Capítulo 36: Interviews

Michael and Jennifer wrapped up things at the job fair and headed to the office. Now they had to sort through the hundreds of resumes to pick the best candidates for face-face interviews. Michael personally picked the candidates he wanted to interview for the Trader position.

After sorting through the resumes; they finally had the list of qualified potential candidates for Empyreal Holdings and Eminence Gaming. For the gaming company, Michael needed server management personnel along with the usual office roles: Human resources, Accounting, Customer Service Etc. Both companies would be working from the same office for now. Eventually, Michael planned on having Empyreal Holdings move into a new office.

After scheduling the interviews, Michael turned his attention to the system. He submitted the hiring mission and checked out his rewards.

[ Mission 3: Attracting Followers has been completed.

Mission Rewards:

Advanced Talent Recognition skill: Allows Host to evaluate the talent of a person. Needs necessary background information on the candidate to work. All talents shall be split into tiers: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and Supreme. The talents will be shown as affinities. It is highly likely that a person will have multiple affinities. In that case, only the highest tier affinities will be listed.]

Michael was astonished when he got a free Advanced tier skill as the reward. Till now the only skill he had at advanced tier was the Stock market skill. Michael knew that the system always showed mercy to him.

The system always discounted the skills that were absolutely necessary like the combat skills or the gambling skill. Perhaps the system thought that this skill would be more significant than all others; Therefore, it gave the skill away as a mission reward. Michael was grateful for the free skill. The skill would make it easier for him to evaluate talents in the future. He wanted to test the skill out to find out how exactly it worked.

First, he tried it on himself and got an annoying error message. In hindsight that makes sense since his talents are always changing because of new skills. With no other options, he turned to Jennifer.

[ Jennifer Parker

Talents:

Supreme Affinity: Business Management

Advanced Affinity: Leadership, Problem-solving, Finance ]

Michael was astonished to find that Jennifer had supreme grade talents. He was glad that he successfully pulled her into his company. He finally understood why the system said only the highest talents will be shown.

The high-level talents need to be built upon by lower level talents. For example, Jennifer needs to have leadership, Finance, and Problem-solving talents in order to have the higher tier Business management talent. Therefore, he only needs to know what the highest level affinity a person has in order to deduce the rest.

Michael prepared interview questions for the potential traders. Jennifer would be conducting the interviews for everyone else; however, he would attend in order to double check using his skills. He could use his Deception detection skill to find out if anyone is lying and use Talent recognition to find unpolished gems.

Time flew by quickly as Empyreal Holdings prepared to have its first round of interviews. The interviews were actually held in a hotel because Michael did not feel comfortable giving access passes of the compound to a bunch of strangers. Besides, there is no need to alarm the candidates with the excessive security. The first person they had for the interview was Kevin Malone. He was the accountant with the dubious history.

Michael and Jennifer had already planned on hiring him as long as this interview went well. He had enough experience to lead an accounting department. During the interview, Michael scanned Kevin and was surprised to see that he had an advanced affinity for accounting and finance.

Michael knew that supreme tier talents were scarce and that advanced talents were what he should normally aim to hire. The interview went well and Kevin was offered a senior accountant position. There was a plethora of paperwork that needed to be processed for new hires. Fortunately, Jennifer worked as a one-man show and completed all the tasks.

The interviews went on with Michael acting as an observer. For the first three days, they were interviewing general office staff in order to set up the framework of the company. The future interviews will be conducted by the Human Resources department.

Michael was delighted because out of the 42 employees that they hired; 32 of them had advanced level talents. The rest had intermediate level talents; which was an exceptional result. Michael was confident that the company hired some of the most talented employees in the industry.

Of course, for the next two months, these employees would be closely monitored to make sure that they worked hard. After all, a talent was not worth anything without putting it into use through hard work.

Finally, it was Michael's turn to interview the traders. He planned on having 25 people in his first batch. They would be offered an internship position for two months. During these two months, Michael would only provide a basic introduction to the stock market and give them low budget accounts. At the end of the internship period, the top performers would be offered an enticing employment contract.

Michael wanted to hire people with no previous experience and train them personally to make sure that they have solid foundations. Therefore, he expected a lot of people dropping out of the internship because of the high-stress environment.

Stock trading is not for everyone; Michael knew how stressful it can be at times. Fortunately, he had the skills provided by the system to give him confidence. However, these new traders would not have any skills; they would be thrown into the fire pit and would have to thrive under the harsh circumstances. Furthermore, these traders had the chance to learn with his money. With such a risk-free opportunity, Michael hoped that these traders would grasp the rope and pull themselves up.

Michael had prepared a series of questions for the candidates. He would quiz them with arithmetic problems and also high-intensity questions. Although calculators were available; every trader needs basic mental math skills to thrive. The scenario questions were meant to probe the rapid problem-solving skills of each candidate. Traders would sometimes have to make decisions on the fly and live with the consequences of their actions.

The first candidate walked into the interview. When Michael looked up he was flabbergasted by the familiar face. What is she doing here?