Workplace reviews and discussion: 三井日本料理餐廳有限公司_三井餐飲事業集團

Online interviews were available during the pandemic.

This interview was a complete waste of time!

First, the day before the interview, around 7:30 p.m., HR called to get a preliminary understanding of the applicant’s background. They mentioned that they thought my background was a great fit for their company. I asked, “Why do you think so?” and they answered, “Because you’re from southern Taiwan! People from the south are more hardworking and able to endure hardship—you think so too, right?” I was completely stunned... This was the first time I had ever heard an HR representative speak like that, and they said it in such a matter-of-fact tone. Wasn’t that basically an indirect admission that the company works its employees to death and is only looking for sufficiently submissive employees to exploit?

Then they asked me, “If tomorrow’s interview goes okay, can you come directly to Taipei the day after tomorrow to discuss the detailed salary and benefits? And then you could start work next Monday.”

I thought to myself: Isn’t that incredibly disrespectful of other people’s time? Don’t people need time to prepare? Have they considered that, with such short notice, people might already have other plans during those times?

In short, I felt from the very beginning that this company was a huge red flag!!

Second, they didn’t send me the online interview link until one minute before the scheduled interview time (yes! exactly one minute). Since there was absolutely no way to test it beforehand, I couldn’t hear them and ran into other problems. To resolve these technical issues, the interview was postponed for an hour and they sent another interview link. We were finally able to conduct the interview successfully. They showed absolutely no respect for the applicant’s time, and the whole process felt very unprofessional and inefficient internally.

Third, the chairman is an extremely self-important person who showed very little respect for the applicant during the interview. He interrupted before I had even finished speaking, then began lecturing me and sharing an entire set of ideas that he thought were brilliant. (In fact, the content was extremely vague and superficial. Even after listening to him go on at length, I still hadn’t heard any real point. He just wanted me to respond with flattering remarks like, “Wow—that’s great! I’ve really learned a lot.”) Moreover, when he asked questions, it felt as though he already had a predetermined answer in mind. If your answer wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear, he decided that you were “totally wrong” or “dodging his questions,” without making any attempt to genuinely understand the applicant’s thoughts, background, or abilities. (I had previously interviewed with several American and Japanese companies, and not a single interviewer thought I had a problem with dodging questions. They all praised my communication skills, verbal expression, and logical thinking, and I was ultimately offered positions by all of them. I simply declined because the salaries did not meet my expectations and the jobs required relocating to other counties. So it should be quite clear who actually had the problem, right?)

Fourth, following from the third point: even if you are the owner or a manager, at a first interview, when the two people are complete strangers, directly telling the interviewee, “I think you have a very serious problem with avoiding direct answers to questions”—regardless of whether it is true—is an extremely impolite, disrespectful, and self-centered way to speak!

Fifth, it was obvious that this chairman was a smiling tiger—you never knew when you might step on his toes—and he had an air of a self-important emperor. Perhaps because he may not even have graduated from junior high school, his way of speaking felt rather lacking in standards and refinement (as noted in the fourth point). What’s more, I was only an applicant (not even his employee), yet he immediately began criticizing and lecturing me as though he knew everything. Extremely classless and rude!

However, if you enjoy listening to empty, pointless lectures, you can go interview there and broaden your horizons~＾＾