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Goodbye Macrumors, thanks for everything!
- Thread starter OwlsAndApples
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That's what I was wondering, how do they determine who is who on a forum, when you're at home.
I don't know what the big huff is. Apple has the job to offer, therefor they make the rules. You have a choice to accept and play ball, or turn it down and continue to live your life the way you've been..........
Congrats on the job, but if I got a job at an Apple store I would still be posting on here and would just change my profile information.
wow congrats on the job! i tried to get one but failed apparently they dont like to hire techno-savvy people
goodluck with it!!!!!!
apparently they dont like to hire techno-savvy people goodluck with it!!!!!!
wow congrats on the job! i tried to get one but failed
goodluck with it!!!!!!
Apple has this thing about hiring people who know what they're talking about. 95% of their retail employees are complete and total idiots, and then there are the 5% who actually know what they're talking about. Just look at the Genius Bar as an example. All but one of the Geniuses at the store I go to, are complete and total asses. They have the brain of an ant, and the mentality of a high school cheerleader crossed with the jock that everyone hates. Then there's the one guy that's nice, and who actually has a brain.
And enjoy your new job. I really hope that you're part of the 5%, because there never seems to be enough of them.
Don
Ok, this is kind of a peeve of mine from when I was a sales manager for Borders; people bitched that we didn't hire enough "book people". The cold hard truth is that in retail you're selling a product. Does it matter if the product is a book, a computer, cereal or pants? Not really. It matters that you can fake enthusiasm and know enough to have a basic conversation with someone, at least enough to move product out of the store and into people's hands.
I'll admit that no hiring manager is perfect, and I've seen enough employees of all retail stores to know that plenty of fools sneak in as employees. It just sets me off when I hear how "bookstores don't hire book people" or "Apple/Best Buy/etc don't hire real technology people" because the reality is that these companies are concerned with their bottom line, and if you don't come across as a good salesperson, they won't bother to hire you. It's easier to train someone on technical specs than it is to teach them sales skills. (Theoretically.
)Ok, this is kind of a peeve of mine from when I was a sales manager for Borders; people bitched that we didn't hire enough "book people". The cold hard truth is that in retail you're selling a product. Does it matter if the product is a book, a computer, cereal or pants? Not really. It matters that you can fake enthusiasm and know enough to have a basic conversation with someone, at least enough to move product out of the store and into people's hands.
I'll admit that no hiring manager is perfect, and I've seen enough employees of all retail stores to know that plenty of fools sneak in as employees. It just sets me off when I hear how "bookstores don't hire book people" or "Apple/Best Buy/etc don't hire real technology people" because the reality is that these companies are concerned with their bottom line, and if you don't come across as a good salesperson, they won't bother to hire you. It's easier to train someone on technical specs than it is to teach them sales skills. (Theoretically.
There's a difference between a $30 book, and a $2000 computer though. I understand where you're coming from, but Apple could do better then someone who doesn't know the difference between RAM and HDD space. Or someone who doesn't know if a product has a Core2Duo chip or a PPC G5.
I had to deal with people like that when I bought my Mac. Then there was one guy who was über-nerd, and knew weather or not it had a Santa-Rosa chipset, etc. Über-nerd is great, I'll only deal with him when I'm at the Apple Store.
Don
That is true. But what Apple most likely is looking for is someone in between the idiot and the uber nerd. They want someone who can happily converse about computer terms but dumb it down for the average consumer, and do it all without seeming too sales-y or awkward. If you know the basics of computers, someone can hand you a spec sheet and say "here's product X". If you don't know how to converse with someone and sell them a computer, it's a lot tougher to teach that than it is to teach a spec sheet. There's no easy checklist for "How to make small talk convincingly enough to sell a 3k computer".
It's admittedly tough, because Apple has to please people who would freak and run away if confronted with too much information, but they also have to please the nuts n bolts crowd.
(I promise I'll stop dragging this OT, but read Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping" if you are curious about why retail stores are a certain way...he literally studies how people shop. It's fascinating stuff, and while it doesn't directly cover the technical vs sales knowledge, it does give you some neat insights into the little tricks that stores employ every day.)
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At the Apple Store near me, even the least technical person could tell you the difference between RAM and HDD space. That's a topic that comes up with virtually every customer they talk to, so even if you started as an employee that didn't know the difference, you'd quickly learn it just from the point of not wanting to have fetch someone else to explain it to your customer!
At that store, the über-geeks were great for explaining things like the difference between the mobile chipsets, and a lot of the less-technical people were great with the creative apps.
It was very rare to find a hardware über-geek that could answer a detailed question on the creative apps, like Aperture, Final Cut, or Logic. Even some of the in-depth iLife questions that customers come in with would stump them.
So all in all, the different types of employees balanced out. At least that was my experience.
The trick to making it all work is having employees that know what they're good at, and when they're better off handing a customer off to another employee that can better help them.
IMO, true über-geeks aren't going to be happy working for Apple Retail, as they'll quickly find that they spend almost 100% of their time talking about non-über-geeky things (image explaining the *basics* of OS X and iLife 10x daily), which seems to get really old for them really quick. Where I worked, it seems like they were the type of people the quit the quickest.
my experience has been that everytime i go into an apple store...
im with you on the retail side, but i applied for the more technical assistant (sorry, cant remember the name) - i would have been the "go-to" guy if the idiot retails didnt know what was happening.. i just cant understand why they do not want knowledgeable people in that aspect of the company.
I with the exception of likely only a dozen or so items, almost all of the technology products I have bought I have bought at Frys Electronics. However, the only times I have asked for help was to locate a product; the staff there knows absolutely nothing about any of their products; I have seen on multiple occassions the salesmen give either misleading or incorrect information about an item to a customer and in some cases I have actually stepped in and corrected the salesmen after he had left if i had felt the error was severe enough to warrant it. My point-while sales is sales, in the case of technology, not knowing can lead to mistakes and angry customers and as a result lost business for that company.
lol i wouldnt quit my account if i worked for apple
i just wouldnt be stupid with my posts
i have NO desire to ever work for apple though
and that is why its important to have tech-savvy people working in the IT industry. the people at apple are very friendly and nice, but ask them even a basic question and they duhhh up. its pathetic, the people need to be giving the correct information.
they kinda force you too
but i would try to keep mine because i love this community and contributing to it. i really wanted to work for apple, but after i found out how strict they are with peoples personalities and how they interact with people, i dont particularly want to go there.Wow, that's crazy. Apple's only had retail stores in Australia for a little over a year now. Cool that there are 5 now though. Are they all that bad, or are you talking about a specific location?
The Apple orientation I went through specifically stressed that if you don't know the answer to a question, you tell the customer that you don't know, then you go and find someone who can answer the question. Ends up being educational for both you and the customer. I guess Apple Australia must use different orientation material than here in the US (although it seemed generic enough to be used worldwide).
i am talking about my experience from two locations..
AFAIK apple uses a generic thing, the video that i saw were all had american accents
you shouldnt be posting should you.. tsktsk.
my point here, is that the worker should already know the answer to the questions (or 95% of them anyway). i was having an interesting conversation with a seemingly knowledgable older worker (maybe 40) about the macmini and using it as a home theatre. he got stuck on the diff between 720p and 1080p, i had to explain it to him.. it was bad.. i was shocked. he had been working there for years and didnt know the difference!
this same person also didnt know that you could take out the MBP (older gen) batteries - that took the cake for me, he didnt know that it underclocked the CPU when u took the battery out, etcetc. hopeless IMO.
Didn't the first Apple retail store in Australia open 14 months (not years) ago?
That's crazy that he didn't know about the prior-gen MBP removable batteries, but your other two questions were so atypical for an Apple store (at least the one I worked at) that it doesn't surprise me he didn't know. (FWIW, none of the official training I saw ever covered the notebooks running underclocked sans battery -- I learned about that here on MacRumors) But if you had specific questions about them, he should have been able to pair up with a Genius or someone technical enough to get the answer for you.
thats correct, doesnt mean that he hasnt worked elseware though.
all the questions that i asked were "general", i would expect everybody to know the difference between 720p and 1080p. e.g. if workers are selling the
TV they HAVE to know that can only playback 5Mb/s content at 1280x780p resolution at 25fps/27.whatever when using the h.264 codec, and that its capable of upscaling to 1080p. that would be the MINIMUM that the workers should know. i dont have an TV and i know that. i hardly know anything about technology compared to other people, some of the questions customers ask would even baffle me - but still, the simple questions MUST be known.There's no way an employer can tell you what websites you can and can't go on in your free time.
What gets me about the Apple genius guys is their plain arrogance. The GPS on my iPhone 3G was goosed with OS 3.0, and I brought with me 10 pages of posts from Apple's very own user forum. He waved it away dismissively and said that it was just disgruntled users complaining like usual
He then check his computer thingy and told me that there were no other reports of the GPS being affected by the 3.0 upgrade, so I grabbed him by the arm and made him stand with me for 5 mins outside to see if he could get a GPS lock. In the end he agreed that perhaps I had a hardware issue. I was beyong arguing since it was plainly a sw issue (before OS 3.0 it works, now it doesn't).
This was the Apple Store in Zurich, so clearly the same hiring criteria apply wherever you go in the world.
He then check his computer thingy and told me that there were no other reports of the GPS being affected by the 3.0 upgrade, so I grabbed him by the arm and made him stand with me for 5 mins outside to see if he could get a GPS lock. In the end he agreed that perhaps I had a hardware issue. I was beyong arguing since it was plainly a sw issue (before OS 3.0 it works, now it doesn't).
This was the Apple Store in Zurich, so clearly the same hiring criteria apply wherever you go in the world.
This thread has kind of hit a nerve with me, to be honest. I applied to work for the Apple Store in Regent Street when it first opened up and I went through 4 rounds of interviews for the position. Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love Apple, follow Apple and really believe in their products. The amount of people who I have taken to the Apple store and bought their products is quite amazing. The sad thing is in the final stage of the interview, the two idiots conducting the interview told me to sell a bowl of fruit. Anyway, I didn't get the job.
Take this example: I took a mac mini to get repaired they forgot to put the optical drive back into the machine and scratched the casing.
I would never give up visiting my mac sites for a job! It isn't worth it.
The sad thing is that the folks who work in that store don't know their stuff. The geniuses are rude and arrogant and the store is so badly run. In a lot of ways I am kind of thankful I don't work there. The sadest thing is that there are people out there who know a lot more about Apple but they just go for the popular looking people who don't know anything about the Mac. The staff didn't even know what firewire was!
Take this example: I took a mac mini to get repaired they forgot to put the optical drive back into the machine and scratched the casing.
I would never give up visiting my mac sites for a job! It isn't worth it.
The sad thing is that the folks who work in that store don't know their stuff. The geniuses are rude and arrogant and the store is so badly run. In a lot of ways I am kind of thankful I don't work there. The sadest thing is that there are people out there who know a lot more about Apple but they just go for the popular looking people who don't know anything about the Mac. The staff didn't even know what firewire was!
Damn thats unfortunate! I have Had the same experience and quite frankly i wouldnt want to work there anymore. I have loads of hardware and software knowledge about apple, if they dont want it then ill go some place else
Are u serious?! Thats a total disgrace, the should have replaced the case or something!
Agreed. People might sat 'oh but its apple and they make really good products' yada yada but its downright crap that they expect to sell products and keep user satisfaction without having the right tech support. I do everything myself now, so much easier.
They are attempting to make an 'aura' about the company, it's working - friendly, supporrtive, helpful & stupid. These is technology and they are hiring gits as their first line of defense (no offense meant to anybody). Argh.
And the fact they had no idea about firewire... That makes me so aggrivated. Apple helped to develop it!