High on the list of exciting professional experiences is the job interview process.  I just spent the weekend updating my resume. It is good to do this now and then if for no other reason than it forces you to recall just what the hell you’re good for.  As I performed this task, I was flooded with a stream of memories, both good and bad. 

I’ve had great interviews, ho-hum interviews, and a few awful experiences. My greatest interviews were from my stint in academia. Of the 7 interviews, I received 5 offers.  Not bad for a rythmically disabled Iowegian. But a few years later my smug confidence was to be shaken by an whole body dose of reality.

Academia is not reality, it is a sort of intellectual Hollywood. A la la land of frog princes and preening fussbudgets, special effects and make-believe. It is a pageant of grant-writing rock stars and untenured showboats on parade waving their tail feathers at all who would watch. I who had earlier embraced that world would later be out in the catabatic winds of big time management recruiting.

I won’t write a tedious valentine about my slender portfolio of actual talent.  Instead, I’ll tell of an experience with those bottom feeders of the job world- recruiters. 

In the frantic world of job placement, there are several kinds of recruiters. There are the recruiters that place at the highest levels of play, and there is everyone else. In my view they are all shady operators.  They will drop a line with bait on the end right in front of your face. Poachers they are. They’ll feign an excuse to call you at your office and query for associates –wink wink, nod nod- who may be looking for other work.

You’ll send a resume and there will be some back and forth. The recruiter will get to know you a bit.  Then one day you’ll receive an email invitation to interview at their office suite in Watercloset, PA.  You’ll fly to Philly, the city of brotherly shove, and navigate your rental car to their office.  The waiting room will have that dental office smell that’ll make your flesh crawl and your molars throb.

A smarmy receptionist will hand you off to a smarmy executive recruiting specialist. For me, this is where it all went down the toilet.  I sat in an expensive office near the Delaware River while the recruiter reviewed my resume, my buttocks reflexively clenched in the way countless other buttocks have been so clenched in that leather chair while enduring the first 2 hours of detailed questioning- “drilling in” they call it.  All the while, she was quietly building a case for yea or nay.

Here is where I went wrong. It was utterly and comically naive.  I thought that the recruiters job was to get me an interview for a management slot with an international chemical company. Fancy that! As I was to learn, my assumption was wildly and insanely in error. The recruiters, you see, only get paid when they deliver a candidate who gets hired.  So, they prescreen over the telephone and only bring in final candidates for the slot.  I was a final candidate for Sales and Marketing Director, but that is still far from the finish line.

As I sat through the meeting, it dawned on me that I was not being coached to give an award winning interview with the unseen client, but rather, I was being slowly skinned alive. 

Based on earlier conversations with this recruiter, I thought that they would deliver me to an interview with the company looking to fill the position. Instead, I was brought into the recruiters office for a much closer inspection on behalf of the customer. I was to have my professional colon inspected, so to speak, by these savage HR mercenaries.

After the early morning session with the contact recruiter, a real heavyweight was brought in- a partner of the firm. He was apparently an alumnus of HR at Merck and was accustomed to body slams in Big Pharma. He was a sort of “Refrigerator Perry” in the recruiting world.  There were no pleasantries, only an immediate start to some pretty rough play.  There was a long succession of close and bluntly skeptical questions about my experience and abilities. The two recruiters did a bit of good cop, bad cop along the way.  They were a team and played a disciplined game of question and answer, drilling ever deeper to what they were looking for.  The refrigerator lectured me at length like I was some kind of rube from up the holler, giving me the facts of life in Big Business. 

I guess I really was a rube from up the holler.

It didn’t take very long for me to see that not only would I not advance forward in this game, but I would have my head lopped off and handed to me on a greasy wooden plate.  And that is what happened.  After 90 minutes of questions and thinly veiled accusations of weakness, inexperience, and retarded professional development, the Refrigerator stood up and left the room. As the other recruiter fumbled with her notes, I sat there in silence like a stunned carp floating on the lake surface after dynamite fishing. After a moment she suddenly became matronly and bleated out consolation.  I was stunned and shocked from the rapid fire rude questions and the careless dissection of my very being. I had never been treated in this manner before, not even in grad school.

After my “case” recruiter made a brief show of effort to salve the wounds, I put my severed head under my arm and was shown the door. It was a long, depressing trip back home. I have had plenty of time to mull it over and can only conclude that I was treated badly.  As for the chemical company, I have had the chance to shun them as a supplier in subsequent years.  My indulgence in pettiness is one more scar from the experience.