Looking for a job, looking for a job, I’ve been job hunting recently. Of course, it’s more likely that I’m just scouting the market to make up my mind about what career to pursue before I graduate next year.

To be honest, I’ve never really taken the job search after graduation seriously. In my mind, it never seemed like a stressful or difficult task.

I felt pretty good about myself, but recently, I’ve been facing continuous failures.

The first major failure was, of course, the interview with Taiping Life Insurance. This failure was so classic that I feel compelled to analyze it in detail here.

When I think about it, my initial motivation to interview with Taiping Life Insurance was simply because I couldn’t find any appealing positions on major job boards. Then, on the school’s graduate employment website, I saw that Taiping Life had a position for “Claims Investigation” that listed “Law Major” as a requirement. Immediately, I started convincing myself that this was an area of interest.

Interest is either cultivated or innate. My deliberate attempt to create interest for the sake of a job was the root cause of this tragedy.

• First, the job content of the claims investigation position mainly involves verifying the basic information of the insured in insurance incidents and document preparation, which indeed seemed close to my major.

To appear experienced or proactive during the interview, I went online and found many PowerPoint and PDF files about claims investigation to study the job’s content and methods.

In this regard, I highly recommend Douban, Sina Share, and Baidu Library. Most white-collar jobs have professional training documents available for viewing and downloading, which can be a key to interview success (unfortunately, I failed).

• After understanding the basics of the job, I started to delve deeper into the company.

Large companies can be thoroughly researched online, but for smaller companies, you can’t just rely on their websites. You need to use social engineering and other methods to get a clear picture.

Since Taiping Life is one of the earliest insurance companies in China with a solid performance, naturally, looking at their financial reports and corporate ratings gave me a good idea of what kind of company it is.

• After understanding the job and the company, the next step was to prepare my resume and contact them for an interview.

This being my first job application, I couldn’t afford to slack off on my resume.

Here are some principles for resume preparation:

1. Keep it to one page;
2. Balance white space and text appropriately;
3. Use a scientific layout;
4. Add a bit of boastfulness.

After several iterations, the final version of my resume looked like the image on the right:

I felt that my resume was decent, not outstanding, but at least a six or seven out of ten. Unfortunately, it didn’t impress the HR (sigh…).

• After finishing the resume, the next step was to send it out. The HR only provided an email address on the website: liang263@tpl.cntaiping.com.

Finally, I saw a glimmer of hope. Being quite investigative, I immediately searched online and found a wealth of information about the HR.

I thought, why not use some “social engineering” to make a stronger impression? (It ended in failure.)

• Before sending the resume, I did a few things that were quite ridiculous: I pondered over which email to use to send this email.

Gmail? Livemail? Domain email?

When I thought of a domain email, I immediately went to GoDaddy and found that tplife.org was available (the company’s main domain is tplife.com).

Oh my god, even though I knew .org is for non-profit organizations, I didn’t care and immediately registered tplife.org, then set up a Mail@tplife.org email using Google Apps.

After setting up the domain email, another idea popped into my head.

I went on QQ and found some groups named Tplife to get a deeper understanding of the market demand. Many field agents expressed interest in setting up their own websites (with my encouragement).

After spending over an hour, I set up tplife.org and tplife.info websites and revised my resume.

Now, these two domains are just sitting idle. I wonder if anyone is interested in buying them.

• After sending the first email, there was no response for two days (sigh…).

Then, the next day, I came up with a sneaky idea. Using the HR’s phone number I found online, I sent a text message saying that my email server was unstable (it really was; some email systems couldn’t recognize domain emails, like Tencent’s) and asked her to reply to my phone.

Perhaps because of this, an hour later, I received a reply from the HR on my Berrymail, asking me to come for an interview at Taiping Life’s Foshan branch the next afternoon.

• Without much preparation, I rode my bike to Taiping Life’s Foshan branch for the interview the next day.

The process felt smooth, but I talked too much about family, the internet, and other topics. The interview, which lasted over 15 minutes, seemed to be led by me, but from the HR’s expression, it still felt promising.

After the interview, the HR gave me a website for an online test along with a username and password (Normstar test).

• Back in the dorm, after drinking some glucose, I started tackling the online test.

The HR gave me a wrong password, and I initially thought they were messing with me. After calling to confirm, it turned out to be a mistake on her part.

The dorm environment wasn’t great, with the washing machine making a lot of noise, and the questions were quite mentally taxing and hard on the eyes, so I didn’t do well. Especially since the Normstar test page didn’t support Firefox or Chrome, forcing me to use IE. When I got to the last big question (an English test), the page kept crashing, and I was sweating bullets.

After numerous attempts, I discovered that the test page only supported the IE6 framework. IE7, IE8, and other non-IE browsers would crash on that question.

While dealing with this issue, I even found out that the test could be cheated:

You just had to intentionally close the browser during the test and log back in to retake it (each question type could only be submitted once).

After finishing the test, there was nothing more for me to do. Later, I received an email saying I didn’t pass the test.

I always doubted the accuracy of that test. The first 30 questions were like numerical and graphical reasoning tests, and I probably got few right. The middle few hundred questions tested eyesight, and I didn’t cheat or copy down the answers (the questions repeated). The last few hundred questions were about personality, and I kept wondering what the company wanted me to choose. The questions were highly repetitive.

This was the tragic first job hunt.

• Here are a few points worth noting for the future:

1. What you feel good about may not be recognized by others;

2. Too much cleverness can lead to negative effects;

3. Don’t try to get a job by stalking the HR;

4. Prepare more thoroughly for interviews at large companies.

After writing this, I just finished downloading a 2.2GB movie. Campus internet is still strong. About 2000 words, 20 minutes or so. Google Input Method shows that since I reinstalled the system on September 20, I’ve typed 370,000 Chinese characters, with a speed of 100 WPM. Truly a homebody.