| I got offered a job in Switzerland last year. It was the weirdest experience ever. What I suspect happened was I'd written "scrum certified" on my cv, and the job had "scrum manager" in the title, so the poor people were bound by the law of stupid to interview only people with this string in their cv. They never asked me anything relevant. I code a bunch of languages, I can manage people, yada yada, they didn't care. I don't know why on earth they wanted to hire me after chatting briefly about my experience and doing some silly think-out-of-the-box exercise. The HR lady then proceeded to tell me about the great benefits of working for them (they pay your mortgage, not bad eh?). One of the strangest things about the interview was that the HR person was there at all, and leading it. She presented the manager, who politely said hello, and then sat there as she asked me every inane and cliche question you've ever heard. So then it got to the documentation stage. They asked for this reference letter, which I had, but I warned them my previous employer was... Me! So obviously they shouldn't be surprised if it was a bit flattering and signed by some partner of mine. Didn't matter. Just give us the letter! And then they also wanted my graduation certificate. Now for years I've not needed this document, I actually did not know what certificate from my school looked like. At Oxford you have to sign up for a weird Latin ceremony, which I didn't do because I'd started work the week after finishing uni. So this lady insisted on getting a signed cert from the university office. I reminded her is was over a decade ago, but no help. Luckily I was passing through anyway. I also hinted quite strongly that it might not be the right kind of work for me, and that I might want some sort of term limited contract. Didn't seem to matter. |