I’ll be posting some of the sordid details of interviews I’ve had. As with everything, I won’t be naming names. And I can guess that even if someone associated with the firm / office I had been applying were to read this, they wouldn’t want to admit it was them considering why I am posting the stories.
I’m always excited to go to an interview. An interview means that you have made it to the next level.. that much closer to a real job. It means that out of the myriad applications and resumes they received, yours was picked out because something stood out about it.
I was headed out to an interview with a firm which specialized in Class Action and employment law. The firm had a few small regional offices, but a decent seeming cash flow considering several recent cases prominently on their website. Their main office was in a nice building downtown. I get to their office and a minor alarm bell goes off far in the recesses of my brain… it seems rather sparse. And there is no sign of support staff working there, which is weird because it is the middle of the week. But they do have other offices, and supposedly they usually work at one of them on this day. I did email back and forth with a secretary somewhere about the interview…
Anyway, I sit down with the two partners. The interview starts out rather normally, but about 5 min in, one of the partners apologizes and says he has to move his car so it won’t be ticketed. (He never returns.) The remaining partner starts talking to me about my past employment, specifically about the contract work I had done. He says he is unfamiliar with how it works (huh? they do class actions… they must use doc review… at least somewhat). I humor him and start explaining what I did for which employers. He starts getting more interested in certain aspects, and this part of the interview has been going on for probably 15+ minutes. He then asks how I was paid… for all of the contract employers, and about overtime, and about how many contract attorneys were working for the various firms.
He gets real excited when he learns that one firm didn’t give overtime to the contract attorneys. About the same time I figure it out, he offers to file an employment lawsuit on my behalf that could be a class action for everyone else who was working with me. 120 attorneys over 4 months. And then he just sits there waiting.
The rest of the interview was pretty fast. He gave me his card and said if I wanted to file or if I knew anyone else who did, to give him a call; and oh yeah, they’d get back to me about the ‘position’. As I was walking out, another young attorney was walking in to be ‘interviewed’. I wouldn’t even bother betting that he had a resume with contract work listed on it.
I went to an interview that was actually a ploy trawling for work.