Facilitating Interviews....So Overrated!

Today was a fabulous day at work.  We had a job fair and I spent a majority of the work day interviewing.  We had a pretty good turnout of people coming in looking for jobs for the holiday season.  We typically get at least 100 applicants to show up.  I don't think I've talked about how our job fairs work before and a few people have asked me how they work.  What we do is set a date for an upcoming job fair.  After that date, we pretty much tell most applicants to attend the job fair when they drop off their applications.  On the day of the job fair we have a table at the front of the store where we have all applicants start.  At this table we have 1 or 2 "screeners" who review all the applications and filter out the ones we don't want to interview or ones that don't meet certain criteria, like anyone needing the holidays off, people with gaps in work history, odd availability etc.  Those we choose to interview are sent to the back of the store where they put their name on a list to be interviewed.  We conduct first interviews to filter out the ones we don't want and then send the remaining applicants onto second interviews typically with our Store Manager.  Any applicant that makes it through this process is okay to hire as long as their references check out.  This is a very long process and is frustrating when you don't end up hiring very many people.  

This was our third job fair this year and this time we had fliers saying that we wanted business casual dress.  It is amazing what people wear to interviews now days! I've had a person show up in a tank top and overalls once!  Today, the best dressed award went to a girl who showed up looking like she was ready to roll in the dirt with her army inspired getup.  She was wearing a hat, cargo jeans and frumpy shirt.  When I asked her how she heard about the job fair (sometimes people come in the store to apply not knowing we had a job fair that day) and she said she heard about it a while ago.  Needless to say, this poor girl did not get interviewed today.  Not only was she dressed inappropriately, she had a total of 1 month of work history so I wouldn't have interviewed her anyway.  I started out the day doing "screening" and then mostly did first interviews.  I've found that applicants will tell people different things in the interview process.  They will tell the screener one thing, the first interviewer one thing and then the second interviewer another thing.  One lady I interviewed seemed like she would be okay and I sent her in for a second interview.  She ended  up not getting approved because it turned out, she hates customer service and doesn't like selling.  Neither of these things came out in the first interview!  Why is a person like this looking for a job in retail?  Another person today actually used the word "manipulative" to describe her selling technique.  Interesting.  

Interviewing is not my favorite thing but is a necessary evil of my job description.  When I was Assistant Manager at Kmart, I took part in the festivities that is hiring but at least we had a Human Resource Manager that did most of it.  Here are some of the experiences I've had over the years in the hiring process.

• A girl I interviewed actually told me during the interview that she experimented with other girls.  
  
• A homeless man turned in an application with every inch of it covered with ramblings.  How were you referred? "God told me you were hiring."  Special skills?  "Some Arabic, Chinese, Pig Latin, Hieroglyphics" (some examples were included).  There were some other crazy responses but I can't remember what they were.  The funny thing was that he was dead serious.
• One kid showed up for a job wearing a suit and tie.  At Kmart we did Behavioral Assessments which are a series of opinion questions like "I like to wake up early", "I find it easy to learn new things", "I enjoy working".  You answer these agree, strongly agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree.  One of the other managers pointed out that this kid made all the effort to dress up and then left the fly to his pants down.  It was pretty funny when his test results came back saying we shouldn't hire him.  How do you fail an opinion questionnaire that you can easily lie on?
• One girl told me she was surprised that I looked her in the eyes when I was talking to her and that it kind of made her uncomfortable because she wasn't used to it.

There's probably more stories that I'm not thinking of right now.  It is amazing what people don't know about proper interview behavior.  There was one person a fellow manager interviewed that actually started texting in the middle of the interview!  I think the easiest thing people can do for themselves is dress properly.  I've been told by different managers to not hire anyone who shows up to an interview in jeans.  I have made exceptions to this in the past if the person seemed really good but it didn't happen often.  If you even want a chance... at least make the effort to look presentable.

Anyone have any funny interview experiences?  Sometimes it's just funny looking at applications.  I don't see too many funny ones these days since I left Kmart.  We got some really classy ones over there.

I just remembered another interviewing gem from the past.  One girl I interviewed, when asked what her weaknesses were, told me that she was kind of mean and lazy.  I don't see how these could be weaknesses when applying for a job in retail!  Read my comments for more details on the bi-curious applicant I mentioned above.