The black hole recruitment


  • area_pol

    I wish to share my own recruitment WTF. For some time now, I've been planning on leaving a certain Korean corporation. Fortunately, I have enough experience to not have to look for a job, but just to respond to headhunter spam on LinkedIn etc. Recently one recruiter invited me to a recruitment process for a certain American corporation. Got me interested so I applied, went on an interview, then another and got the job.

    Or not? You see, after I got info that I passed and they want me, my recruiter (an agency) stopped answering my questions about when we'll actually sign all the paperwork. After few days she told me that the corporation put the recruitment on hold. After a few more weeks of no info, I got word that the process was canceled. Well, shit. I turned down another option for this one, but hell - I'll find something else. When I was looking through more recruiter spam, I noticed I got two invites to the same corporation, for the same position. And then I got an invite from some woman from HR there. Now that's interesting given I already passed the recruitment process, which was supposedly be non-existent ATM.

    So I call those new recruiters, the HR lady, and describe the situation and ask WTF is going on. They all are shocked to hear the process has been canceled. Well, almost all, since the HR didn't respond at all. They were supposed to check this out and get back to me. They didn't.

    Then I got spammed with a direct job ad for the same position. The plot thickens... I submitted my CV again, hoping they will eventually find out that they wanted to hire me a month ago. No response.

    So I call the first recruiter. She's in shock knowing that the process is back and nobody told her. She asks me if I'm sure, I show her the direct job ad, she tells me she'll find out what's going on and get back to me. No response for a week now.

    To you I give two questions:

    1. What should I do now, since everyone I contact about this, suddenly disappears. Like there's some kind of black hole near me.
    2. Who's TRWTF? Me for going on and having hope? The first recruiter? The remaining recruiters? The corporation with their non-responsive HR?

    How is it possible that the corporation wants me, I want to work for them, the agency wants me to work for them, and nothing happens?



  • If they're that disorganized, you don't want to work for them. QED.


  • area_pol

    My inside source described the corporation as a really nice place to work. And let's be honest - everything is better than the Koreans.

    Bonus WTF: my inside man also stopped responding.



  • I bet you read in the news in another week and a half that they did a big round of layoffs and started a hiring freeze.

    Either way, fuck 'em. They don't have their shit together, they don't want you. Go call the offer you turned down and let them know you're still available.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    How is it possible that the corporation wants me, I want to work for them, the agency wants me to work for them, and nothing happens?

    Maybe they have some super-secret agreement not to hire from your existing company. When I worked at VMware, a Dell recruiter contacted me. Once I told them where I worked (um, duh? the email address wasn't a clue???), they flat out said they couldn't hire me. Yeah, very much illegal here. Wasn't interested, so didn't matter.


  • area_pol

    Not really - people fleeing my current employer already got jobs there.



  • Were they still employed, or they left and then were hired? In my case, the 1st would have been ok, the 2nd (to them) wasn't (poaching).


  • area_pol

    I don't really know that. Usually people get accepted in a new workplace, and then show the current one the middle finger.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    people fleeing my current employer already got jobs there

    Maybe they got there and asked them "why don't you use Excel to keep track of codes changes ?"

    After that, the company decided to never hire anyone that comes from that certain Korean corporation. 😉


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    My inside source described the corporation as a really nice place to work. And let's be honest - everything is better than the Koreans.

    Bonus WTF: my inside man also stopped responding.

    Applying multiple times via different recruiters supposedly pisses companies off, so you may have inadvertently stepped on some toes and HR may have just thrown out your resume. Not really your fault, since either the original recruiter or someone at the company screwed up.

    But given the shitshow you've seen so far I would, separate from what I said above, tend to agree with Blakey, that this is a sign they're pretty disorganized and you may have dodged a bullet.

    He's also got a good shot at being right about them downsizing. That happened to me in 2008--had a series of interviews with a big mortgage company in NYC, mediated by a very reliable recruiter I've worked with before. All of a sudden the company stopped replying to phone calls and emails, and then they were in the news as one of the first casualties of the home loan meltdown. Yeah, it was American Home Mortgage (I think), the big "Friends of Angelo" company.



  • Sounds like that HR person just doesn't like you for some reason.

    Did you take a shower before you went in for the interview? Didn't clog the toilet, or flirted with the secretary who happens to be HR manager's daughter?


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @blakeyrat said:

    If they're that disorganized, you don't want to work for them.

    Where I currently work, HR is disorganized as fuck (after I applied, I didn't hear back for 8 weeks), and the job is still great. It only sucks when you have to interact with HR.

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    How is it possible that the corporation wants me, I want to work for them, the agency wants me to work for them, and nothing happens?

    I don't know, but that's standard procedure at my current employer. I wouldn't be surprised if you applied here, what you describe sounds very familiar…



  • @asdf said:

    Where I currently work, HR is disorganized as fuck

    👍

    When I was hired at my current company, HR sent me someone else's job offer. I had to tell them to send me one with my name on it. :wtf:



  • I had a recruiter give me the wrong spec for a job they were sending me to an interview for. Found out halfway through the interview when some domain stuff came up and it wasn't the domain I was expecting.

    I actually got that contract, amusingly enough.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    How is it possible that the corporation wants me, I want to work for them, the agency wants me to work for them, and nothing happens?

    Recruiters are involved.



  • If I understood correctly, it looks to me like your prospective employer didn't want to pay the recruitment fee; they were trying to cut the recruiter out. That is lawsuit territory (contract breach) and now that you've connected the dots, the legal teams have probably told everyone to shut up and not talk to anyone. Including you.

    I think it's move-on time.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    Who's TRWTF? Me for going on and having hope? The first recruiter? The remaining recruiters? The corporation with their non-responsive HR?

    The options aren't exclusive. Might as well call it "all of the above".


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    What should I do now, since everyone I contact about this, suddenly disappears. Like there's some kind of black hole near me.

    Please contact Jeff for a position the Discourse-team.

    Filed Under: and everybody at Oracle, while you are at it!



  • I've had a number of cases where a company told me they were ready to hire me, then said that the project was canceled (usually for budgetary raisins), but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.



  • Please don't leave this certain Korean company. I was following you on here since the day you enlightened us all with your heroic tales of mis-management and C-warriors.
    Where will I get my quarter yearly dose of REAL WTFs if you don't work in a WTF-y work place anymore?
    Don't you ever think about your subscribers on this very platform?

    Also: Please don't leave without burning their HQ down to the ground. /s



  • http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V2f-MZ2HRHQ

    Of course the same could be said of Dicksores...


  • area_pol

    The shitty thing is - the corp cannot accept my application from source other than the first agency, which leaves me fucked over.

    On the bright side, I have another recruitment WTF: a position for a software engineer with C++ experience, which turns out to be a PL/I job, but C++ was in the ad because of :clickbait: and "PL/I and C++ are really similar". Yeah, as in "they use the same alphabet for keywords".



  • Similar thing happened to me. Applying for several jobs through the biggest job site in Australia (seek.com.au) and got a few interviews. It'd been some years since I had to go job searching so want really prepared for recruiters' tactics.

    One seemed really interesting but recruiter went silent after interview with them. Eventually got a similar-sounding position through a different kind of recruiter. Turned out the first recruiter was acting without permission and was trying for the commission. It was for a start-up before there even was a HR department. CEO thought he had heard my name before: it was in a subject line of an unread email from the first recruiter.



  • PL/1, eh? Well, then, fire up the DeLorean and set the Flux Capacitor for 1969!


  • BINNED

    Two very recent ones (both with onsite and 3 rounds of tests and whatnot):

    1. We've decided to discontinue our "job title" candidate search, as after re-organizing the engineering teams we feel the "job title" team is adequately staffed. ... if we decide to continue hiring here you'll be the first person we contact.

    2. Thanks for your ping. How are you? We have been in the process of getting
      new positions approved over the last two weeks. I will find out from

    And of course no news now after 5 weeks!



  • This is happening (just like the other incidents described in this thread) because people like you conspire to keep it happening.

    That's not an accusation. You are in a very nasty dilemma.

    Either you protect the jobs and reputations of the recruiters, HR executives, and companies involved by keeping their unethical and incompetent behaviour secret.
    Or you benefit your fellow-workers, society in general, and even the culprits (who are thereby encouraged to reform) by naming names and quoting verbatim from actual communications. At some risk to yourself.

    As a freelancer, you may feel that your duty to yourself outweighs the harm you are causing to other freelancers, and to the companies concerned, (and society in general) by entering into the conspiracy of silence. It isn't selfish to want not to starve.

    But as long as you go on letting it carry on happening, it will carry on happening.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    Yeah, as in "they use the same alphabet for keywords".

    Well, you could've always ended up with an APL job, so be grateful for that.



  • @TheDailyBread said:

    Please don't leave this certain Korean company.

    Yeah, he sure has to leave the responsibility to someone else after he leaves.

    @asdf said:

    Where I currently work, HR is disorganized as fuck (after I applied, I didn't hear back for 8 weeks), and the job is still great. It only sucks when you have to interact with HR.

    Exactly. Almost every place I worked, it was this way.

    My advice? Stop communication right now and move on. Yes, it was a dream job, but this shit happens. We just had a project that was canceled from one day to the other and all related positions were put on hold. We'll probably be calling first some of the people that were already selected if a position opens up.



  • Maybe they don't want to tell you what's going on. There were times a company called me months after the last interview to hire me, so it's not totally lost.

    On the other hand, there was a company that kept bullshitting me for months and never hired me, saying that somebody had to came back from a travel before going forward with the process and etc.

    I wouldn't stand waiting for them, I would keep looking. The chances of this one working out doesn't look good.


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