Workplace reviews and discussion: 冠西電子企業股份有限公司

There was air conditioning while filling out the résumé...

On the 104 website, the job description for the Administrative Assistant (Yilan) position only said:

“ **No experience required** Education: Junior college graduate or above”

For the Administrative Assistant (Zhonghe) position at the same company, the job duties were clearly listed, but the Yilan plant did not provide them directly.

I submitted my résumé at night, and the next morning they immediately called me and asked me to come for an interview that afternoon. They also asked me to print out the résumé from 104 and bring it with me.

I arrived at the company on time and asked the security guard to notify them. After a while, an employee in uniform took me into a conference room and prepared the company’s standard résumé form for me to fill out. After I finished, they notified someone using the conference room telephone.

The first page was the traditional kind of form that asks you to provide the names and occupations of all your family members—information that disregards personal privacy;

The second page was a 10-question intelligence test;

The third page was an English test.

They required basic English proficiency (although this had not been disclosed in advance). I could understand the English-to-Chinese questions, but when asked to translate words from Chinese into English, I suddenly could not remember them. I also had to write about my strengths and weaknesses and the most memorable event in my life in English....

They did not say that I could not use my phone to look things up, did not say there would be a test, and did not tell me how much time I had to answer.

(I have had interviews with impromptu tests before, but they always stated how long I would have to complete them.)

Since they had not told me the time limit, I wrote at my own pace... It had probably been about 40 minutes when a female employee suddenly walked in without knocking and said, “You should be finished by now, right? Let’s start the interview directly!”

She sat down, took my test paper, did not look at what I had written, and immediately asked me to introduce myself.

She was an interviewer who made no attempt at courtesy—not even intending to introduce herself or say which department she was from to the job applicant.

After I introduced myself, she kept asking what my previous job involved and which application software I could use... She asked what I thought my weaknesses were (one answer was not enough; she wanted me to name a second and a third), whereas she hurriedly ended the question after I gave just one strength.

She then asked me, “What salary do you think an administrative assistant in Yilan should receive?” and “What duties should an administrative assistant have?”

After I answered, she asked whether I had to work Saturdays and Sundays at my previous job (which was also an administrative assistant position). I said I did not need to go to the company on weekends, and she reacted with surprise, saying that my previous company was also quite large and operated on weekends, so why had I not needed to go to the company to work overtime?

I replied that my previous company expected employees to finish their work during regular weekday working hours and did not require overtime. Overtime also had to be paid, so naturally they did not want employees to work overtime.

Then, very suddenly, she told me that the interview was over. She immediately stood up, opened the door, and said they would contact me later if there was any further news.

She did not explain the duties or compensation for the position at all, nor did she give me time to ask questions.

I had originally thought that after asking what I believed an administrative assistant should do, she would go on to explain what the administrative assistant’s duties at the company were... and what the salary was... Instead, after spending an hour and a half, I still had no idea what the position involved, and received a silent rejection.

Takeaway: Mentioning overtime pay during the interview was probably a taboo subject for this company. After all, as soon as the person interviewing me heard about overtime pay, she jumped up, opened the door, and asked me to leave. The entire interview felt extremely unpleasant. They required job applicants to fill out a résumé containing private information, yet the interviewer was unwilling even to give a simple introduction. They showed no respect for job applicants.