Interview at REI

Don't go crazy - I'm not quitting my job. I LOVE my job. I just realized that with some extra income I could pay off my medical debts a bit faster and that would be much appreciated considering I could buy a house with my student loan amount. I though to myself, "If I had to work more than 40 hours a week, where would I enjoy doing that at?" REI was definitely a good option; one of my coworkers even suggested it. So, I applied online, got an email, and showed up.

To a group interview.

Yuck.

I'm not outgoing and I'm not a salesman. I do well one-on-one and have no capacity to "sell myself." Well, too bad, because that's what I did today! We all gathered (17 or so) in a room for about 10 minutes while the HR guy went through a powerpoint of REI's history, job responsibilities, benefits, and all that fun stuff. Then we broke up into two groups in separate areas. When we sat down in a circle, the leader asked us to just take a few minutes and introduce ourselves, what activities we like in the outdoors and why, and what we can bring to the table. IN FRONT OF EACH OTHER? Really? I do not like boasting about myself, especially in a group, and it felt super uncomfortable. I kept trying to make eye contact with the leader as if to say, "how about we do this later? like one-on-one?" So after that was over, we did two exercises: one where we paired up and taught our partners ANYTHING, then in turn we would teach that to the class, sort of to assess our teacher's ability and our ability to translate. My partner taught me about aggressive inline skating. I tried to make it sound interesting. He totally butchered my topic: your heart. I wanted to scream, "I do this everyday! I teach people! I'm so much better at this!"

The second activity was to get in groups of 4 and brainstorm a definition for customer service. That was good, no problems there.

Then we all gathered back into the room and the HR guy talked a bit more. We filled out a small worksheet, then I left. TWO HOURS LATER. Who goes to a first interview that lasts 2 hours? I suppose when you're interviewing 100 people for 20-30 slots, you need an efficient way to do so. I just fear that because I'm not outgoing and annoyingly prideful, I will get looked over.

Oh well, there's always Hobby Lobby! :)