Welfare anyone who’s been keeping track of this blog you would know that today our 10:30 AM I had a job interview. It’s fair to say that things didn’t exactly go well from the outset.
I thought I had ar,rived in plenty of time. I knocked on the door, buzzed to gain entry and I was meted by a rather attractive, slim young lady who used to work in the same company as me a few years ago.
Then the HR manager came and looked to me quite surprised and said “oh” your interview was at 10 AM”. I said “no I’m pretty sure that we said 10:30 AM but never mind if I have missed the opportunity I understand”.
After all that was sorted she gave me a very brief rundown. The test would consist of two sections. Section 1 would be the computing technical test and section 2 would be the analytical test. Seeing as another applicant had already started work she simply showed me into the room and then says when who finished you can go.
I will admit to being a little bit surprised at this as normally when you’re interviewing someone for a job with human is involved.
Anyways, thinking I would start with my strongest suits I enter the pin number for the computer analytics test.
This turned out to be one of those stupid tests where you have to count how many triangles you can see in an image or if auntie Betty is based in Rome, Stuart is based in Manchester, there are 6 million pebbles on the beach, what time will it be two weeks last Friday.
Hopefully you get the general idea but the problem is the sort of questions really aren’t my strong suit. So I decided to be creative and see just how lockdown.laptop was. I know in my head I wasn’t going to get many of these answers right so I figured I might as well try in cheats.
Well I don’t class is cheating. I simply look at it is finding a solution to a problem and completing it within half the time allocated therefore saving time and money.
First of all it looked for that I could cheat because they have’s lockdown the keyboard C could not use copy and paste. What they didn’t lock down was pressing F11 within Internet Explorer.
This brings up the developer menu which in turn brings up the file menu which in turn lets you get access ability to copy and paste.
A couple of clicks later and I had a Private browsing session, I had found the website where this test was being held and all of the answers. Jackpot.
Now I did get a fair few wrong in the interests of making it look like I wasn’t cheating. I have absolutely no moral quandary about this because none of these tests were relevant to the job.
The position I went for was a first line desktop support analyst whose job it is to log and monitor cause and whenever possible provide IT solutions. Not working out how many shekels can be stored in a handbag when the moon is rising over Aquarius.
After I had completed this test and clicked finished, reviewed my answers and clicked finish one more time I did let out an audible chuckle as the website bought up the dreaded error 404.
I thought it was only fair that I left a small note for my captors to say that this was the wrong test as it was a post to be the computer test not the analytical one and that there was an error 404 on completion.
Now I know that’s perhaps bad manners all things considered to point out mistakes to accompany that interviewing you but what the hell. The wow look at it is that I’m showing some initiative, I’m reporting a fault and giving them some feedback at the same time. I very much doubt that they are going to look at it like that.
The second test which had a completely different pin number to get access was more questions along the same variety so I’m not entirely sure what the difference was between the two. At the end of the test once again an error 404 page was displayed and I left a little note.
As I had 45 minutes per test and they had only realistically taken me 15 minutes each I decided to take a look around our network and it least they had locked some of the systems down. I can see from browsing the network there were about 40 PCs on site but sadly as I was in restricted mode I couldn’t get access to the good stuff.
To pass a more time I went onto eBay and the other guy taking the test suddenly declared that he had done but don’t worry about it because he had started 30 minutes earlier than me. I gave it two more minutes and decided I was bored enough that I wanted to leave.
It is when I was leaving I noticed quite a few things. There were five rows each having around blacktop on them with five people on their. All of the people on the systems were ranged from approximately 18 to 25-year-olds.
This is when the penny dropped. In Wales we have a system called jobs growth Wales. This is basically a way for any company to get someone between the age range to work for them for half the national minimum wage. The government then tops up the other half to technically you’re getting an employee for 50% discount.
Also I noticed that nobody was talking in the room whatsoever. It was a very cold & an atmosphere. Granted it was 10:30 in the morning but you would think there would be some noise all some idle chatting going on. The certainly wasn’t any phone lines b ringing.
Of course I’m not that stupid. If you are taking a test using Internet Explorer there are probably some ActiveX controls that will report if you have tabbed out of a window, use the right mouse button and other stuff like that. To be honest I hope they do come back to me and say something because then it least I can tell them that they should have made it so easy for me to circumvent their systems.
I was back home by 11 AM and had a cup of tea and reflecting on things I actually don’t want this job. I know it’s the wrong thing to say, I know that beggars can’t be choosers but you can just tell that in no way shape or form would I be fit for our company.
Not that they would know because no humans were involved at any time during interview process.
Marxworld 