Tuesday, January 4, 2011

No new job yet

So I got my "Hey thanks for trying but we'd rather not" note from the company I did a phone interview with last Wednesday. It doesn't really surprise me. I suspect it might have been the long pause after one particular question that did me in. What question you ask?

Interviewer: What intrigued you about the position to be a claims representative?
Mirth: ...........?????

Call it my Jan Brewer moment if you will. I just couldn't wrap my mind around her using that particular word in that sentence. It's not that I didn't understand the meaning of the word or anything like that. It's just that there are very few reasons to use that word in a job interview, at least not in a question. It would be more appropriate to use the word when asking the interviewee to clarify something on their resume.

For example...

"Mirth, I see here that you used to work as a shoeless, bar tending, speed reader in a Texas brothel. That sounds intriguing, tell me more about that."

Honestly though, the question caught me totally off guard. I was prepared for a lot of questions, but throwing the word "intrigued" in relationship to a job as a phone representative is a bit unfair. Mister C hates when I refer to jobs like this as glorified phone sex, but I think it's fairly accurate.

So the answer to the question is really, nothing. There's nothing about your claims representative job that intrigued me. There's nothing intriguing about spending ten hours a day hooked up to a phone system handling customer complaints. I applied for this job because your company has great benefits and decent pay and I'm fairly sure that even my little pea brain could handle the job itself.

The most intriguing thing about this whole situation was trying to figure out what genius came up with the idea to use totally inappropriate words during the interview process in order to throw off the applicants. Intrigued indeed.

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