Recruiters 9

Finally—someone involved with this contract product marketing gig who’s intelligent, professional and knowledgeable about the position and the discipline.

I met Friday with the actual hiring manager, had a cogent exchange of information and think I could do the work and enjoy it. And, contrary to what Shveta Here (how the recruiter invariably begins any phone conversation) had said to prep me for the Skippy call, I’m not under consideration for the retail PMM role, but the enterprise one. Quelle surprise that she got that little bit of crucial information exactly backwards.

At the least, I’m interested in an organization that names its conference rooms after TV shows. My interview was held in “The Outer Limits”; make of that what you will.

The recruiter, however, was as useless as ever. Because the hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile was only her name and three job titles, I’d asked SH to use her premium account to get me a screen shot of the whole profile. She said she would; this was Tuesday.

I pinged again Thursday morning; in the afternoon she rang me to say she hadn’t been able to do that and the only thing she could tell me was the hiring manager’s title. Which she got wrong.

And she gave me the wrong pronunciation for the HM’s surname.

Then, at 1028 on Friday (as I was literally stepping out the door to go to the 1100 interview), she called to inform me that the HM is “the decision maker” and “a very senior person”.

Oh, and Skippy reports to her.

(That would mean that he isn’t the hiring manager, which is what she’d insisted when I questioned that fact. Of course, she didn’t refer to the previous conversation.)

She enjoined me to call her after the interview so she could “follow up with the client”.

Well, when I hadn’t contacted her by 1330, she rang and reproached me: “I said for you to call me.”

Yeah, whatever. I gave her a brief summary of the meeting—I thought it went well but HM has only just started the interview process. (In fact, I saw another candidate had signed in with Reception a couple of hours before my appointment.) And she said hoped to get back to us sometime next week.

(I did leave out the little bits about the HM giving me her card and taking down my phone number; I knew SH would have a cow over that.)

I don’t know what SH was hoping to get out of me—she kept pressing me for indicators that I’m the chosen one, and there was nothing to give. Most interviewers are very evasive about that sort of thing. And I have no idea what she means by the phrase “follow-up with the client”, because obviously she hasn’t had any conversations with the client at all (she doesn’t even seem to speak with the account manager) and she wasn’t going to do anything on Friday anyhow.

We now return control of your television set to you, until the next episode.