valiantly push them on their relatives and parents, the knives practically would sell themselves.
The icing on the cake came at the end, when Anderson offered us a “special discount” on a set of knives, “at 70% off!” (Gasps of awe ensue). The knives were around $150 discounted, I’m sure far less than the manufacturing cost.
I guess the point of this whole post is that you need to be honest with your employees. I happily put in time and effort for Future Delivery, and I don’t mind that I’m not being paid because I knew what I was getting into. But please don’t spit on my cupcake and call it frosting.
Oh, one last thing. I thought this was hi-larious. So at the end of the interview, Anderson says “Ok, we are going to give you the courtesy of a decision today. What we do is call you in around 6 to let you know our decision… does anyone not have a cell phone?”
One of the super enthusiastic kids raises his hand fervently (I’m looking at him like sweet Jesus, this is gonna be great) and says- in the most normal way possible “Miss Anderson I have a phone, but it’s turned off right now”. I couldn’t hold back. I made that nasally grunting noise you make when your try and hold back a laugh.
