Warning: Grand Circle Travel Bait & Switch

I applied for an idyllic-sounding administrative job supposedly supporting three executives at Grand Circle Travel, not taking a moment to question the pie-in-the-sky salary range or the scant 3 years experience required. I was invited to a "group interview" along with 5 other people who had applied for various admin and IT jobs at Grand Circle. In hindsight, this should have stopped me in my tracks -- I can think of no functional use for a group interview except to bring the top candidates for one specific job together to duke it out. I expressed some slight skepticism the night before to beowabbit, but went anyway yesterday morning.

I could go into long narrative detail, but I'd rather cut to the chase -- it was a bait & switch to lure candidates into their telemarketing pool. I've never been to a more surreal and dishonest "interview." It felt just like being primed for induction into a cult. We were led into a small conference room. We were instructed to place anything we had in our hands (resumes, purses, etc) on the floor. Most of us were wearing interview suits, and it was strongly suggested that we take our suit jackets off (I did NOT). A Borg from HR rattled on so fast that I could hardly understand her, about the company's core values and unique culture that was so very superior to mainstream corporate culture. We were divided into teams to figure out how to drop an egg on the floor without breaking it (both teams failed). Then came the sentence that by then I knew was coming: "Most of our employees begin their career at Grand Circle in the call center..."

I know some of you readers have had good experiences working in call centers. Fine, I'm glad it worked out. But this is the very same call center that recently pulled my friend's life out from under him, and experience from which he's still recovering. The same call center that has online reviews saying that "Chinese factory workers have it better than at Grand Circle." My friend can identify and tell his story if he wishes. In any case, the administrative and IT jobs we had all come to interview for didn't exist.

The company seems to operate by getting a strangle-hold on employees' personal lives and sense of individual identity. Posters in the conference room showed scenes from mandatory off-site team building excursions to push employees outside of their physical and mental comfort zones. Separation from family and home appeared to be a big element of their culture. I didn't stay long enough to hear whether the pay was all or mostly commission-based, but given how emphatically they stressed that "risk-taking is part of our core culture," I think I can guess.

I walked out. So did someone else. It was a morning that I'll never get back, a morning that could have been spent doing school work or interviewing for temp agencies with real administrative jobs. This post does not do justice to the underhandedness and pure creepiness of the experience, as I'm too sleepy-headed right now to document it well. But I'm posting because I have many Boston area job-seekers on my friends list and I don't want them to fall for this scam. A search on the Better Business Bureau website shows that their customers are no happier with them. I'll be posting to Yelp and GlassDoor presently.