Is it so far gone?
The search is reaching a pretty frantic pace. But that’s absolutely no excuse to let principles slide. Too many people (nearly everybody I know, it seems) lack the basic courage of their convictions.
Yesterday I was back and forth over email and the phone with a particularly gung ho recruiter. It was in response to a job rec on dice I’d responded to late Wednesday afternoon and ended up being a particularly fruitful exchange. He was energetic, sufficiently fluent in technologies that I didn’t have to hand hold him through the acronyms on my resume.
Within about 20 minutes of talking with him, he’d set me up with a couple/few online tests (which I mentioned yesterday.) Now normally I hate those things for reasons that ended up being borne out perfectly. (What? I was right? No shit. Get used to it sparky. It happens an AWFUL lot.)
I went back and forth with him a couple/few more times afterwards.
As the day wound down I didn’t think much of it. I went and made a set of T2 chain and mastercrafted weapons for Legrand (whups, wrong blog) fucked around online when the phone rang. It was the recruiter… It was pushing 8:00 at night. Sorry sparky. I let it go.
Then the email came “<company name> wants to interview you, and I just called you with a msg. Please call me back 201-654-3210 ASAP.” Now, company name, salutation and phone number aside, that’s exactly what the email said.
I went back to leveling my provisioner more noodling around and the phone rang again…
at 9:30.
at night.
like… PM.
In my home.
And it was him again.
I weighed the relative merits of explaining to him the basic protocols of polite professional behavior in THIS culture against my need and decided to table it for later.
So this morning I emailed him back saying I was available and what’s up?
He sent me the following email: “Michael, do you have PL/SQL knowledge/experience?”
We spoke and I said “Not really. I know it’s Oracle’s sql extensions and programming language. Probably defines a lot of the syntax for stored procs and extended functionality. But I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.”
“Could you do me a favor? Could you research PL/SQL online for a bit? That’s your homework ok? Because, uhm… day want lots of Oracle. Den later I call you and ask some simple simple PL/SQL questions and I can tell them that you know Oracle and PL/SQL okay? Can you do that?”
I figure… I just must not have heard him right.
“I can certainly spend a couple hours researching PL/SQL and then maybe I’ll be able to answer your questions. But if I sit in front of this guy I’m not going to say I’ve used it professionally. I’ll say I’ve noodled around with it a bit on my own for a few hours. No. I’m not going to ever lie about what I have and haven’t done. That’s not acceptable.”
“Well ok. Uhm, hmm… ok. Let me go back to my people and tell them what you told me, and uhm… I really like you and want to push you for this job. You did great on the perl test and good on the C++ test, but they need oracle. So let me go back to my people and see what they say.”
I hung up the phone, *twitch*ed a bit, vented on twitter, then went about my business.
But just before I hit “post new” here I realized something…
He told me they wanted me to come in. He said in no uncertain terms that I HAD the interview.
Lying fuck.
I’m getting really fucking sick of the “staffing” industry.
What burns my ass the most is that when push comes to shove, there’s no external reward for having any integrity. It’s ok because I really do get enough from it. I can hold my head up and look straight at a mirror without wincing.
As I mentioned to Bink on the phone today: Integrity is like Health. You really don’t notice it until you start losing it.
UPDATE: I really do give people the benefit of the doubt and God willing I always will. It drives me absolutely batty that I can almost presume dishonesty of a group of people, and I don’t like what it’s doing to my head.
Sure, I know of a couple/few exceptions. But DAMMIT! Why are they exceptions?
August 14th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
H has been contacted by a few recruiters who were interested in getting his quals and info and then never contacted him again. I figured they just needed warm bodies to pad their results with. “Look, boss, I’ve developed serious business relationships with all these people!”
One guy tried to convince H he should go three states over, on his own dime, to join “a group of five other very qualified candidates like yourself”, to see an allegedly prospective employer. We did the barest of research on said employer and found out he wasn’t even close to being in H’s field… or any field he could be considered for.
It was ridiculous. I’m kind of burnt on recruiters now.
August 14th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Definitely not somebody I’d want to work with.
But before we pile on recruiters too much, it is worth noting that there are plenty of programmers who would gladly say “Yes, of course I know Oracle” or whatever else it took to get into the interview. Programmers can be lying scum too.
August 14th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Indeed they can. But recruiters are in a particular position. They stand between me and work. Programmers themselves are leaf-nodes in the process and basically are free to act like scumbags (not that I think more of them in any inherent way, it’s just that their integrity doesn’t stand in my way the way a recruiter’s can.)
It’s gotten to the point where it’s really my expected experience, which drives me out of my mind.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Unfortunately there are some recruiters out there that have to make x amount of calls per day. Some of them also have to have x amount of candidates screened or slated to their “pipeline” for a particular position. This may be one explanation. Another is that the recruiter is merely incompetent.
There are many people out there like that within many lines of work. They try out recruiting for a while and if/when it doesn’t work out they move on to something else. Sounds maybe like the guy forgot about one important requirement, Oracle, and then tried to use a little smoke and mirrors to clean up after himself. Either way there has to be some morals there. Some recruiters and some people in general just don’t have morals.
As a recruiter myself I have bumped into other recruiters that simply have ZERO morals or respect for the candidates they work with. The worst example is when you find that another recruiter has already submitted your candidate for the position you were planning to submit him for. You then realize with the confirmation of the candidate that he did not give that recruiter permission to submit him anywhere. It should surprise me that people would do stupid things like that but it doesn’t surprise me anymore. It is unfortunate that you have to navigate this side of the recruiting industry. Not fun I am sure.
Keep it up. It will happen soon enough!