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.
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November 12, 2007 at 8:12 am
Jordan
That’s quite a story.
Perhaps I’m even more naive, but I don’t see why there’s ever a need for rudeness. We’re not investment bankers or cab drivers here. What advantage does rudeness provide?
November 12, 2007 at 8:22 am
gaussling
Hi Jordan,
I can only suppose it was to see if they could unnerve me. I now see it from the primate anthropology viewpoint- it was about alpha males, dominance, and status.
November 12, 2007 at 10:25 am
Uncle Al
Managerial qualifications are purely social. If something must be objectively accomplished they hire and fire fungible folks like… look in a mirror. NOCD otherwise (“not of our class, dearie”)
If you wish to suceed in velvet-lined administration rather than mud-splattered production, begin as the head bully in a fraternity. Your height and grip strength are primary determinants of your placement, then golf handicap. Плавания дерьма.
November 12, 2007 at 10:47 am
gaussling
Uncle Al- Плавания дерьма- “Floatings of derma or skin”? “Dung Navigations”?
November 12, 2007 at 6:10 pm
OMB
Dealings with recruiters, like most forms of buggery, are to be avoided except in the absence of acceptable alternatives.
November 12, 2007 at 6:52 pm
OMB
(note that I wasn’t intending to come across as being bigoted).
November 12, 2007 at 10:08 pm
gaussling
It’s pretty hard to resist the call. They’ll flatter you and waft news of plum 6-figure positions under your nose. They come from a place where the grass is always greener and the sky is always sunny.
November 13, 2007 at 11:25 am
Uncle Al
The full proverb, the essence of Korporate Kulture and its manager knights, is “whether the water is salt or fresh, shit floats.” That’s nekulturny, but true. Lean overall management with distinct local control is a pragmatic, operational concept. Its real world corporate and political implementations are astoundingly insane. It is a culture of privilege and fear without intellectual basis. The universe is not fatuous.
November 14, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Mark Radoff
Speak the truth, oh my brother. At one point I got so tired of recruiters I created a website to try to put them out of business. They often are just low-performing, overpaid text-matching machines that line up your resume (random snippets you put together) to a job description (random snippets the company put together) and hopes for a match. The real fun begins when they mix psychometrics in with the deal.
Sometimes, I run into a good one that actually calls back as he/she promises, follows my career, and actually works on selling me. But 9 of 10 times, they’re either resume and job deck shufflers or hired muscle (as would seem to be the case in your situation).
Gotta change the process. Gotta level the playing field.
November 14, 2007 at 1:01 pm
gaussling
I’ve taken the damned tests and had my career harmed. I had always wondered what private sector psychologists did for a living. These rat bastards have been busy developing test batteries that can be used by HR to put people into little decorated boxes. Score one way, you’re off to sales. Score another way, it’s accounting. Score like me, they don’t know what to do with you. It’s funny. If government did this, there would be a revolution. If private industry does it, it’s called personnel management.
December 15, 2007 at 4:17 pm
RRR
Oh, have you ever applied for a government job? I have, to the Patent office in Washington. They do stealth psychotesting – just after you send in your electronic application, they spring an electronic psychometric test on you, with the warning that your application is incomplete without it. Most of the questions were of following ilk: Would your coworkers agree that you would not agree that it is viable to forgo extra work when an urgent deadline is coming up?
If you apply for a federal government job, you have to have just the right wording on your 5+ page application in order to just get past the barely scientifically literate clerk who will be grading it. It is nearly impossible to get a job in government with this system.
Whatever happened to knowing how to get things done, as opposed to performing well on some test or grading system.
BTW, after having lived and worked in Philadelphia for 18 years, the sobriquet ‘City of Brotherly Shove’ is so apropos, both metaphorically and literally. People will walk right into you on sidewalks and in malls, they don’t care if they shove you out of the way. I now work in Northern Virginia, and people will apologize even if they just missed bumping into you. What a welcome change.
December 15, 2007 at 6:42 pm
gaussling
I’ve taken these damned psych tests and hold them in the deepest contempt. I was moved out of a job that I had performed well for several years. The rat bastards who administer the tests use them to provide scores that justify making personnel changes. People who fear and loath government should consider that business has the same big brother proclivity.
December 16, 2007 at 10:16 am
Kevin
“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”
Profound wisdom. This snippet should be etched on a bracelet and locked onto the wrists of every grad student, post doc or assistant prof. I see no reason why it should be that way. I believe it is because the tenure system selects for individuals who maintain the departmental status quo at any cost. Hence they really recruit protégés of the senior faculty -super post docs!-. When this is coupled with the fact that many granting agencies desire to invest in only sure things the inevitable result is stagnant thought and mediocre science. Not to mention the fact that tenured faculty seem to think their people should work for salaries hovering around the minimum wage. Supply and demand is out of whack and if an American doesn’t want to work for 25 k in the bay area, they’ll have no problem getting some guy from China or India to do it.
My solution – ABOLISH TENURE!
I’m so sick of seeing bogus, applied science fill up the journals. We really don’t need an infinite collection of things that fluoresce when the pH changes. Yet our society pumps millions into propping up such crap. Tenure is at the root of skyrocketing tuition , bad science and toady, narcissistic people who are poor role models.
Good reference from the Chronicle of Higher Education- Those who desire a PhD should memorize it. Do not under any circumstance listen to a tenured faculty member about the job market. Only people who lie to you are given tenure in the first place.
THIS ARTICLE MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE!
//chronicle.com/free/v54/i04/04a00102.htm
December 18, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Joel
The full proverb, the essence of Korporate Kulture and its manager knights, is “whether the water is salt or fresh, shit floats.”
http://www.free-resumes.org