I was an ad writer for a company called Boost CTR in San Francisco. We wrote Google Ads and in 2015 the work was abundant, allowing me to spend my day job doing my second job.
A Boost manager disliked me and, despite being the very top performer (they had a performance chart) I was fired.
The manager was soon fired so I reached out to an executive there and asked if I could re-apply on a trial basis. She punted it to someone else, and that person said my ad samples did not meet their standard.
I then applied under another name, and they replied quickly:
THEM: We need foreign language writers. do you speak French, German or Spanish?
ME, with pants on fire: I speak all 3.
THEM: Take this test.
The test had nothing to do with those languages. It asked what a preposition was, which ad was a better ad, and things like that.
I was immediately hired as a foreign language ad writer, but here's the hilarious part: They had almost no ads in foreign languages, and didn't directly assign me anything. So, I was back to writing English language ads. When there was no work, I had no issue with trying out Google Translate in Dutch, Japanese, Hebrew…….I mean, I'm there to make money, right?