Recruiters 19

You’ll recall my surreal experience with the Recruiting Chick for an enterprise software company here in the Silicon Valley. and the first farce of an attempted phone conversation with the Hiring Manager.

Well, despite their best efforts to inject the Marx Brothers into business life, the HM eventually did contact me. He was late calling, but not as late as the recruiter so I let it slide.

Interestingly, he opened by asking how much of the job I’d already covered with the RC. I refrained from stating the fact that we hadn’t talked about it at all since 1)she’d blown 1/3 of our allotted time by calling late; 2)she wasted most of the rest of the conversation trying to throttle irrelevant salary information out of me; 3)at no point did she bring up the actual job.

In fact, her only essay into the position under discussion was an email the following day to ask me if I realized the job was public sector marketing, not healthcare. And when I replied that the description she’d sent me focused on healthcare within the PS arena, her response indicated that the description “wasn’t quite on target”, and the additional information she gave me was useless if her intent was any sort of clarification.

Okay—so, back to the actual conversation with the HM. I just told him that the job description I’d been given apparently wasn’t an accurate depiction of the opportunity under discussion, since it focused on healthcare. HM humphed about a bit, thought RC might have been working from an older document and sent me the “right” one.

Which was exactly what the RC had sent me, although she apparently hadn’t bothered to read it. But then, looks like HM hadn’t, either, when he forwarded it to recruiting to start the process.

It turns out that he didn’t want a product marketer at all (despite the title on the JD), but a solutions marketer, who could identify and pull together entire solutions of multiple internal and partner product lines for presenting to public sector customers (which HM never really defined—everything about this group of people was amorphous and vague). I spoke with this guy for more than 30 minutes, asking a lot of questions, and I still didn’t get a picture of what this creature they want looks like.

So, red flags—which had already sprouted up like poppies in April from my conversation with RC and the flapdoodle about scheduling a simple phone call with HM—expanded to the size of banners at a May Day parade at the Kremlin. The level of dysfunction, the inflexibility in their approach to information exchange, the inability to define or articulate what the hell they want, their utter lack of communication—all Very Bad Signs.

HM had said he had more candidates to interview and I should hear back from RC the following week. But within two days I had one of her chirpy emails—again misspelling my name—to say, “At this time, we have decided to continue to interview other candidates for the role with more Solutions Marketing background.  I will contact you if any other positions open up that might be a better fit for your background and experience.”

With difficulty I restrained myself from wishing her good luck with that, since they didn’t seem to be able to define, much less articulate, what they want. And the qualities most in evidence from everyone I dealt with weren’t ones I’d want to surround myself with 50-60 hours per week.

Now, I’m well aware that in the corporate scheme of things, these clowns don’t give a toss that they’ve exposed themselves to me as incompetent buffoons with delusions of superiority.

They’re holding something they think I want—employment. Which is true. But that doesn’t prevent me from seeing them from what they are and finding that both risible and contemptible.