On the (Multilevel) Market

When I graduated from college back in 2007, I knew I didn't want to be a high school teacher (what one of my two degrees had been in), and I had this vague sort of inkling I wanted to go to grad school. Alas, I didn't really do any work to go to grad school until the last minute. Like, I took the GRE and subject GRE, but didn't solicit any rec letters. I ended up just applying to one local M.A. program in English solely because they didn't require rec letters. I got in, but as you might imagine of a grad program that doesn't require rec letters, they weren't at all competitive, and didn't offer any funding. So I didn't go.

That left me unemployed and living with my parents.

Like many 22-year-old college graduates, I had little idea how to apply for jobs; like many English degree holders specifically, I didn't even know what kind of jobs I was qualified for. (I have a memory of walking around campus my final semester and almost going into our career center, but then feeling too nervous and ashamed of my ignorance and veering off. I guess I should sympathize more with my students' inability to take advantage of institutional resources.) I spent a lot of time procrastinating, but I did I eventually apply to anything I could find locally on job sites. Writing jobs, jobs vaguely related to writing jobs, radio jobs (trying to trade on my amateur interest in audio drama), managerial jobs (trying to trade on my time as a student manager).

No one even called me back.

In retrospect, it's obvious why. I think I sent in college papers as samples to writing jobs. Who wants that? But it was all I really had.

But I did get one request for an interview. So I went in, dressing professionally. It had been advertised as a managerial job, but it was really a sales job at a company called Primerica. The whole thing was surreal. A whole bunch of candidates came in at once, and they showed us a PowerPoint... but also watching the presentation were prospective buyers. So the video was more about how awesome the product was than the actual job. But I remember finishing the presentation with only the vaguest notion of what the product actually was ("They consolidate loans, I guess?" I wrote in my blog at the time) and no idea at all what the job actually was!

When I went back for the interview, it was a disaster. Both in how I interviewed, and what I learned the job would be like. Primerica is a multilevel marketing scheme for financial products; I would be an "analyst" and paid on commission... after I paid $200 for a training course that didn't even have a guarantee I would be hired at its end. I wouldn't be a manager right away; in retrospect it seems like I would be a manager only in the sense that, like a lot of MLM things, you get people to work for you, and you get a slice of their sales too.* As the interview went on, I got more and more uncomfortable about the job. (Though I signed up for the training course anyway because surely it was better than no job.)

The biggest red flag for me, though, was the bare fact that they were willing to hire me! Because I bombed that interview, and I knew I bombed that interview. I couldn't even sell myself; there's no way someone interviewing me would have believed I could sell someone else on a financial product. At one point the interviewer said something like, "Steve, whenever I hire someone, I'm taking a chance. Why should I take a chance on you?" I was barely able to form a coherent answer to that question, let alone a compelling one. And then he offered me the job! So I like I said I singed up for it, but their very willingness to "hire" me (i.e., get $200 of my money) made it clear that it was a scam.

So that night, after talking it over with my parents, I called the guy back and left him a message saying I wasn't coming in.

Hopefully, ten years on, I am better at selling myself.

I kept on applying for jobs, and eventually I got called in for another interview, as a technical writer at Belcan. But that is probably best saved as another story...

* Here's a good SFGate article about how Primerica works, from when they went public in 2010.