Since I graduated from college, I’ve been pounding the pavement trying to find work as a writer. On that journey, I’ve been to a fair share of uncomfortable or disappointing job interviews along the way. Admittedly, job interviews have some degree of contrivance and are interrogational by nature, but this one I took part in recently was exceptionally cringe-worthy.
I applied for a content creator position that was listed on Indeed.com. The job description said they were looking for a fast learner with skills in boosting online content to help clients gain more web traffic. From the description, it sounded like a marketing copywriter position for a firm that helps local businesses with CTR. My resumé didn’t exactly match up with the skills they listed, but it was close enough to where I could Venn-diagram my qualifications. I submitted an application, not really expecting to hear back from them.
A day later, I was surprised to get an email inviting me to the next round of interviews. The email explained that they received a large number of applicants, so they would be conducting group interviews on zoom. This didn’t sound out of the ordinary. In previous group interviews I’ve attended, there were maybe one or two other candidates alongside me, so I was expecting it to go much the same way.
There were almost thirty people logged into this meeting at once, and there was only one interviewer.
I was intensely curious about how this guy was going to be able to screen that many people in under an hour. To my surprise, the interviewer never asked the applicants any questions about their qualifications or experience. Instead, he spent the entire time talking about his company, saying they were growing rapidly with around 40 people currently working with them. (Sidebar: on the company’s LinkedIn page, there was only himself and one other anonymous profile listed in their “people” section).
Before he got into the logistics of the job itself, which was beginning to sound more like a sales job that had nearly nothing to do with content, he noted that he had written a book on marketing which was available for purchase. He also tried to sell us some company T-shirts, and an online training course that was pricier than a course with the UC system.
The interviewer kept claiming that we were going to make “so much money,” throwing a dizzying variety of numbers and figures for hypothetical incomes, always a different and more exorbitant amount. When he made the lofty claim that one of his coworkers was able to make forty thousand dollars in just one month, one applicant in the Zoom piped up, and asked him to stop and elaborate on that claim, and whether he could give us all a profile of this star employee. The interviewer pivoted, and said the employee in question was actually in the zoom meeting with them, and gave the floor to someone logged in with the video disabled.
When this mystery person started speaking about his time with the company, his profile icon came into view, and other applicants were able to quickly figure out that this employee had the same surname as the interviewer. People called attention to this, and they both admitted that this person was, in fact, the interviewer’s nineteen-year-old kid brother.
They ducked the issue quickly and the brother continued with his anecdotes, amidst visible smirks and raised eyebrows across the Zoom squares. When he finished, the interviewer thanked his brother for the testimonial, and then, in a very staged and uncomfortable manner, asked “Hey by the way, how’s Cabo, bro?”
It was beyond comical. Some people couldn’t log out of the meeting fast enough. I stuck around because it was just too juicy.
Sure enough, as the meeting lumbered on, the claims became more and more incredible. He said they were considering “buying a mansion” to house all the employees like Big Brother, and tried to brag about the “stacks of checks” he was supposedly receiving in the mail, showing us pictures of said checks.
Obviously, this was all a contrived promenade of steaming BS that raised more questions than answers. After deciding the meeting ventured beyond the realm of entertainment and was now just getting irritating, I unceremoniously signed off from the Zoom meeting. I reported the job listing on Indeed as fraudulent, and flagged the interviewers profile on LinkedIn for false information. I hope nobody in that meeting actually signed on to “work” for this schmuck.
For now, it’s back to the drawing board. At least going forward I have a more finely-tuned filter for scams.
Tyler Faurot 