And The Results Are…

Okay, for the two of you who emailed me and asked about how the Radio Shack interview went and for the other one and half of you who couldn’t be bothered to do so but are still morbidly curious, this post is for you.

Simply put… It sucked, but I suspect that I’ll get an job offer out of it. Namely because if they people they had at the presentation as examples of “Successful” Managers that came through their MiT program, then they’re pretty damn desperate for help. For those in the know… the Archetypes I saw while I was there were: three Jeremys, two Marcs, one Mike and two Dans. (For those who don’t know, all are names of employees at my former time in Hell)

Radio Shack is still the idiotic corporate monolith that it was 5 years ago. There isn’t any particular difference between the US version and the Canadian version (even though the Canadian Radio Shack was in fact Intertan Corp which was in turn a wholly owned subsidiary of Circuit City and not Radio Shack proper… which is why there aren’t any Radio Shacks in Canuckia anymore as they’ve all become “The Source by Circuit City” after RS Corp here in Texas won a court case to protect their brand identity). Every job they have is commission based which sucks royal monkey cock. They didn’t go in to numerical details about the rate but it still bugs the hell out of me. I hate the whole selling more means your a better person attitude that commission based sales structures create. You always get the knuckle-dragging bottom feeder types with the worst customer service attitudes in the positions of most power solely because they can steal the most sales.

Anyways, if you’re looking for details the interview hiring fair consisted of a simple “Ra Ra” presentation filled with propaganda about how RS is the best there is at what they do, blah blah blah. They traipsed out a group of Manager success stories. Then came the cheesy recruitment video with the faux employees with plastic smiles and nothing bad to say about the company. Then they gave us all a pre-interview interview which was all “tell me how you helped someone”, “Give me an example of an initiative you undertook on your own” that type of crap. Mine lasted under 5 minutes before the guy just sort of stopped and handed me the MiT Test booklet. I don’t know if he realized I was making shit up as I went along but I guess he’d heard enough to realize I was “Manager Material”. Fer fucks sake! The last customer I talked to was 5 years ago. I’ve been doing my best to forget them since the day I quit. Idiots, what’d you expect me to do? Write down and remember the name of every single customer I helped and remember their life stories?!?!?

So the first part of the test was the usual psuedo-psychological “Do you think stealing paper clips from the company is wrong” Agree? Disagree? type of questions along with the standard questions used to weed out the morons. Then they had a multiple choice section which annoyed me because a lot of it was “making change” and while I can make change quickly using real money that includes $1 and $2 coins I had trouble at first wrapping my head around the no coin higher than a quarter rule. American money bugs the fuck out of me at times. They ended the “survey” with a fun little 150 question basic maths quiz. Which ended up being about as much fun as swallowing glass because they weren’t “allowing” calculators or cell phones with them equipped. It’s been so long since I had to do long division that at first I forgot how. What pissed me off to no end though was the fact that despite saying “don’t use calculators” pretty much everyone who had one was using one. They never bothered to check or police it. Which sucks because I didn’t have one and so had to do everything by hand.

After doing the test they said they’d enter in the information, check all my references and then give me a call when they had something. Hopefully any pay rate they offer me will be worth the effort it’ll take to get me to and from the store daily. They’d better include enough hazardous duty danger pay for me to put up with the morons as well.

All in all I was there for about two and a half hours. Would’ve been gone sooner but my brain and math aren’t the best of friends so we had to suffer through for a bit.

I also noticed that they weren’t giving everyone the same test. Some people like me had a black test booklet which was a Manager in Training test, others were given a red booklet which I can only assume was just a Sales Associate test as it had fewer questions that also seemed easier. The red booklet ones were done sooner than those with the black book at any rate. Though I was amused that a couple of them even finished it, especially when one of the red book taking drones asked “Not to sound like a moron, but what does optimistic mean?”

*Boggle*

What’s worse was three other people within earshot of him (including a black book quiz guy) had a hard time describing the concept. I finally had to say “You look at the bright side of things”. and they all shut up looking as foolish as they should have. I mean come the fuck on people! Is it really THAT big of a word?

At any rate, its over. I’ll hopefully get something out of it. If not then there’s no skin off my nose.

In other news, The Sign of Four is a good book.