My job search in Columbia, South Carolina was much more sophisticated than my telephone book hunt for CPA firms in Seattle, Washington five years before. This time around I turned to the classifieds of The State newspaper, a rich repository of career-changing opportunities in September, 1973. I checked the classifieds every week and made many calls with no success.
Finally as my twenty-seven-year-old youthful exuberance faltered and my typically small savings dwindled, I responded to an ad for an internal auditor position with Blue Cross of South Carolina which was headquartered in Columbia. The secretary to the director of the internal audit department for Blue Cross called to set an appointment for me with the internal audit director. At the appointed time I met with the director who was a middle-aged man and another member of his team, a woman named Yvonne who appeared to be in her early thirties. Both the manager and Yvonne who I really liked gave positive vibes that they were impressed with my credentials – particularly my year in the Houston office of Arthur Andersen & Co. The director said I had one other interview his secretary would schedule with a third-party psychological testing center, but that wasn’t a big deal – just a formality. What could be easier to pass than personality tests for an auditor? Ha, ha, ha. We all laughed.
My spirits lifted after the interview, and I pictured myself working with Yvonne and her boss. The pay was good and the benefits excellent, although benefits were unimportant to me at the time. Show me the money was the key to my vision of success. I agreed to go to the testing site the following Saturday.
I felt good when I finished the standardized cognitive ability tests that next Saturday. I was familiar with some of the tests from my college psychology courses where I volunteered to be a subject of experimental testing in the psychology labs for extra course credit. The third-party testing site administrator, an older man with framed diplomas displayed on his office walls, spent half an hour talking with me after I completed the series of exams. I noticed he took tons of notes during our chat, but that seemed reasonable during the interview process, and I was upbeat when I left his office; I felt sure I nailed it.
The next week I didn’t hear from Blue Cross. I waited until Thursday and then gave the internal audit director a call. He was in a meeting, his always cheerful secretary told me; I felt a twinge of uncertainty about the “in a meeting” comment, but I left my number with her. She promised he would call.
On Friday afternoon the director returned my call and told me I didn’t get the job. Unfortunately, I had failed the personality tests which indicated I was “dull and boring.” I was stunned, speechless. How can someone fail a personality test, I thought. Dull and boring? Isn’t that what you looked for in any type of auditor? Why would you want an internal auditor to be lively and exciting as an auditor for an insurance company? I thanked him for his call, appreciated his consideration and bid farewell to my Blue Cross dreams. It was no use. I wasn’t internal auditor material. I was distraught.
Two weeks later I got a job as Controller for Geneva Construction Company, a large local company in Columbia making more money than I would have made at Blue Cross. My CPA designation opened that door, as it continued to do whenever I applied for any position over the next forty years. But this company was owned by Mormons, and the two young men who ran the company interviewed me for the job. Both men had done two years of missionary service their church required before entering the world of work, and what they loved more than my CPA background was my seminary training. No one mentioned personality tests.
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Yvonne, the woman I met in the Blue Cross interview process, and I became good friends when she randomly moved to the same apartment complex Janie and I lived in following the untimely death of her young husband from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We recognized each other in the parking lot one day, chatted, became friends even when she changed employers and moved to Louisville to their headquarters several years later. We often laughed about my failing the personality tests at Blue Cross – she said if anyone failed the dull and boring test, it should have been her boss.
I'll Call It Like I See It 