Desperate job hunters face cattle calls

Lorian Elbert was sitting in a Renton bingo hall with a few hundred other job hunters when she sensed a man watching her from across the table. He caught her eye, nodded flirtatiously and smiled — a glorious, toothless grin.

For the 37-year-old writer and documentary filmmaker, it was suddenly all too much.

"Do you go to a postal exam to flirt?" she wanted to shout. "Is this where you go to pick up girls?"

Elbert might have been less frustrated if she hadn't been through this ordeal before; this was her fifth job cattle call in as many months.

As months of joblessness drag on — Washington's unemployment rate was 7.7 percent in June — many professionals are working their way down the employment chain. They're applying for everything from low-level service jobs to dubious multilevel marketing schemes, sectors where labor is cheap and workers are interviewed by the batch.

Politely referred to as hiring events or recruiting fairs, these mass job screenings are an increasingly common way for businesses to fill multiple job openings, mostly for low-wage positions in stores, restaurants, offices or any industry with a high employee turnover.

Applicants are typically called in groups, given an orientation, administered tests and taken aside for a brief one-on-one interview, often within earshot of their competitors. The events are long, impersonal, and in a market where a single job opening can draw 500 résumés, very efficient.

Yet for desperate job hunters now looking far outside their normal professions, cattle calls are a new and often bizarre experience.

"It's like an audition," says Elbert, a former stand-up comedienne who holds a master's degree in screenwriting. She needs a job to pay the bills while she sells her film about homes for Seattle's mentally ill.

When she began seeking full-time work in the spring, Elbert thought her search would go the way it always had. She'd send a résumé, be interviewed by a manager and get an offer — or not.

Instead, she has found herself in a grocery-store stock room for a three-hour screening session with six others vying for the same job.

She has sat in a crowded coffee bar with a dozen other hopefuls, waiting 45 minutes for a brief private interview.

She has spent an agonizing afternoon touring an elite pre-school. The recruiter talked for so long that one by one the candidates slid to the floor, sitting cross-legged in their skirts and suits.

"If I was right out of high school, that would be one thing," says Elbert, sipping tea in a Capitol Hill cafe where she takes meditative breaks from her job search.

"But to have experience and to be struggling like this at 37 is very discouraging."

The good, bad and dubious

Most cattle calls are used for branch or store openings, such as the new Staples in Bellevue. Over two days in July, manager Amber Hubbard interviewed dozens of people for more than 20 jobs, a process she says would have taken far too long if scheduling individual appointments had been necessary.

"We interviewed on the spot. You get a few good people out of many, many, many."

Some, such as those sponsored by Fred Meyer and Starbucks, are routine events to fill current openings and promote employer brands.

California-based Wells Fargo began using group interviews — which the bank calls engagement sessions — two years ago, partly to handle the heavy volume of applicants for entry-level positions, such as teller and personal banker.

In a three-hour chatfest, recruiters can interview a dozen candidates at once, then decide who gets called back for a final, one-on-one interview. The bank's cattle call has some added twists: candidates interview each other, then do some role-playing, pretending to be either a client or a banker.

"We can see how they'll interact with our customers," says Lisa Latham, the bank's human-resources manager in Seattle.

Recruiters argue that cattle calls aren't just designed for the hirer's convenience; they also give candidates the face time with company reps that they wouldn't have had if they'd merely sent a résumé.

But job seekers are finding it hard to be grateful.

Ron Auerbach, a 38-year-old former corporate trainer from Kent, applied to be a personal banker for Wells Fargo, a job that's a notch above a teller and pays in the low $30,000s.

He sat through the engagement session with about 10 others, including a middle-aged former chief executive, whom he eyed with curiosity.

"My first thought was, what a step down for him. But in today's market, that's reality. You take whatever you can find."

Auerbach answered questions, did the simulations and interviewed the other candidates as required.

A few days later, he learned his lack of direct experience (he'd never worked for a bank before) had put him out of the running.

"They should have made that clear to me initially," he says, more perplexed than angry. "They put me through this three-hour interview that was an utter waste of my time."

Auerbach had an advantage over some job hunters — he knew the position for which he had applied.

Matt Barnes, a 19-year-old at Central Washington University, wasn't so sure when he answered an ad for an unspecified sales job with an unnamed company.

Still, he showed up for his appointment in a Tacoma office complex.

"I walk in and there's like 60 people in there. So I was like, what am I getting myself into?"

The interview turned out to be a four-hour ordeal hosted by a multilevel marketing company looking to expand its sales network. As the recruiter brought people in by groups of 10, the others sat outside wondering what kind of company this was.

"There were big swords on the wall," Barnes says. "This guy's like, 'You have to sell swords.' Some girls got freaked out and left."

When he finally was called in for the presentation, Barnes learned he would be selling kitchen knives. But instead of earning $12.50 an hour, as the ad indicated, he'd be earning $12.50 every time he set up a sales pitch, beginning with family and friends.

He left the interview "feeling greasy and crappy."

Adam Smith got sucked into a similar pitch. The 30-year-old Federal Way man had been a credit-union consultant, a purchaser for a retail store and a site lead for Starbucks, a promising career that was derailed by a speeding semi in 1999, an accident from which it took him four years to recover.

He knew better than to be seduced by a recruiter asking him to interview for an unspecified sales job at a secret company. But he needed work, and the woman said he could make up to $4,000 a month, "which is just ridiculous when you think about it. No way."

When he arrived and saw that he wasn't the only candidate to be interviewed and that his suit was out of place among the shorts and T-shirts, "I was like, aw, geez. I knew I'd gotten suckered."

Forty minutes into the recruiter's presentation — candidates would have to pay $130 to get started selling health supplements — Smith contemplated his escape.

"Every 30 seconds, I'm just thinking I'll never see her again. I could just close my briefcase, not even say a word and just walk out."

Instead, he feigned interest and sized up the rest of the group.

"These people are failures," he remembers thinking. "They're walking failures. The laugh was on me at the end. I was the person who didn't belong there."

White-collar graveyard

Indeed, the profile of the cattle-call job candidate has changed in the past two years.

Paul Christopherson heads the state-run WorkSource office in Redmond, where companies such as Safeway hold screening sessions for service jobs. He remembers when these cattle calls drew mostly blue-collar or low-skilled workers.

"Now we're starting to see more and more professionals, engineers. They're getting very close to exhausting their unemployment benefits, so they're coming here. I'm not sure how successful they are in attaining that kind of employment when they have a master's degree and beaucoup experience."

And in some cases, no clue how to work in customer service. At a recent group session for Fred Meyer, screener Jill Morris interviewed a mix of hopefuls for jobs ranging from grocery bagger to a shelf stocker for the graveyard shift. One applicant, a burly middle-aged man, said he was looking for a job to pay the bills until he found work as a network analyst.

As the others eavesdropped, Morris asked him how he'd help an irate customer.

He gave a couple of general answers and then, in a moment of inspiration, added: "Sometimes you just need to make it look like you're helping."

Nick Corcodilos, author of "Ask the Headhunter" and a frequent critic of current hiring practices, defends cattle calls to a point.

"You have people applying for jobs that they have no business applying for. I can see where companies get to the point where they're so swamped with so many candidates they don't know how to evaluate them. What (screeners) are doing is picking out the ones who are least likely to cause a problem."

Aside from filling low-skilled jobs, however, Corcodilos sees time-consuming group interviews as another example of the growing arrogance among some companies.

"It's an employer's market right now, so the attitude is 'We can do whatever we want, they're going to come,' " he says. "Companies act like the job candidate's time is worth nothing."

The headhunter insists that when the economy rebounds, these businesses will have a harder time recruiting talent.

"The behavior that you demonstrate as an employer is going to come around to you. It's going to affect your reputation."

Auerbach, the unemployed corporate trainer, says his three-hour interview and subsequent rejection certainly soured his feelings about Wells Fargo.

"Even if they had offered (the job) to me, I'm not so sure I would have accepted it after what they put me through."

Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or sholt@seattletimes.com