I got an email from a recruiter because she had seen my resume online. I responded and was told to formally apply online, so I did. I got a phone call a couple of days later and the recruiter asked me if I had any questions right off the bat, and I asked about what the job mainly entails and she told me there's a lot that goes into it. She asked about an employment gap on my resume, if I had had any accidents or DUIs in the past 4 years, then told me I looked like an ideal candidate and scheduled an in-person interview with her for the next day. I also found it strange that she told me to look at their website and learn everything and to be prepared the next day. It almost felt like I was going to be quizzed on their company. The in-person interview was really nice. The recruiter was very friendly and we got along well, and we discussed both professional and personal things. It lasted about half an hour, with basic situational questions, and then she called my local Enterprise branch and scheduled the next interview. I did ask her what the job was really about because I still did not have a firm grasp of what I was going to be doing if hired. It's called a sales management TRAINEE, right? So I asked how we went about getting trained. She explained that different people teach you different departments (the accounting, the managing, the promos, etc), and I was satisfied with that. I did not like the second interview. It's an hour and a half of observing the branch, basically shadowing the assistant manager, and then an hour long interview. None of the employees seemed to be genuine, unless speaking to each other, and for the most part seemed bored with their job. I shadowed the assistant manager around and he seemed at a loss as to what to say. He'd give a vague wave towards a door and say, "That's the break room," gesture to a man cleaning a car, "He cleans the cars," then went back inside and said, "That's pretty much it." He also said when the people who clean cars and pick people up aren't around then the trainees have to do it. I asked a lot of questions because I didn't see anyone doing anything besides pulling up old reservations and bringing cars around. I tried to make conversation with the workers and one guy told me that he had been there the longest at 8 months - they have a very high turnover rate, which I did not take as a good sign. They gave me a paper with a checklist of things I had to do: observe a reservation, in-person and phone; observe a pick-up; observe a drop-off; see the weekly schedule, etc. We got through it within half an hour, so I kind of waited around for about half an hour more while everyone was on a computer reading news, since it had gotten slow. I still had one thing to check off my list so I couldn't start the interview yet. They decided to skip it and just get to the interview because it was so slow. The second interview was conducted by the area manager with the branch manager sitting beside her writing down notes. It had an interrogation style feeling to it, with questions being fired at me immediately after I had just finished answering the previous questions. I almost felt out of breath by the end of the interview. This interview had a colder feeling than the previous one and lasted about an hour. Finally, we get to the part that I did not like. At the end of the interview, the area manager basically outlines how a trainee becomes an assistant manager. It's a SALES job, you are literally trying to make people buy insurance and to upgrade their car. You have to make the sales to even be considered to be an assistant manager. From here comes what she called the grille. You do something like a 4 hour long interview with the department heads and you have to take a 200 question test about the company and then it's decided if you are good enough to be an assistant manager. There are also mandatory happy hours and community service. You work 53 hours a week, 6 days a week, and then afterwards you have to attend either community service with the rest of your coworkers or go to happy hour. I asked if this was mandatory, and I was told that if you want to make it through the grille then you have to develop relationships with the department folk in order to get ahead. The community service also has a minimum number requirement that you have to do. This all just felt like too much. You're working an excessive amount of hours, sometimes manual labor, for mediocre pay and then you are required still to do things outside of work no matter if you want to or not.

Everything was really cordial and loose until the final interview with management. HR forgot to notify me that I had moved on after the first round of interviews and I had to call them to follow up.