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The interview location near Songshan Airport was honestly quite far away. Moreover, the company, Zhaoji, mainly handles property rentals, and I only discovered upon arrival that almost the entire building seemed to belong to them. Due to the pandemic, one of the entrances was closed, so it was only possible to enter through the entrance on Jianguo North Road. At first, I registered at the reception desk by scanning a QR code. After waiting about 10 minutes, a woman who looked around 20 to 30 years old and identified herself as an HR representative came downstairs and took me to a meeting room on the fourth floor. Once inside a meeting room with seating for about 10 people, HR gave me a standard résumé form and printed information from the recruitment website to fill out. One page was a personal-data authorization form, which essentially authorized the company to use the personal information you provided. Anyone who is not comfortable with this should take note. The form also asked for information about family background and personal details, as well as information about previous employers, including supervisors, and so on.

I finished filling it out in about 15 minutes. After HR collected it, she said she would take it upstairs to the interviewer. After waiting another 10 minutes or so, HR came back down and said that the interviewer had suddenly been summoned by the vice president, so I would have to wait a little longer. I went to the restroom and waited nearly another 20 minutes before the interviewer finally arrived. He was a middle-aged man who appeared to be over 50.

Rather than conducting an interview, he seemed more curious about me personally. He asked questions about my reasons for choosing jobs, why I had left my previous position, what I had been doing while unemployed, and so on. The conversation then shifted to my family background, which made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. We spent relatively little time discussing the actual job. I also took two tests. One consisted of about 60 questions asking me to determine whether the numerical figures on the left and right were identical—a one-minute test of quick perception and attention to detail. The other consisted of four rounds of adding numbers, with a 30-second time limit for each round, testing reaction speed.

As for the job itself, they mainly mentioned that working hours were from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., with the lunch break not starting until 1:30 p.m. Perfect attendance was worth 2,000, which I found difficult to accept, as it effectively discourages taking leave. Interestingly, when discussing the perfect-attendance bonus, he also mentioned that overtime or make-up work could be used to offset absences. Although this sounded like a remedial way to make up the hours, it sounded to me more like an indirect way of saying that overtime was actually very common. He said overtime was paid, but considering the working hours and the distance to the company, working overtime would mean being tied up at the office for even longer. In addition, he seemed to be looking for people capable of “teamwork,” which sounded more like everyone working overtime together until the job was finished.

Overall, I am very cautious about companies that need to collect personal information. The authorization form was clipped together with the forms that had to be filled out, which meant that regardless of whether you wanted to sign it, you had to complete it. I also personally regard interviews as formal and serious processes, yet the interviewer seemed to think I was not personable enough. Companies that try to act overly familiar do not feel like warm workplaces to me; they seem more like traditional companies that say on the surface that you are family but in practice expect you to make unpaid sacrifices and work yourself to the bone. Combined with the fact that the time I spent waiting after arriving may have exceeded the actual interview time, the whole process was somewhat uncomfortable and stressful. I felt like I just wanted to escape, and especially after it ended, I wanted to leave as quickly as possible.