One time, while I was currently employed, I answered an ad for a job and was called and asked to come in for an interview. Upon being told the company’s address, I said that I worked in the same building. During the interview, the interviewer commented on my lack of experience in their industry (which he had already known about before I was called in for an interview), and he suggested that I take a two-week vacation from my job and work there for those two weeks to see if I could do the job. Nothing was said about my being paid for those two weeks, and I didn’t even bother to ask, because there was no way I would agree to that. He also said that if hired, I wouldn’t be paid the salary that was listed in the ad, due to my lack of experience in the field. I said that it would be very difficult, maybe even impossible, for me to work at his company for two weeks, reminding him that I worked in the same building, and at least one of my co-workers would be sure to see me every day either in the building lobby or in an elevator.
At another company, the office manager told everyone how delighted she was with an applicant for the position of receptionist, that she was an absolutely perfect person, and she carried on so much that one employee said that maybe she was expecting too much. The office manager said that the applicant agreed to come in the following day and work as a receptionist to see how things went.
So the applicant came in, and I trained her, and everything was fine until she went to lunch and never came back or called. I was frantic, thinking that she had been hit by a bus or something. The office manager, because she thought that this applicant was absolutely wonderful, kept making excuses, saying “Maybe she didn’t know how much time she was supposed to get for lunch.” I said no, saying that I had told the applicant, “I go to lunch at noon, so you’ll go at 1:00 PM, okay?” The office manager had to agree that that was a way of saying that we get one hour for lunch. Then the office manager said, “Maybe she didn’t realize that she was supposed to come back. Maybe she thought that she was just supposed to work half a day.” I said no, saying that someone had given her a task that had to be done after 3:00 PM, and the applicant knew that it would have to be done after 3:00 PM.
Eventually the office manager told me that she called the applicant’s home phone number, and the applicant answered, saying that she hadn’t returned to the office because she didn’t think that she was doing a good job. The office manager told me that she asked the applicant if anyone had told her that she wasn’t doing a good job or had given her a lot of criticism, and the applicant had answered no, that she just didn’t think that she was doing a good job, and she had decided that the best thing to do was to go home and not call us. The office manager told me that she told the applicant that she wasn’t going to hire her. It’s just as well that this didn’t happen on the applicant’s first day of work (without having had a one-day trial).