ACME Chem Well’s Candidate

Earl liked his job. Most of the time, being head of personnel for a medium sized pharmaceutical sales company, while not exactly every childhood dream come true, still offered many fine rewards. He was well compensated, respected by his colleagues and enjoyed relatively high job security. What the job might have lacked in status it made up for with dependability and a first rate benefits package. As it was Earl’s job to hire new salespeople for the company, these attributes of ACME Chem-Well Inc served as valuable enticements for prospective salesmen and women, making his job far easier than it would have been at a lesser firm.

But everyone eventually goes into a slump and Earl had been in one going on three weeks now. The task had been typical and straight forward—find a new salesperson for the Tidewater region of the State of Virginia, a very profitable territory that promised to be easy to fill. He had chosen the best resumes and scheduled one interview after another. The first two were unacceptably unkempt, another had a slight lisp, not necessarily a deal killer, but for a position like this, Earl knew that someone better would come along.

Then he hit pay dirt on two outstanding prospects, one man and one women, both newly graduated from college and both with striking physical features. It was an open secret in the pharmaceutical sales business that being young and attractive, while not guarantors of success, sure seemed to help. The positive connection between physical attractiveness and the ability to sell drugs had become an article of faith for not only Earl, but his contemporaries throughout the industry. So, both Barbee and Ken had been automatically called back for a second interview on looks alone. Unfortunately, it turned out that neither possessed a working command of the English language, spoken or written. 

Three more candidates had come and gone and now the heat was being transferred down the ladder of responsibility and Earl felt its intensity. This position needed to be filled and the longer  the process dragged on, the worse he looked and felt. 

Today, however, there was cause for optimism. A top shelf prospect had made it through multiple interviews and managed to impress enough people along the way to warrant renewed scrutiny. This would involve a criminal background check, extensive personality testing, and one final—more intense— interview which Earl himself would conduct. The candidate, George Mendenhall, 29 was scheduled to arrive at 10:00 am. Earl looked at his watch. It was 9:45 and as he skimmed through the file before him he could almost feel the relief on its way into the building. Once this hire was on board, the pressure that had been building would dissipate. He could once again get back to enjoying his job.

George Mendenhall walked in at exactly 10:00 am, extended a hand with exquisitely manicured fingernails across Earl’s desk, and flashed a winsome smile. He seemed positively delighted at the prospect of becoming ACME Chem Well’s newest superstar salesman.

“Great to see you again, George. Thanks for being so punctual—that’s an important quality in this business.”

George smiled and made no reply.

Earl continued, “I’m looking through the latest information in your file and am glad to report that you have no criminal record.” Earl always chuckled when sharing this information with a candidate, as if it would have been shocking to find some horrid legal skeleton in the closet of a 29 year old, when in point of fact it was always the background check that worried him the most. More than once a fine candidate had been undone by a drug arrest, a non-starter for someone asked to sell legal drugs to medical professionals. George chuckled along with Earl and offered the customary, “well, that’s a relief!”

Earl then offered an apology along with a summary of the various personality tests that George had endured. Earl had never been a huge fan of these tests, a staple of his business, since he wasn’t at all convinced of their usefulness. More than one clear introvert had come back as Type A go-getter, leading Earl to believe that the tests had become so well-known that people had learned to lie believably, rendering their results unreliable. “Both your Meyers-Briggs and your Enneagram line up perfectly with what we are looking for in our best people.”

“Thanks,” George answered. “I was a little worried about that. It’s been a long time since I took one of those tests. I’ve never really had much confidence in them anyway.”

This guy is perfect, Earl thought as a smile spread across his own face nearly as radiant as George’s. Now it was time for the last step of the process. Earl only ever got to this part with candidates who he had already decided to hire. So it was his favorite question since literally nothing hung in the balance. No one had ever failed in their answer. Some had done better than others but none had crashed and burned. Despite the question’s apparent gravity, it was essentially an empty question—“So, George—suppose that this decision has come down to you and another candidate. If I gave you five minutes, what would you say to convince me that I should hire you?” Then he closed the file, sat back in his chair, placed his hands in his lap and waited.

George hesitated for a moment, gathering his thoughts, then looked out the office window at the towering oak trees swaying in the breeze. After what seemed like an unnecessarily long pause, he began his answer.

“I’m sure that you have had many fine candidates for this job, each of whom brings their own strengths to the table, but I believe that what sets me apart from most of them is my capacity for independent thought. I think that too many people have fallen into a sort of group think, where they are too unwilling to challenge conventional thinking. It is this rigidity of thought, this lock-step conformity that is holding all of us back. As far as how this applies to this job, I will constantly be thinking outside of the box to figure out new and creative ways to present ideas to my customers. I will always be willing to experiment with the unconventional, to try something new, to attempt things that haven’t been tried before. Before just accepting traditional ways of thinking and doing, I am committed to doing my own research. Its what I call passionate skepticism, and it is the one quality that sets me apart and the essence of why you should offer me the job.”

Earl wasn’t sure that he had ever heard a better answer. This guy was intelligent, well-spoken and supremely confident. He checked off every box. He leaned forward, and dramatically placed his elbows on his desk, preparing to make George Mendenhall the newest member of the ACME Chem Well family when George leaned forward himself and added, “Here’s an example of what I mean about this group think conformity thing—you know the Earth is actually flat, right?”

Earl had learned many things in his twenty years in personnel, stumbled upon several rules of the road that had served him well, primary among them was to never engage a candidate on the subjects of politics or religion. These were areas fraught with passion and disagreement and Earl had learned the hard way to tread lightly. But, nothing had prepared him for what had just come forth out of the mouth of this Duke University graduate with the spotless resume and gushing references. The suggestion that the Earth was flat had sucked all of the atmosphere out of Earl’s corner office and suddenly an electric silence had descended. Earl’s facial expression had gone from exultant to stunned shock in a nanosecond. He opened his mouth to respond but instantly thought better of it, thinking it more prudent to get clarification first.

“…um…excuse me?”

“Look, I get it. We can agree to disagree,” George offered with a smile. “I would just say that you should do your own research.”

Earl could no longer hang on to the hope that he had misunderstood. Suddenly, a decision had to be made. Earl could let it go, adding rejection of 2000 year old scientific consensus to politics and religion as subjects not to be discussed, or he could engage the man across from him with probing questions in an attempt to discover where this potentially disqualifying notion came from. After all, for a job heavily reliant upon faith in modern science and chemical engineering, a rejection of the idea that human beings inhabit a globe shaped planet might be problematic. Still, Earl was hesitant. Did he really want to find out more about George Mendenhall’s scientific views? By every measure at his disposal, this man had proven to be the ideal candidate for a job that Earl was under terrific pressure to fill. At the end of the day, who cares if the guy holds a bizarre theory or two? Unfortunately, Earl was being driven by his own personal biases, he being a lifelong aficionado of the United States space program, to the point where his man cave at home was hung with one photograph after another of every Apollo liftoff along with portraits of every astronaut to ever have flown on a lunar mission. Against a host of instincts screaming in his ear to disengage and offer the man the job, he heard himself saying, “But George—what about the photographic evidence from space?”

At this point Earl had taken his elbows off the desk and slid back into his chair, taking on the appearance of a deeply concerned therapist, as the blood slowly drained from his face as George expounded on his ideas, “Yes, you mean the photographic evidence that comes to us through the filter of NASA, the same people who faked the moon landings? At some point you have to ask yourself what you choose to believe—the evidence you can freely observe with your own eyes or the testimony of the roughly 500 humans who have allegedly been in space?”

Earl sat in incredulous silence as this handsome, erudite man produced a laundry list of conventional thinking that he believed were in fact conspiracies against the American people and the spirit of free thought. Everything from gravity—a strong case could be made against it— to what really happened on 9/11. He ended his speech with a statement that was still ringing in Earl’s ears as the elevator doors closed behind him as he left—“Actually, if we really understood what is being sprayed on this planet from the chem trails of airplanes, we would probably never leave our homes.”

Earl had walked George to the elevator and assured him that a decision would be made in just a few days and he would be in touch. Then he disappeared into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face and stared into the mirror for a full five minutes. Having adequately composed himself, he walked back to his office, stopping along the way at his assistant’s desk.

“Get that girl with the lisp back in here!”