It’s fascinating how you can continue losing respect for someone or a group of people even when you already had no respect for them. I guess that’s what happens when people continue to disgrace themselves.
As most of my readers know, I spent the first five and a half months of 2024 unemployed. This tied my 2006 post college graduation record; a dark era when I realized that nobody gave a flying fuck about my Bachelor of Arts. Appropriately so. An era during which I spent hours a day in my undies in front of my parents’ computer applying to jobs on Craigslist and Monster.
While I was typically wearing pants during my recent stint of shame, and I am proud to tell you that I now own my own computer, this latest unemployment experience was even more brutal. It illuminated just how idiotic, shameful, disrespectful and pathetic corporate America is. Let’s take a deep dive into this disgrace.
Problem 1: Consensus Hiring (a.k.a the hiring manager has no balls).
Eight interviews including several panel interviews. I met 11 people in total. Things are going swimmingly. Two weeks after my final interview I emailed the recruiter to ask for updates. She sent me an email a day later saying they had decided to move in a different direction. “There was a wealth of positive feedback but our VP of client services (the very last guy I talked to for a whopping 25 minutes during my 3-month interview process) had some concerns.” Then she copy-pasted the feedback (an obvious copy paste job as the font and text size was different).
“The most excited that the candidate got during the interview was when he discussed his hobby and passion for mixed martial arts. For this reason and an unclear answer he gave in the early part of his interview, I feel like the candidate is not a good fit.”
Just like that. This dick asked me what hobbies I have outside of work. I spent 90 seconds talking about how I like to read biographies, and that I really enjoy MMA and used to compete, but now I have a kid, so time is limited. I guess, in his mind, only cretins and peasants enjoy MMA. Can’t have such white trash as his colleague. Perhaps I was supposed to say that I have zero interests outside of work. I later mentioned this to a friend who once worked at the company. He described my black-baller as “a well-known asshole”. I guess a “wealth of positive feedback” (i.e. everyone loved me except this dick) is irrelevant when you are rushing a corporate fraternity. One day I will encounter this guy at some boring industry conference and break his ribs. Not because I am bitter about the job but because he needs to learn some respect for combat sports.
Problem 2: Salary ranges wider than the Grand Canyon.
Director of Operations, base salary range from 110k to 245k. Other than complying (maybe?) with the bare minimum of state regulations requiring you to post a salary range, what else are you achieving here? Your candidate pool ranges from arrogant recent college grads (who have not YET gotten the memo that their degree is worthless) to 50-year-old VPs. You’re gonna get 10,000 resumes for this role and you’ll never be able to sift through them all. Interviews for these roles were the worst. Half of the time I saw a bunch of 27-year-olds on the other end of the virtual interview; both of us perplexed by the age and experience gap. “Why am I interviewing this old man?” “How many days a week does this kid black out at happy hour?” Had we actually started our interview exchange with real talk like this, the boondoggle interview process would have been much more enjoyable.
Other times I was told that they are looking for someone with more experience leading service lines and a “deep rolodex of industry contacts”. Trick, if I had a deep rolodex you’d be applying for a job with me not the other way around. You think that industry whales are filling out your 1990’s era application software for a job? That they are copy and pasting each section of their CV into the application portal cause your system is too peewee to properly read an attached PDF? These people are morons. In the few instances where I got to the final stages with these wide-band companies, the recruiter always managed to torpedo things at the end.
“Well, I know we discussed salary X and that’s technically within our range, but the hiring manager is actually looking to max this out at about 20k above our stated minimum salary”
“Why did you post such a generous range then? And why didn’t you tell me what you actually wanted to pay?”
“Well, we’re open to great candidates and we don’t want to let salary get in the way of attracting the right talent.”
“Maybe I am misunderstanding but isn’t that exactly what you are doing?”
To this day I don’t understand the strategy here. Is this a Turksih bazaar? Did you think you could grind me down with enough interviews and enough bullshit that I would eventually cave? I’m not shopping for a kilim and I didn’t even get any free chai. Did the hiring manager absolutely loathe me from day 1 so much that he crafted this elaborate ruse (enlisting and wasting his own team’s time) just to fuck me over? Unreal.
Problem 3: Companies run by bean-counters:
During my many interviews with this company (a major retailer) the exact salary seemed to be a moving target. After a month of interviews, I finally confronted the recruiter about this issue:
“In my experience this role typically pays around $____, is that the case here?”
“It used to be.”
“What do you mean it USED to be? What is it now?”
“Well….. most of the roles we cut during our big RIF (reduction in force apparently, that’s new buzzword of choice) in December, we are trying to bring them back at 30% less. The C-suite feels like we overpaid during COVID.”
Are you f-ing kidding me!? I was offended. Not by this underhanded and dirty, dirty move to lay off your staff in hopes that you could replace them with cheaper workers; I have come to expect this type of savagery and lack of ethics from Corporate America. No. What offends me is how goddamn stupid your organization is. How much money are you going to pay out in severance packages? How much are you going to pay in recruiting costs and time to get people back in the door? What about those 6-12 months when you don’t have enough people to do the work – how will your customers respond to diminished quality of service and product? What about the suckers that you do pull in at 30% less? They are all going to leave you as soon as the market improves. That’s two waves of corporate knowledge walking out the door. You think you are saving money by doing this? This is what happens when you let some former Deutche Bank beta who dreams about spreadsheets call the shots. He can’t see beyond short-term dollars and cents.
Problem 4: The Corporate Ding-Dong-Ditch:
I applied to a role and 3 hours later I received an excited email from the recruiter asking if we could talk the next day. I offered times, but alas, never heard back. Two weeks later. Another email, making no mention of our initial game of cat and mouse: “I think you have a very strong resume, are you free to chat tmrw?”. I again offered my availability and never heard back. Two weeks after that, I woke up and checked my email: Déjà vu. “Are you free to talk about this job tomorrow, you are a very strong candidate.”
I talked it over with my wife: Is this lady f-ing with me? Should I even bother responding?
“You have nothing to lose?”
Except I did. My dignity. A third response. A third ghosting. Is this fucktard paid by the email? Is she a sadist who does this to every applicant? What was the point of repeatedly punking me? I will tell you one lasting outcome from all this: Not only will I never, ever consider working for your company in the future, but I am now motivated to do everything in my power to steal clients from you. What a great recruiter: You turn quality candidates into motivated competitors.
Problem 5: Wretchedly Unhappy Employees
I’ll pause my rant after this one. There were probably 7 companies I talked to where at least one interviewer more or less said: “This place is fucked.” Every word below is real:
“If I am being honest, I would be surprised if this company is even around in 5 years”
“We have almost no organizational maturity. We enter deals we can’t execute and have constant leadership changes”
“Our investors have been very clear that they aren’t seeing the ROI they had hoped for. If you join this company, you’re going to have to work really long hours to help us right the ship.”
“We don’t ever really move anything forward at this organization.”
On two occasions it was the actual hiring manager saying this.
How are your employees this despondent? Half of these statements are outright threats. Also, does HR not screen the interviewers? Is there no assessment as to whether this guy is gonna go rogue? You can’t tell me that the dude who warns a stranger of imminent financial collapse doesn’t mouth off in internal meetings. Even more frightening, what if these ARE the screened interviewers!? What if these are in fact the best ambassadors of the company? Is everyone else………….. fuuuuuccckkkkk…….. they’re all applying for jobs while at work.
Pathetic bastards like me. Applicant number 1078 for a phantom job. A hamster seeking to replace one wheel with another. A minion hoping to stay in the good graces of some Wall Street psychopath who views him as a mere decimal point. Disrespected and repeatedly and intentionally misled by incompetent morons much less worthy of gainful employment.
Honestly, dear reader, I am stoned and drinking overpriced tequila as I write this; and even so my blood is starting to boil. Part II coming soon. I still have a lot of grievances, and I haven’t even laid into my former employer yet.
Enjoy your Labor Day weekend
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