It's The Effort That Counts

There was a job fair held at exhibition centre last Saturday. I didn't expect to nail anything there but just went to "see life". There were less job-hunters than we had thought but you could still see long queues in front of popular companies, say banks. After wandering in the exhibition hall for almost 1 hour, me and my friends decided to have fun in bingo hall.:P

"It's a season of sending zillions (or not so much) of resumes and getting no response." That's what I said on twitter the other day. Well, I did exaggerate a little bit because I actually got two interviews, though they all ended up "sorry...wish you a bright future". But I'm still willing to talk about it.^^

The first one was Bosch. I read their want AD of an English coach intern. My major is Chinese, but I didn't think my English is any worse than students (what an innocent girl :P). So I was bold enough to send my resume. The HR manager replied me instantly and told me they preferred a student of English major and with experience. But he said that there was a vacancy of administration assistant intern and suggested me going for a interview for that position. Friends told me that "administration assistant" meaned that you had to do miscellaneous errands, but I figured that there was no hurt in trying and met the HR manager.

The manager looked young and was gracious. Instead of informing me of resume there, he printed it out for me. I saw some marks on it which means he'd literally read it hehe. Afterwards, he wrote me an email and said that media related job was more suitable for me. REALLY? Or it was just one of those ways to reject people politely. I do think I was being a little too "Shuo" at the interview. Maybe I should've acted more tactfully. Thanks Bosch! It was my first official interview.

I figured that if I sent my resumes to common companies instead of educational institutions, they could barely be sifed through concerning my major. As I mentioned, I major in Chinese language and somewhat trained to be a teacher. So I was very excited when I got an interview at Maersk, another 500 Fortune Company. I was mostly excited about place I would be interviewed at - Diwang Tower, used to be the tallest construction (second to Saige). Well, a few foreign friends think Diwang is hideous but I have sentimental feeling for it because I witnessed the whole process of its soaring up while Shenzhen was less developed.

However, who would've thought that the interview lasted for more than 3 hours, including 1 hour for written tests. The written tests included two part, logic test and personality assessment. After that we were asked to write an English article according to given setting.

The logic test mainly consisted of syllogism assessment, patterns inference and calculation. I skipped all the calculating questions. Time was limited. I couldn't finish them all anyways.:P As for the personality assessment, we were given a lot of adjectives describing characteristic. First we were asked to
pick out the ones in line with your personality, as far as you were concerned. Then we picked out the adjectives that we thought we were like in other people's minds. The options were the same but we were not allowed to turn to the previous page to review our previous answers.

A guy who took the tests with me told me afterward that when picking out the adjectives for other people's minds, the less the better, because the more you chose, the more shortcomings you had. Writing an English article was a piece of cake. At last we handed in our answer sheets and resumes. The staff told us to stay where we were and the result would come out in 10 minutes.


10 minutes later, three of us were eliminated. There left six persons and I was one of them. The same staff came in and handed out a piece of paper to each of us. She asked us to draw three pictures of our past, present and future in 10 minutes, then explain them in English to the HR manager.

I always was a poor painter, so I only draw some simply "abstract" patterns using lines and circles. Other candidates all drew better than me but I don't think they explained their drawing very well because of their nonproficiency of oral English. And yes, I found that most candidates could speak English very well if they had happened to memorize the sentences, but couldn't pull it off if given new situations.

Later the HR manager divided us six into two groups and gave us different topics to talk about. Everyone got the chance to speak, only in turn. After over three hours, we were free to leave. Whatever the outcome, the whole interview process was fun. It's the effort that counts.^^

I took the following picture before I left. Just in case you don't know, Hong Kong was beckoning you in this picture.