Job Application Experiences

My experience with being an applicant for the last job that I applied to was different from any other. Before this experience, I had only ever had three other jobs. I joined the U.S. Navy out of high school and that lasted six years. After that I worked at an IT company and my current job in limited energy. Through all of those hiring processes, I had always met someone face to face. This job was a state job and even though I got to the interview stage, I did not see anyone face to face let alone talk to anyone. Everything before the interview stage was done online. I had assumed that if I had made to the interview stage I would met some representative for the department that I was applying for, but that did not happen. It was a prerecorded interview that gave candidates a set time limit and a set amount of tries to record their response. While going through the process, I started to lose interest in the job as I did not believe in the process.

The department was using an outside company to vet their candidates and with that company allowing a set amount of prerecorded responses, it made me feel that they were not going to have a genuine look at their candidates. The process made me feel that I would not be a fit for working their. Every other place that I had worked at had a different flow in the hiring process. I got to meet people that I would potentially be working with and could see if I would be a fit. This process made me believe that I would not get that opportunity unless I was hired. The current place I work at now is made up of people that I now consider family and could not imagine leaving them without knowing how the new work environment would feel like. If circumstances were different maybe I would have sucked it up and put on my best act during the interview. That is what I felt the interview was since you got time to formulate your answer and take multiple attempts to record it, an act.