Lately I have been attempting to get out of where I am working with renewed effort. Short version is that my current job / company is a good springboard with a recognizable name, but the office I work at is horribly mismanaged and the company itself is penurious to the point of absurdity. I tell most people I am lucky they supply pens (and in truth it is almost that bad).
Anyway, I applied to a position listed for civil litigation with ‘the state’. Nice amazing sounding position working for the County DA’s office. Salaried but straight bankers hours, any OT is flexed over to whenever you want to take it back. The position pretty simply said it was for a civil litigator with very generic background requirements but nothing specific as to what one would be litigating. There is a pretty large basket that encompasses ‘civil’ and I have a pretty significant background in a whole bunch of it so I figured I would give it a shot. Usually getting these positions require an inside track but I tossed out a resume because you never know.
And it turns out it paid off. I got in for an interview pretty quickly and sat down with several people who had been at the office for well over a decade. Positions didn’t open up often there, the job situation was great and apparently most people only left the job when they retired, died, or moved cities.
The interview was going great. I had worked in a County Civil dept before so I was aware of most of what they did and what would be expected. The fateful moment came when they asked why I was attempting to leave my current job. I told them I was trying to get out of Personal Injury work.
At which point the DA said, that’s too bad… we were trying to hire you to do Personal Injury defense for car accident cases for us.
The job description had never mentioned this. Anywhere. I had a print out in my interview folio; I almost wanted to pull it out mid-interview at that point just to verify I wasn’t crazy. I tried to save the interview from the flaming death spiral the it had just become, but the damage really was done. Even though they had literally said ‘we are looking for someone exactly like you’… it was apparently not me; it was I guess someone exactly like me who wanted to do more personal injury cases.
I’m guessing they hired someone exactly like me, only different.