Live and let die.

I had an interview recently, the first in a long time. 

For the position of store manager. 

I have no retail experience though, oddly, I do get mistaken from time to time for a member of staff in department stores and asked for shop directions and clothing advice. Perhaps its my destiny?

An interesting recruitment journey. A lengthy recruitment journey. That is for the process initially rather then the drive there. For the third stage of the process there was actually a there, there

The organisation, a large multinational grocery chain, has a very slick on-line recruitment process. 

Stage 1.

Series of multiple choice questions. 

Passed. 

Stage 2

Record a video interview at home answering up 9 questions to camera. 

This is not something I’ve tried before but nothing to lose, let's give it a go. I can tell you 1) their process worked and 2) it's not that easy with just 30 seconds to think up a reply and then a further 30 to 45 seconds to answer. My inner voice is, by this time, asking 'is there actually any point in me saying anything about the sense in you pursuing this' but I was intrigued so ignored the voice...and ploughed on. 

It’s a very odd experience. My top half is wearing a shirt and tie and bottom half (off camera) wearing shorts. I spent a reasonable time making sure there was nothing inappropriate in the background as, once its recorded, there’s no opportunity to change the content. I mean we don't want my kid's Gonk collection being viewed on a large screen in Grocery world HQ do we?

Anyway I passed that test, surprising even myself. And so to the actual interview. Or group assessment.

Stage 3

Group assessment. This was held at a large distribution hub. We will come back to that shortly.

Now wait up, I hear you say. We’ve been listening to your podcasts and now know a little about you. But Grocery? Not a sector I believe you have any familiarity with though I understand you may have bought frozen peas, milk and loaves of bread from time to time. What are you doing? Have you totally lost the plot?

You are quite right. I buy groceries, I have them delivered even, but I'd barely even been in this large store even though they have hundreds of branches across Europe

You see this is what happens when you have too much time on your hand, it's a rainy day and you have no other job applications in the pipeline - I should not have even started on this process but there was the advert on a daily jobs feed, there was nothing else going on...so I completely ignored my inner voice asking 'what are you actually doing here just stop, this is pointless?' Take heed, you should listen to the voice, it makes sense. Further take heed, as I so clearly did not, that you can waste a lot of time and effort on senseless tasks. I know that sounds much like going to work anyway but just saying...

There are a few things that make ice run down my spine when it comes to job hunting;

• Role play in interviews
• Group assessments

I arrived at the location and realised that 7 years working in the public sector has made me forget that many organisations actually have working air conditioning and not elderly fans wheezing away barely moving on decrepit desks, they have modern, brightly painted clean offices, technology and software actually less than 20 years old and desks that don't need you to jamb paper under the legs to stop them wobbling.  They have large modern carparks with electric charging points for cars. Utter bliss. Except that as soon as I got there I entered, well the offices of course and made my way to reception, but also the 'what the hell am I doing here, flee now don't look back?' zone. Out of my comfort zone? I should say. Jumping off the cliffs of Acapulco out-of-my-comfort-zone. Do you remember the song in Sesame Street 'One of these things is not like the others'? Me. In that group assessment conference room.

All credit though to the organisation for inviting me along - after all they'd seen the video so they could figure out my age but I was at least 25 years older than any other candidate who all came from the grocery sector. When I was asked where I'd last worked there was a clear 'Say what' look on their faces when I told them. It was quite a lot different from groceries shall we say. The assessor also had the look that said 'Must talk to HR about why he is here. Maybe they just wanted to see how how I handled this outlier.'

The assessment task

A group of people had become trapped underground. Water is rising. Only one can escape at a time. Worst case, one escapes, all others die. Best case one dies all others escape. Rank the order of escape by yourself, discuss with two other attendees then agree on a compromise. Of course all the 'personalities' had flaws so you had to decide on an ideology or logic (which is based on wild assumptions) about, for example, future contribution to society or lack of contribution so far. Or something else. My logic was send the one least likely to panic and bring back help and save all (think Thailand). However he had a drink problem apparently so my two colleagues thought that he should be doomed to a watery snuffing out of existence. Redemption was not an factor my compadres were willing to consider.

Of course there is no right answer, just a least worse case which you then, as a small group, have to justify. Of course you can't really as it's based instantly on people's prejudices and reading far too much into the whole thing. Which promptly bores me. It did give me a terrifying glimpse into people's immediate callousness when deciding who lives. Clue - don't be old and get trapped in a cave with grocers.

During assessments in the past, I’ve made rafts out of bits of string, cans and plastic bottles, dived through murky tunnels sharing oxygen cylinders, crossed bottomless chasms with planks and bits of rope and, frankly, can't really understand what an organisation gets out of this apart from watching Alpha males (and one female) set their egos at one another. Which probably explains why I was not successful. And there was a maths test afterwards. Not my strong suit without a calculator but as 50% of the questions involved an arcane process to do with 'chiller pallets' which may mean something to them but sounded like a dinner party course to me and therefore left me cold - excuse the pun. I mean not a clue.

We were invited to ask questions at the end by our smooth, unnaturally tanned male compere who professed undying love to the organisation. I called him Captain Corporate. In my head.

This prompted a flurry of questions in what seemed to be a foreign language.

Does the lettuce have a full pano scan?

Are pallet chillers fully RFID enabled and back hauled to the ERP on a Gondola basis or is it G5?

Does the scree post have a demountable Schting coupling or is it the EU version?

Do you squizz at all? I think that was a grocery question and not personal.

I might have made all of those up but that’s what it sounded like to me. 

I’m sure Captain Corporate had taken a further look at me and thought ‘Must definitely pay a second visit to HR to check their process for selecting candidates and try to keep the obvious non-grocers away. Especially if they have no idea what a lettuce pano scan is. I mean everyone knows that…’

Naturally I was not invited back but I couldn’t really see myself as a grocer - money was ostensibly good, but a 50 hour week plus weekend working and a promise of total hell at Christmas and other notable public holidays. And if you divide 50 hours by the salary proposed then it isn’t such great pay after all. And I could do that sum without a calculator.

I did consider asking at reception, as I hurriedly left at the end, for some frozen peas and a couple of bottles of wine to see how they would handle it and if they had a bar code scanner but decided not to. 

This was a world that was not mine, could not be mine. I did take a job many years back, after one redundancy, which involved a 180 mile four hour daily commute let alone the working day. I loathed it (and it was relevant to what I'd been doing before) but needed the money. I had to reintroduce myself to the family every Saturday morning. I don't need the money quite so much now so I'm far less impelled to take jobs which are so not me. This fell into that category. Bigly.

On the basis that if you keep doing the same thing you keep getting the same answer I’ve decided to lower the bar even further. Actually it’s so low now I can step over it barely raising a foot. There is a very splendid fine food shop in town, offering to train one as a fine food sales person. No, don’t laugh Gromit. I have sent them my totally inappropriate CV and said maybe we should have a conversation as I might be interested. Thanks to spellcheck and my inadvertent inattention it suggests we have a 'conversion' which is a completely different sort of meeting. If I have to do a retail type job then there might as well be some skill involved. Is my view. 

However that leaves me with the conundrum that I am still unemployed after  7 months.

The purpose of a CV is to get a job.

The purpose of an interview is to get a job offer.

Then you can make the choice whether to accept or not.

Still not there yet.

No job offer to consider.