Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Plus ça change…

I interviewed for a position with a cybersec startup last week—the recruiter had reached out to me and it looked like it could be interesting.

However, the VP of Product Management (who, 10 years ago owned and managed a tree removal service and whose LinkedIn profile still enumerates very minor tasks he performed for unrelated work early in his career) was clearly looking for someone more technical than I, so I knew that would be the end of it.

His shop, his call; fair enough.

However, I had found a typo in the data sheet the recruiter had sent me as prep for the VP call (she said it was a white paper, but I do know the difference between the two), so when I sent her my thank-you (since they’d masked the VP’s email address), I said—very nicely—that I’d found a typo and someone in their marketing department would probably want to correct that.

(The company has fewer than 150 employees; I reckoned that the marketing “department” might be the CMO plus one general dogsbody. Interestingly, when I looked up the CMO on LinkedIn, I discovered she has a BA; in “English—Technical Writing”. Well, we all make mistakes.)

I didn’t point out that this particular typo should have been caught by spellcheck in the first draft. I seriously do not know how it made it past what should have been multiple sets of eyeballs on the screen.

Two days later I received the thanks-but-no-thanks email from the recruiter’s email address. It was possibly a systems-generated (or maybe they’re using AI) effort; no mention of my editorial assist and the signature was just the company name.

Bless their hearts.

 

 

 

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