Accountant, Purchaser, Receptionist... OH MY!

At the beginning of this year I was given the horrible news that I would for sure be losing my job. I was given until the end of the year to get out. I immediately went searching online and looked in newspapers to see what was available. I found an ad for a manufacturing facility that was hiring a customer service position and a receptionist position. I sent my resume and applied for both jobs. I got a call on a Saturday afternoon and went through my second "are you worthy" phone call. Again, I was deemed worthy and not just for the CS or receptionist position, but possibly for the Administrative Assistant to the owner position. I didn't even know that position was available and I was much more interested in that anyway.

I went to the interview at 7:30 in the morning and didn't get out of the interview until after 10. First up was a math test. This consisted of adding and subtracting fractions, long division, and pointing out specific places on a ruler. This may make me sound incredibly stupid, but I have not worked with fractions since I'm in elementry school. I had to think a little bit. The test took me about 23 minutes and I think there were 25 questions.

I then had a microsoft word test. I was handed a piece of paper that was formatted a certain way and I had to format it on the computer. Problem was, I couldn't see much of a difference in what was on the printed page compared to what was on the screen. If they would have asked me to center justify the third paragraph and make the font Courier 8pt. I could have easily followed those directions. Trying to figure out a font out of 16 different fonts can be tough as can telling the difference between 10pt and 8pt on a printed page. That one I know I failed miserably because I couldn't tell any differences from the page to the screen.

Next up was an Excel worksheet. I flew through that and was very confident in myself.

The interview wasn't so bad, except I wasn't really sure for what job I was interviewing. I initially went in for CS or receptionist, then it was changed to Admin Assistant, then during the interview they brought up accounting and purchasing. I tried to talk myself up as a fast learner, but I was having a hard time learning what job they wanted me for!

We then get to my test results. I got all of the math questions right, however she was very curious as to why I took so long with the test. I gave her my "haven't done this since elementary school" reasoning and then we got into a verbal war on whether or not something should be done correctly but somewhat slowly, or super fast and outright wrong. I voted for correct, but maybe a little slow. She thought things should be done fast. "But," I said getting somewhat indignant, "if you do it wrong, then won't you just spend even more time fixing the problem, thereby spending even more time on it than if you just would have concentrated and gone slowly getting it right?" Apparantly, she wanted to disagree, but instead just seethed. Point 1 for me.

I also did something wrong with Excel in that I didn't use a "function" key that I could have used. I had to figure out if row one was less than or greater than row 2 and pick the lesser. I just eyeballed it and put in the answer. I was supposed to use a function. My argument to that was it would have taken me longer to do the function than just figure it out myself. I didn't say that, but I'm sure it was all over my face.

Surprisingly, I didn't get the job(s).