I recently applied for a job at Whistler Blackcomb. Part of the application process involved answering a series of questions about myself, and at the end of it I received, to my surprise, a job offer, even though I hadn’t spoken to anyone.
I was invited to attend an online meeting to receive more information about the job. I also applied for staff housing. I had received an invitation several months before to apply for staff housing, but hadn’t, as I didn’t have a job offer at the resort. During the online meeting, I found out that staff accommodation was full, and that only one person in the meeting actually had accommodation in Whistler.
We were told to “find accommodation after we arrived in Whistler.” I wasn’t sure if that meant we were supposed to come to Whistler and sleep in a car until we found accommodation, or stay in a hotel, or sleep on a friend’s couch, or what. At the time, I assumed that my manager would request that I be placed on a waiting list for staff accommodation, but I later found that that wasn’t true, so I had to ask for that to be done.
After that, I received an email asking me when I was arriving in Whistler. A couple of days ago, I received another email about finding non-staff accommodation in Whistler. The email advised that I join a Facebook group dedicated to finding accommodation in Whistler, but I found that the group was full of desperate pleas for accommodation from people who like me had been offered a job in Whistler but who had no accommodation there.
It is hard to overstate the bizarreness of this whole experience... Why would a company offer jobs to all of these people who have no accommodation in a town experiencing an extreme housing crisis?
