Sears Sales Associate Interview

Interviewed Sep 2009 in Kingston, NY (took a day)

My initial communications with the company began with your standard online questionnaire to see if I was a good fit for the company. I applied for electronics sales.

I was called the next day and asked when I would be available for an interview. We scheduled an interview four days after the phone call.

When I arrived at the store, I initially spoke to the young lady who was working as their HR personnel. She told me that she wasn't sure where they were going to place me, and had me sit in the Loss Prevention office of all places to wait for the assistant manager in charge of home improvement. I got plenty of strange glances as employees walked past the room with me on the bench.

After about ten minutes the assistant manager arrived and the interview began. He asked the typical retail store interview questions with nothing that really struck me as abnormal. One thing that I told him was that I knew absolutely nothing about tools, lawnmowers, or snow blowers; I also had no selling experience.

After the first portion of the interview, I was then asked to wait yet again while they found the general manager (who was an extremely nice guy) to ask me the same questions as the first guy. Again, I told him that I knew nothing about tools, etc. In response to this, he asked me to "sell" him a stapler. I did a quick spiel about the features of the stapler that made it worthwhile, and after telling me what he liked about me, and promising me that they'd be able to teach me the products he gave me the job.

The general manager told me that he gave me the job because of a few key things. First, I looked him in the eyes at all times. Second, I sat straight up and was not afraid to answer questions honestly and directly. Third, when he asked me to "sell" him the stapler, I did not freeze even though I had no prior experience.

One thing that I should mention is that they never "taught" me the tools. They gave me about 20 hours of computer-based training in total to learn everything there was to know about the store's operations as well as its products. I reached out to my fellow employees often, but they basically just told me to tell customers something they'd want to hear to sell the product; my conscience wouldn't allow me to do that, so I left the job fairly quickly.