The Phantom Menace

A bit of context: I work at a staffing company called Staff Co. Those temps you sometimes see in your office, making $6 an hour to help sort your mail? We're one of the companies that send those people over.

Now, really big companies need more than one or two temps; sometimes they'll need 800 customer service reps, or 400 staff for a business conference, or whatever. Because it's such a large order, they'll request proposals from all the staffing companies, read through them, and pick the staffing company that gives them the most value for the best price. My job is to tell these companies why Staff Co. is the best. And since naturally we're not, it's a bit of a challenge.

At any rate, Staff Co. has a process with which we recruit people. This includes finding the people, interviewing them, assessing their skills, checking their references, and so on. It’s a set-in-stone process, and it goes into all our proposals as a way to impress the company about how thorough we are. In reality, it's the same damn process every staffing company has — it's not like one staffing company's not gonna check references when every other staffing company does — so in order to create the mirage of added value, most staffing companies invent a lot of impressive sounding, completely useless bells and whistles, like behavioral assessments and team-building software. Like if you're IBM and you need 200 temps to sort mail you really give a shit what animal they'd most like to be, but whatever. We do what we can to sound competitive.

So there's your background. Anyway, I was at a meeting last week going over one of my proposals, when the VP of North America mentioned that one of the assessments I had listed in the proposal isn’t actually the assessment they’re using in the states.

I was confused. "But this is our newest assessment technology. It’s Windows compatible. We rolled it out just this year."

"Yes," she explained, "but a lot of our branches in the states haven’t caught up to that yet. They use the old DOS assessments. Our clients are happy with it down there. We don’t need to spend the money installing all these new assessments and training all our staff to use it until we have to. In the US the plan is to stick with the old assessments until the client asks for better, and then gradually bring in the new one."

"Yeah, alright," I said. "So we’ll use the old assessment in the proposal."

"Well, we’re not using the version you’re mentioning, though. We’re using the "level 2" version of that assessment.” Sure enough, I noticed in the graphic in my proposal said "Level 1" in the background.

"I didn’t even know there was a level two," I said.

"There is," she said. "It’s for our industrial clients. It’s not as focused on education and math as the Level 1 assessment is. More for loaders and forklift operators."

"Oh," I said. "So it doesn’t test math or logic? What’s it test then?"

"I don't know. Things. Reflexes, I guess," she replied, and gave a noncommittal shrug.

"Like this?" I said, dropping a pen from one hand and catching it with the other.

"Sure," she said, and we moved onto the next topic of discussion.

The next day I began looking for the "Level 2" version of our now- fifteen-year-old assessment. You’d think this would be easy. But keep in mind, all our Canadian branches (who don’t have industrial staffing) are using the NEW assessment. This means the old assessment, I quickly discovered, was more of a ghost than an actual product.

Calls and emails to our North American, UK and Australian branches yielded nothing. A search of our website revealed nothing. A thorough search of every filing cabinet on the floor revealed nothing. A phone call to the person in charge of the old assessment definitely revealed nothing, because as it turns out there is no such person. In the years since Staff Co. bought the technology, the company that made it has now phased the technology out in favor of the new assessment. Information on the old one now exists solely in the thoughts and songs of Staff Co. personnel.

I chatted up our recruiters, who naturally had never heard of a "Level 2" version of this long-dead assessment. I showed them the picture, and pointed to the blurry text where it said "Level 1" in the graphic.

"So?" they said.

"Well," I responded, "If there’s a Level 1 there must be a Level 2."

"Who says?"

"Because then why call it Level 1? Why call it anything?"

"Why call anything anything?"

I wasn’t prepared for this kind of philosophical assault, and so extricated myself from the conversation and went searching elsewhere. I phoned the managers of other assessments we owned. I got back in touch with the VP of North America, who helpfully suggested I get in touch with the seventeen people I’d just gotten in touch with.

At one point I got frustrated, and sent an email to the address listed on our webpage that pertained to the old assessment. Within three days, my email was forwarded to people throughout North America in search of someone who'd have this knowledge. Eventually, and hilariously, it was forwarded back to me.

After an exhaustive and fruitless interview with myself, the only thing I had learned is that I might be going crazy. Back to square one, I decided to do the only sensible thing: I went and assessed myself on the old assessment. It wasn’t easy, since the program had been deleted from our computers. Luckily I managed to find a computer with remnants of it still on the hard drive. I booted to DOS, frantically tried to remember how to start programs before Windows existed, remembered, and soon enough was in the assessment. My hope was to find the name of the programmer and phone him at home and yell at him until he told me about his phantom product.

But he’d covered his tracks too well. When I opened up the Credits window, the only name available as the Lead Programmer was Withheld By Request. One fruitless search through a phone book later, I was still no further ahead.

Finally it occurred to me to call the stupid US branch that had started all this – the branch the VP of North America had been talking about – the stupid branch that didn’t have the intelligence to switch to our new assessment, and was thus wasting all of my time so I could speak intelligently about this shitty DOS assessment.

I phoned them up and discovered without any great deal of surprise that not one of them was in the office right now. "No matter," I said to the receptionist. "You’ll do." I introduced myself and the situation. "So this assessment you’re using," I summed up, "is not actually being used anywhere else in the solar system. You apparently have the only remaining copy. If you had a manual of it or something, or even a screenshot, or even tell me what it does...?"

Long pause. "I’ve never heard of that assessment. We use the new one."

"But the new one doesn’t do Industrial assessments though, right?" I asked.

"No," she said. "It doesn’t."

"Ah!" I said, finally trapping her. "So you must use a different assessment for industrial recruiting and it must be this old assessment!"

"No," she said. "We don’t use any assessments. It’s just industrial staffing. They lift boxes and put them on trucks. We don’t need to."

And suddenly the ludicrous comedy of the situation occurred to me. The VP of North America who started me on this search in the first place knew full well we didn’t assess in the first place. But we can’t say that in our sales materials. So she asked me to talk about an old assessment we used to use that did assess for industrial, and then all the US branches could go back to doing what they always did, which is not assess at all, and all of our clients would be happy, since they were getting the "Level 2" assessment technology respected worldwide.

In summation: I have to write half a page of text on a product that may or may not exist, made by a technology company that isn’t in business any longer, that isn’t actually used by anyone, since it may not exist.

This is my job.