Promoted In 2 Weeks...

I was cruising the job posting on CareerBuilder around 3 weeks ago looking for a new job. I had come across a few that sounded interesting but just kept clicking on through. I found one that I really liked but I didn't have a cover letter. CareerBuilder gives you a free cover letter when you apply for a job. So I went to a different listing and applied for that job to get a free cover letter to apply for the one that I actually wanted.

Well, needless to say I got an email from the one that I applied to to get the free cover letter. I was feeling a bit desperate, as I had no money and needed a job. I decided to go in for an interview and see what it was all about.

I was lied to from the first phone call I had ever made to this company, "First Choice Associates." I asked strait up if this was a direct sales/direct marketing job. Of course the answer was, "no, this is a position open on our marketing team." Lie. So I decided to say what the fuck and just go on the interview.

The waiting room was filled with upwards of 10-15 people interviewing for this one position. If anything I was going to just take this interview as practice and move onto the next one. I get in there after waiting for a good 45 minutes in the lobby, she gives me a short rundown of what they actually do in their business, which was very vague and not descriptive. At the end of the interview she tells me that there is 2 positions open and they will be breaking it down at the end of the day for second interviews. Of course, because I'm awesome, and pretty much anyone who can muster up a paragraph of English, got one.

The next day was an "in field" interview where I went and met this really nice lady at a Home Depot in the Sacramento area. She was training another girl there who absolutely sucked at pitching people the "product" that they were "not selling." The lady seemed to like me so she sent me back to the office for a 3rd and final interview with the Manger/Owner/Ceo/Whatever her real title was.

She took all my information, took a picture of me for my badge, copies of license and social security card, and said if I passed some sort of quiz on Tuesday, I would start training that day. Booyah.

So when I arrive on Tuesday I waited in the lobby to be called in again for around 45 minutes. When I get into the office it is a mad house. People are writing on white boards about "business theories," none of which I had heard throughout the many classes I took at Pacific. Also, people were set up in pairs practicing their pitch to one another. It was absolutely nuts. The lady I went on my second round interview with started teaching me the 5 points to a conversation. The open, short story, pre-emptive strike, etc.

Everything was really fast. I learned the pitch within a couple days. I didn't go home and study or anything because I really didn't care that much. When you open and pitch like 100-150 people a day, you can get good at anything. Please ask me to pitch you sometime. It is ingrained in my brain. I did it so much I even dreamed about it while I was working there.

The manager would come out of her office and yell something out and everyone there would respond with something. Then they would proceed into a highly motivational meeting. Ironically enough, the lesson was Joe Schmoes vs. John Elway. Basically saying that Joe is not willing to sacrifice his entire life to be good at selling shit in a Home Depot. But John sacrifices everything to be good at it. Everyone would circle up and I have never had any more high-5's within a two week period than ever before in my entire life.

So I had a pretty decent pitch. I was put out in my own store the second week I was there and I ended up getting 20 leads in that week all by myself. Oh yeah, thats what the whole job was. I would basically run around a Home Depot selling a free promotion to people. The promotion was to have the Home Depot Designers come out to your house for free to help you get a good look for what you kitchen or bathroom might look like in the future. It basically was a dude that went to your place brought you some samples and then slightly pressured you to buy the new cabinets or bathrooms.

When I was interviewing for the job they said that their would be a base salary of $8/hour plus commission and every lead that you got that called and confirmed their appointments. It ended up being that you got $8/hr if you did not make above that with your commission. So if I made over $300 in commission I would get that, but if not, I made the $8/hr. Also, I was told that the job was Monday through Friday, but it ended up that Saturday was a mandatory day if you wanted to get promoted. I was going to get promoted on the start of my third week to Leader. Leader is basically the person that just trains new people to become leaders in two weeks and start the cycle all over again.

There are thousands of these offices around the country all run under their parent company The Smart Circle. It is a multi level marketing business/scam who offer promises of fast advancement through the company so you can one day run your own office and repeat the cycle. I havent quite figured out how the money works within the organization but somewhere, someone is making a shitload of money. I don;t think you find that out until you are actually an assistant manager or a manager.

There were many closed door meetings. If something came up things would be said behind closed doors so they could "talk shop"

To be honest, I liked everyone that worked there. They were all a really good group of people. Even my manager and assistant manger were nice people. After I ended up doing more research on The Smart Circle, I realized that the job definitely wasn't for me. I feel really bad for the lady who trained me. She was really nice, and was always seeing how I was doing. She really didn't train me that well though, I learned the pitch by practice and the lessons from everyone else, but my success in the company was directly related to hers. If the leader can keep a team together they get promoted to assistant manager and get put in charge of their own campaigns. So I fucked up her shit a little bit. But I know that today there is a fresh batch of employees sitting in the waiting room, waiting to be trained by their new leaders, probably thinking that they have finally found a decent job.

The job is definitely for some people, it just wasn't for me.

If you would like to read more about it:

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/smart-circle-c124174.html

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/the-smart-circle-group-c43210.html

And the search continues....

Job Attained, Not for long.

For most of my life I have been a big believe is things just working themselves out. The stars will align and karmic synergy will do it's thing and it will just be all fine and dandy. This point was proven when I attained my first job as a college graduate.

My pal, Nate, had this job throughout the school year working for a lawyer. He couldn't work there over the summer so he gave the guy my name and number and whatnot so I could work there. Karmic Synergy. I basically had to just talk to this guy on the phone and I had the job. I got the job on Friday and started working on Monday. Baller.

So the job itself is not that baller. I search through thousands of insurance claims at a hospital. I look for one number on the claim form or the name of the hospital and separate them into four different piles and then once the box is done, you label the piles and put then in another box to be sorted through again by someone else. It pretty fucking monotonous and mind numbing, but all in all, its pretty easy and I can watch movies on my laptop while doing it. I have been watching Dead Like Me and True Blood.

There is a couple other graduates of University of the Pacific that work there. They have been graduated a year and both have no found legitimate jobs yet. We have talks on the daily about how the school does not do their part in helping out the future of their now Alumni. It is a good venting session usually because we are all fairly bitter about out time at Pacific, and to furthermore the bitterness UoP isterrible with alumni relations. I doubt that any of you reading this, that go to UoP, and have a job, got it because the school had a part in helping you find that job. Other than that we listen to good tunes and flip through paper.

Anyways, I sit in a room for 8 hours a day and then I go home and whatnot and chill and then do it again the next day. I am only allowed to work 30 hours a week, so I usually have fridays off, which has kind of been the death of me because I have been going out to the bars, getting retarded and then have all of friday to chill off my hangover. The rest of the weekend just speaks for itself.

I am once again coming to a crossroads in my life within the next two weeks. My place for the summer is getting re-inhabited by it's original renter, as school is starting soon. My job is ending within the next couple weeks because we were hired for a certain task and once it's done, it's done. I'm going home for a couple days to chill and go to a concert with my family and friend, but when I come back I will not have a place to stay, and I will not have a job. So I'm going to be couch crashing for awhile until I am able to hopefully rent on a month-to-month, very short term basis until I am able to make some moves. So if anyone has an extra room in their place, for a short term, probably twoish month basis, then let me know what the good word is. I'm willing to pay some kind of rent to sleep on a fouton/pull out couch also.

Also, if any of your places of employment are hiring, for anything that my college degree is worth applying to, please let me know. I don't think I am that picky because right now I am flipping through papers in a 12x12 room with no windows. But I am also not interested in being the night manager at Mcdonalds.

Intro/The First BIG Interview.

The life of a recent college graduate isn't as awesome as one would think. Yes, my days may consist of doing not too much other then cruising the Internet looking for jobs, waking up around noon, and then playing video games after that.

There is only so much that I am willing to do to get a job. Ideally, I would like to not have to create a cover letter, because I believe it is a bunch of bullshit. People sit there and tell you why they think they are awesome, and why you should think they are awesome. But in most cases, the person is not that awesome but they took a class, or had someone else write their cover letter for them, to seem awesome.

There are a lot of sites such as Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Craigslist.org, etc. I think Monster is a bad website in general. For some reason in my research I have done, this is one of the most popular ones. Careerbuilder is not much better. I have had many people contact me for job interviews because of my resume posted on Careerbuilder. For some reason it seems to be a lot of fake people, or businesses that seem fake. A lot of it is shit that I really don't want to do. Such as cold call sales, door to door sales and what not.

A lot of the jobs I have seen floating around are called "Entry-Level Marketing and Sales." Doesn't that sound intriguing? I think not. I went on an interview at one of these so called "Entry Level Marketing and Sales" jobs to find out that it was not what I had expected at all. The first interview was a get together with the Owner/President of the corporation. I guess this was supposed to be intimidation to see if I could handle the pressure of being sat down in front of the head honcho/big kahuna/hot tamale. Well, I admit I was a little nervous, I was not jumping out of my seat with nerves. I sat there for 10 minutes while he went over a little history of the company asked me some basic interview questions, and then was asked to come back for a second interview the next day. They told me about the account they are handling and what not. There was a HR representative sitting behind him in the corner of the room. Which I felt was kind of awkward because I didn't know whether to be looking at him the whole time, or glace at her on occasion. (She was smoking hot by the way)

It ended up being an all day long interview, which I had no problem with at the time, except the fact that I had a 3 piece suit on, when the day required a button down shirt, nice pants and some boat shoes. I was paired up with a person for some field experience, and we rolled to Palo Alto in his 2001, beat to shit, Pontiac Grand AM. He started with all these professional questions that I bullshitted the best I possibly could and then we started hanging out and having normal conversation, because we were both from New England so we had a lot in common.

So the day goes on, and I figure out that this job is a lot of lying to people about what we were actually doing there. It was solely commission based. We would walk from small businesses throughout the area and asked "If they had received the recent promotions that AT&T had recently attached to all of their customers in the area," Which is a kind of the truth. What he was doing was checking peoples bills to see if they were not getting screwed or anything like that, and he was also checking to see if everything on the bill was actually attached to AT&T and not some other company. For every correction he made on the bill, he made some sort of commission. We had walked to over 30 businesses that day, and he made only three corrections on peoples monthly statements. Fuck that. I will reiterate that I was in a 3 piece suit while doing this, and I tend to get hot very easily, so needless to say I was sweating my ass off.

He gives me the breakdown at lunch about money to be made and whatnot. It doesn't really interest me. We were 20 miles away from where the main office was, so it wasn't like I was able to just bounce out on the interview.

The day goes on and we stop by a few more places, and then we make our way back to the office in San Francisco. He pretends like he is texting and making calls, and sneakingly he puts his phone in his breast pocket with, who I could think was the HR representative on the line, and asks me a bunch of questions like "what is my best quality? what do you think I can bring to this business?" Then finally, he came to "Well, do you see yourself working here?" I was honest with the guy. I told him strait up that I didn't see myself working there and I wasn't interested in the job. He seemed agitated, almost as if his day was a waste.

So we had an awkward 20 minute ride back to the office, he dropped me off at my car, and I bounced out.

All in all, it was a good learning experience to know that it NOT the kind of job I want to be doing. If I'm walking door to door I prefer it not to be ridiculously hot out.

The search continues...