Let’s put everything in timeline here. I got a call on a Thursday at lunch followed by an email within half an hour for an in-person interview the next day which is Friday morning. And with the email came a form that I had to fill out about my work experience. Now mind you they have all the information on me via this beautiful things called resume. But no I must fill out the same information in this form again. The form also consisted of columns for last salary drawn and reasons to leave the organization. Anyhow I filled out the form and send it across EOD Thursday, followed by long night of work (3 am) to finish all the Friday deadlines because my current employed should suffer as well. I reach the office 10 mins before the interview time. And then came 2 interviews introduced themselves and looked at the form and said, “I think you have put an extra zero or two in your last drawn salary” To which I replied, “this is how much I make annually”. interviewer : Who writes their annual salary on a from. Me : It’s a global practice. interviewer : takes his phone out to calculate my monthly salary. Well that didn’t start off very well, followed by an even more interesting question. interviewer : what would you do if you don’t get this job. Are you going to go back to India? Well I answered with the Maximum amount of grace I have and we moved forward. I started showing them my work. Interviewer : why do you have so many Indians in your TVC? Me : This campaign was made for Indian market. Interviewer : Do you only work on Indian campaigns? Me : I have also worked for Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and china as well, I have put up this work because it has great illustrations. I still continued showing more work. Where they saw another work that I did for the Govt pitch in India. He saw the work and said their logo is bad. And why don’t you have any website design on your folio. So I politely clarified that as an art director I am not required to do web design hence there’s no website on my folio. At this point I realized that they are looking for a web designer not an art director. Fair point and wrong job posting. But they continued to disgrace my work and tell me the difference between social media and web designing. Finally I was unable to take it any further and stopped the interview by politely saying, that am not planning to move to web designing anytime soon, so I guess this role is not for me and closed my laptop. Followed by thanks for taking the time out to meet me. They said same here, btw I hope it was easy to get to the office. (The office is far from the MRT station so there’s a shuttle service). And I replied, I took a cab. And their reaction was so priceless. She rich Sia, Takes cab and all. And I left and took a cab back home, so I could finish off all my deadlines of Friday on time.
