Homemade Pizza Co.

Well this week leads me into yet another discussion of lax hiring practices. Today's offender....Homemade Pizza Co.. I decided to take a step back in position. My thought is that if I take a step back in position it will allow me to get my foot in the door at a company. Well that completely escalated out of hand at HPC.

I applied for a team lead position at HPC which is really not a good match for my skills. I have been working in the restaurant/retail industry for over 20 years with the last 5 years in management. So I was completely overqualified for a supervisor position with Homemade Pizza. But like I said, I was willing to take a step back to get in the company. I passed their phone screen easily, and made it onto the first interview. The recruiter said that I would not work out for some of the other management positions because I didn't have a car. So she set me up for a face to face interview with a district manager for a team lead in one of the stores.

In theory this is a district manager, he should have been qualified to hire me for one of these positions on the spot. That's what district managers do when the fit is right. But nonetheless he said he wanted me to meet the manager that I would be working for and he was going to set up an interview with her. This sounds logical to me. How many times do managers get forced to take staff that they don't want to work with. Out of all of the interviews that I went to this was the most professional of the interviews. So he told me he would call me when he got the interview set up. Ok.

Then I got a phone call from the recruiter who said that the next interview would be in the suburbs and that she would send me information for it. The second interview was not with a store manager, but rather a regional manager. Plus for this to be a second interview I was shocked to find out that I had no set time, the interview was a job fair. How did I go from second interview back to job fair? Very unusual.

While I was in the interview for a team lead, they realized that I had quite a bit of management experience and told me how overqualified I was for the position that was available. Then to make a long story short they wanted me to consider becoming a manager in a store in Washington DC. This interview really shouldn't have escalated like that. They asked me to consider it over the weekend and I did. The cost of living in DC is about 38% higher than Chicago, so I told them that I would need more money to go there. The recruiter laid it off on me that it appeared that I had reservations about moving to DC and that another position became available in Chicago. The only reservation I had was that they wanted me to work for next to nothing in an expensive city. So the recruiter set me up with the Director of Operations to interview for the position in Chicago.

First of all the place that I had to go to for the interview was in a very bad area. I thought I was going to get mugged, but nonetheless I found the place and interviewed. The Director of Operations was so rude it was unbelievable. It was very clear that he had been out too late the night before and he could hardly keep himself awake during the interview. From the moment we started he was yawning. Not once did he apologize for his actions. Apparantly it's ok to party all night and half-ass your job the next day. Plus this was my third interview, not my first...I got there for a reason. By the third interview there should be talk of money and benefits and what the optimal situation should be. Alas no.

This brings me to my point. Hiring managers have lost the ability to make decisions. They don't know how to conduct an interview. They are too afraid of hiring the wrong person that they present themselves in such a bad light. Hiring managers should not be in their positions if one of the chief responsibilities they have is hiring, and they can't do it.