Over the course of seven weeks, I had the opportunity to interview for two positions. The first was with National Accounts as a Senior Account Executive and the other was an Account Manager - Local Sales. This company (under Cox Media) has gone through numerous reorganizations and lay offs. The perception I had of the process and the company as a whole was disorganization, lack of departmental vision and poor communication. The new mantra of the AJC sales team is all about customer service and consultative selling. Apparently years of bad sales reps during the boom before the recession, lead them into a bad financial situation currently. With all the reorganizations, many lower performing employees were let go and they are rehiring to fill these positions. I initially met with the Recruiter who answered a lot of the preliminary questions I had. He also wanted to know about what I was looking for in a career, I appreciated this. I learned during this conversation that the AJC had a past problem of recycling employees. If one employee was doing a mediocre job, they were likely to be kept within the organization rather than being fired. He was trying to break them of this habit and bring in external candidates. The first position I interviewed for was the Senior Account Executive position in the Major Accounts Department. The incumbent hadn't been doing his job of making sales calls but apparently is still employed at AJC in another position. The Management for this position was obviously very leery of every candidate because of the incumbent. Per the Recruiter's recommendation, he told me to be more conversational than aggressive during these interviews. After several weeks, it came down to me and an internal candidate. The Manager for this position wanted me to prove I was able to sell. After giving references of past employers and customers, they stated that I couldn't prove I could sell. I called my references and found that no one had contacted them and the internal candidate got the position. This process to receive feedback and to find out whether or not I would move to the next round took a long time. From start to finish it was about 6+ weeks. After not being selected for the Senior Account Executive position, the Recruiter recommended that I also interviewed for a new position, Account Manager - Local Sales. He didn't have much information other than a very long and verbose job description that had many AJC internal descriptions. When I asked him to decipher certain sentences in the job description, he let me know I would have an opportunity to ask the Manager when I interviewed. Clearly he wasn’t positive what the description meant either and kept saying it was a newly created position. I met with the Regional Sales Manager and really was trying to find out what exactly the position would entail. During our conversation, the Manager spent most of the time talking and explaining the position. He had a very difficult time trying to sum up the position. He also spent a long time drawing flow charts for me and his explanation was extremely long. I let him know briefly of my Account Management experience but he asked me only two questions before the interview ended. He later let the Recruiter know that he enjoyed our conversation but didn't think I sold myself enough. An internal candidate got the position. I question whether or not I was truly there because I was a viable candidate or if I was there to prove the Recruiter was doing his job? If the AJC wants to break free of their poor past performance in advertising, perhaps they should look outside of their glass house to find better talent.