Would you apply for a job with a listing as scary-sounding as this one? If you, like so many Americans, have been out of work for a while, you might. An ad for a Director of Operations at a company called Rehtom Inc. recently surfaced, and the requirements are nuts. The ad got about 2.7 million impressions, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) only 24 people actually applied. Those 24 people interviewed for the position via webcam… and that’s where the fun begins in this eye-opening video.
Discussion between the well-dressed interviewer and each applicant begins with one of the most basic requirements of the job: Mobility. Anyone who’s hired for the position will need to work standing up pretty much all the time, which naturally begins to raise a few eyebrows. Then it comes up that anyone who would be successful in the position holds a degree in medicine, finance, and the culinary arts. Not or — and. Oh, and forget about vacation time, even around the holidays; the workload goes up then, not down. How does the workload of a job with a minimum of 135 hours a week go up? No idea, but apparently it does.
At this point, you can probably imagine how the interviewees are feeling. That’s when people started to speak their minds: “That’s insane,” “That’s inhumane,” and in some cases, simply, “No. Uh uh.”
Then another bomb gets dropped: Our well-suited interviewer moves on to salary, stating, “The position is going to pay absolutely nothing.”
If your initial reaction was, “…Excuse me?”, you’re not alone. But guess what happened when the interviewer proceeded to ask his potential employees, “What if I told you there’s actually someone who currently holds this position right now?”
Well played, American Greetings. Well played, indeed.
It’s true that this whole stunt is an ad; its goal is ultimately to get you to buy American Greeting cards for your mom for Mother’s Day. But I think what it gets right that, say, Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign so frequently gets wrong is that it doesn’t say that something like beauty is the ultimate goal. It doesn’t say that the brand is better or smarter than you are, or that you should buy the brand’s product because it can teach you things. It reminds you that, in the words of that one guy, “Moms are the best,” and that you should tell them that more frequently. It also suggests that “this Mother’s Day, you might want to make her a card.” Make, not buy. She sure deserves the effort.
Image: cardstore/YouTube
