Three Questions I Might Ask During an Interview:
- Is this job a permanent position or purely seasonal?
- Will I be working largely independently or will I be working in a team setting?
- Are you only accepting applicants who can travel or is this position open regardless of willingness or ability to travel?
Three Questions I might get asked by Interviewers:
- Could you share with us an example of your skills in networking?
- Why might you not be a good candidate for this position?
- Could you explain some of your prior customer service and/or sales background?
Sample Job Description Concerns
- Some of the major and minor duties are quite vague.
- I’m not sure why they included a high school diploma if they require a college diploma. (Do they require a college diploma?)
- No mention of Technical Skills like PowerPoint or Excel.
- “Reaching out to Higher-ups” is an incredibly vague way to refer to superiors and/or supervisors. Do they expect and/or desire more inquiry about this in the interview?
- I’m not sure if this is accurate or not but all the duties listed seem like they could fit in the major duties category.
Three Big Moments
I have been in customer service jobs for my whole working life. I have learned how to navigate tough experiences and customer struggles. I have had to navigate people having off days and people being rude or angry for years. Both fellow employees and customers.
- I had more or less just started the job and as such I was hypervigilant concerning my register. I was a cashier at a convenience store. I wanted to keep like 300 dollars in my drawer as I knew that we get a fair amount of lottery players and I didn’t want to turn anyone away due to a lack of money in my drawer but I also couldn’t stand disorganization and I wanted to reduce the probability of any mistakes. I ended up counting out my whole drawer and organizing it in sets of 25 for ones, sets of 50 for fives, and leaving tens and ones alone because there were so few. A fellow employee saw this and became frustrated with me. Why are you constantly fiddling with your drawer. She started yelling at me and overall just being mean. I just shook it off as I was practically done with my drawer and I assumed she was just having a bad day. I believe in a “everyone gets one” mentality. One outburst is ignored and I don’t bring it up with managers or anything like that. I just took it in stride. She later apologized and that was that.
- I had been on the job for about a year when this customer came in and got the five dollar chicken special consisting of three chicken tenders, three potato wedges, a cookie, and a 20oz bottle of soda. At first this was a perfectly normal interaction. Eventually I hear the guy raise his voice at the register from the back of the store. We didn’t have a manager at the store at the time, It was just me and my coworker Kevin. Kevin has a thick accent and is African-American. He does an incredible job and is a stellar coworker. This older white guy started spewing things about him not understanding english and that he should go back to his own country. I walked over and asked what the problem was, we had a line so I was just trying to resolve this as quickly as possible. I take over the customer and do everything Kevin did and I ring the guy up and it’s the same price that Kevin told the guy prior to his outburst. I tell the guy the price and he smiles and says that is more like it. He pays and leaves. I was dumbfounded how someone could be so arrogant and I apologized to Kevin on his behalf but I always felt like I should’ve done more about the rude individual.
- This next story was by far the worst experience I had ever had at this job. It began like any other normal day but when I came in for my shift something felt wrong almost immediately. Nobody said anything but I could feel the temperature change in the room. I could tell that all my coworkers were on edge about something and I knew It was going to be a rough day. I didn’t know how rough until later. As it turns out a fellow employee had scammed the store out of a bunch of lottery tickets and we were all being interviewed as to our involvement and understanding how the register system could have allowed this. I was interviewed by my boss, my boss’s boss, and the head of HR in the state of Maine. It was the worst interview of my life for a few reasons, I wasn’t expecting it and I wasn’t just getting interviewed, I was getting Interrogated. One question I was asked that sticks with me was in regard to me selling him the tickets, I was asked didn’t it seem strange to you that he was buying so many tickets. I responded kind of defensively but I very quickly regained my composure. I said that with hindsight absolutely it seems odd now but at the moment it seemed like any normal transaction between coworkers. This led to the policy change within the company of only taking cash for lottery tickets as this employee had bought tickets with a fake credit card. I didn’t get in trouble that day as everyone had sold to him and we were all equally to blame but I was watched carefully for a while and I had to make sure I was doing my job to the best of my ability after that.
