The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Colorado Marketing (Denver, CO) in Aug 2010
Interview
only 24 hours after submitting my resume to Colorado Marketing, I received an initial phone call. The call lasted less than 10 minutes and we just went over a couple things on my resume, and set up a face-to-face interview for the following day.
The next day I arrived at the office and was handed a 3-page questionnaire filled with typical interview questions “what is your biggest strength,” “what is your biggest weakness,” “how has your previous job prepared you for taking on more responsibility at a new position,” “if you could change one thing about your last job, what would it be,” “how would your colleagues describe you,” etc…
I arrived at the office at 10:50am and had about 10 minutes to fill out the questionnaire before I was brought in for the interview, which lasted about 20 minutes. The interviewer asked me only a couple of questions but mostly just talked about the company and the position. At the end of the interview she told me, “In sales, first impressions are everything. After you leave I’m going to look over your questionnaire and resume and if I like what I see, I’ll call you back at 12:30pm this afternoon to set up a round 2 interview for tomorrow. I’m looking for reliable sales people, so if you don’t answer the phone, we won’t leave a message, and that will be it.”
So I get a phone call at 12:30 and set up a full-day second round interview for the following day. I showed up at the office at 9:00am and was paired up with one of their “top account representatives” who I would shadow for the entire day. Basically, each account rep is given a zip code and they have to go door to door to every business in that zip code trying to sell them office supplies. I followed this guy around for the entire day and he only made one $50 sale.
At lunch time, he sat me down and described the company structure to me. Basically the position is a contract position, no base salary, just commission + ‘bonuses.’ To me, it looked like a pyramid scheme; a lot of work with little return but the “promise” of moving up in the organization.
At the end of the day, I was going to be brought in for a 3rd round interview – filling out another questionnaire and another 1:1 interview, but I declined the chance to do any more interviews.