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A recruiter lined me up an interview. With the employer that just fired me
- gadrev 5y agoPlease take five minutes to read through this ;D Hilarious.
- me_me_me 5y ago"I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined." I am in stitches, so good.
- rei_ayanami 5y ago> How did you know it was me?
- abetusk 5y agoQuality corporate trolling. @gadrev is right, well worth the read.
- benjamir 5y agoOh yeah. Similar laughter: the same company that denied me SEPA payment and insisted on payment in advance due to lacking creditworthiness, tried to hire me as an administrator with 60k€+11k€ bonuses a week later.
- xtracto 5y agoFor me it was a 100 ppl startup in which i had just left a position as head of Engineering. A recruiter sent me a cold email telling me she liked my LinkedIn resume for a developer position at said startup. I emailed both the head of HR and the CEO who are good friends. It was hilarious.
- soneca 5y agoNot sure why this was flagged before, but vouched for it. It is an amusing anedocte that illustrates a broken piece of tech recruiting. Not particularly deep or enlightening, but not worth being flagged also IMO
- no-s 5y agoI’ve been in the industry for 40 years; The absurdities keep repeating.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago> It is an amusing anedocte that illustrates a broken piece of tech recruiting. The guy didn't list the employer on his resume: > The resume I passed doesn't have my old job listed by name, but it's a copy paste of the job listing. How was the recruiter supposed to know this person had been fired from the position if he didn't list provide a complete and accurate list of his previous jobs?
- soneca 5y agoI believe the company should know by themselves from his name only, not to learn about it from his resume. It might be common for companies to not know that, but I don’t think it makes it less broken.
- davis_m 5y agoNames aren't unique. I have a pretty common name, I even have the same name as someone else at my current (not very large) company. Should I be blocked from everywhere that has fired someone with the same name?
- jhgb 5y agoDo you also have the same age, e-mail address, phone number etc.?
- hollandia 5y agoThe recruiter might not be from the same company and creating/sharing these kind of databases with everyone and their mother seems like a hell from the data protection/privacy standpoint. Feels like an edge case that it's not worth fixing. How often is this going to happen? Do you really want to collect tons of personal data from your candidates before they even show to an interview? Is it worth it to keep personal data of your ex-employees just because of this and is it even legal? (might not be in EU)
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoI feel like the ending is a tad embellished, but I want to believe this is real.
- no-s 5y agoThis is amusing as fuck. This happened to me once after I left what looked like a sinking ship. At the new job I made 20% more for roughly the same position. On the interview at the old place, I learned the req was from new management “building a team”. Apparently the old management had left for greener pastures too. The new management was empowered from “new investment” to “rebuild core business”. It was hilarious because I knew enough to turn every question around and make them squirm. They had bought me lunch at the conclusion of the interview so I politely thanked them for their time and told them the whole story as we had dessert, then excused myself at the last bite so I could go back to work.
- sva_ 5y agoI wonder why this guy was fired. Really can't tell. I feel like he's just giving the hiring manager/recruiter a hard time, for no reason but personal amusement.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoThats exactly how I took it as well. This didn't seem funny but just cringey.
- tapoxi 5y agoIt's both funny and cringey. Is it unprofessional and a dick thing to do? Yes. It's also hilariously absurd.
- zbuf 5y agoIs it even hilarious? Hasn't everyone who's used a recruiter joked, at some point, about them finding their old job?
- rsynnott 5y agoI've had a recruiter try to get me to interview from a job I'd just given notice on (before my notice period was even up!) However, I didn't actually _take the interview_; that's what makes this case funny.
- lultimouomo 5y agoWhen it happens, you usually say "how funny would it have been if I had interviewed again with them?" Today we found out, it would have indeed been hilarious. (But yes, a dick move)
- l30n4da5 5y agoGot the same opinion about it. Unprofessional? Yes. Hilarious? Also yes.
- emsy 5y ago
- shepardrtc 5y agoHe didn't have that employer on his resume. How would the recruiter know he was just fired from there? Why would the hiring manager check to see if they had fired this person? This guy is a troll. No wonder they fired him.
- scotty79 5y agoAt least one company that I worked for contacted me to ask if I'd like to work for them again. So keeping tabs on your former employees and being aware of them in your recruitment process is something companies do.
- capableweb 5y agoI'm not sure it would have mattered. I've been contacted before by recruiters trying to hire me for roles at companies I already work at, exactly the same role and everything.
- jhgb 5y agoAnd you rejected the option of getting paid for the same job twice? ;)
- capableweb 5y agoI didn't! I played along, getting as far as having a video call with the recruiter, in the office I would be hired into, eventually showing the recruiter where I was sitting and made the CTO wave to her. Needless to say, we didn't continue using that agency anymore :)
- monkeybutton 5y agoWell you can't fault them for not finding qualified candidates.
- bena 5y agoObvious culture fit, strong enough technicals to pass all the interviews. Yeah. Slam dunk. They found people who definitely would be able to get hired.
- speeder 5y agoOne time HR of a company I got fired from contacted me out of the blue, and sent me a coding test made in a extremely poorly formatted MS Word .doc (not even docx...) I was kinda amazed at how bad it was. So I sent an e-mail to the CEO, I still had his contact and when I worked there I had a lot of freedom to talk to him and whatnot and had his personal e-mail. I explained in the e-mail his HR was attempting to recruit me back, and if he had changed his mind and wanted me back I would accept it, but if not, at least he should take a look at the quality of the .doc his HR created. He e-mailed me back some days later, said my e-mail made him go and check what the HR department is doing, he found out they all are being incompetent, so he fired all of them and hired a new HR, he said he doesn't want me back, but thanked me for fixing his HR, and promised such unprofessional approach wouldn't happen again. EDIT: for those thinking firing HR was too harsh, just some more context: they e-mailed me a .doc out of the blue, with bad questions and bad formatting, they didn't told me what job I "applied" for (and I didn't apply for a job in first place), they never said what the company wanted, or what the job was or anything, and they acted in a kinda arrogant manner, as if they were HR of a FAANG company, something like: "Oh, complete this document, and if you pass we will inform you when the next interview will take place, you have 36h to complete this." Also, somehow the .doc was the third inverview, somehow I passed the first two?
- rsynnott 5y ago> he found out they all are being incompetent, so he fired all of them and hired a new HR I get the feeling that this CEO isn't very good at CEO-ing. Presumably the solution if the next HR team doesn't work out is to fire them and keep trying?
- Jansen312 5y agoA lot of managers and CEOs behave in this way. It is their privileged training ground. Of course it isn't effective if the environment is more to employee than employer like current situation. Once in a while they will hit a jackpot of star employee that is willing to be enslaved. If things turn sour, they can just jump to another company. As long as market and board of directors are incompetent like those HR, these kind of pricks will be able to survive. Their niche are there.
- rwaksmunski 5y agoHow badly do you have to screw up as a programmer to be fired in the current labor market?
- he_is_legend 5y agoAs badly as Zillow perhaps: https://vinvashishta.substack.com/p/zillow-just-gave-us-a-look-at-machine https://vinvashishta.substack.com/p/zillow-just-gave-us-a-lo...
- exhilaration 5y agoI heard from someone on the inside that Zillow didn't lay off any engineers. It was all building inspectors and other field staff for their failed house flipping biz.
- vintermann 5y agoThat article doesn't really cover the important bit. Yes, the distribution changes, but that's not just something that happens, it's adversarial. https://mobile.twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1456032851477028870 https://mobile.twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1456032851477028870 I'm quite sure there were people in Zillow's data science team who understood this, and maybe even tried to say, hey, this model we developed can't really be used for this new purpose you want to use it. But it's hard being that naysayer. I was at an interview with some people who were doing some things with machine learning on time series data... a topic I know little about, but enough to have heard of Eamonn Keogh and his many, many criticisms of how that's being done by ML practitioners with no time series background. What they were doing was pretty much everything on Prof. Keogh's "what not to do" list. But how do you tell them that? And how would it be if I'd already worked there for a while when you found out your company's business model has some pretty big flaws from a data science perspective? As long as they pay well, there's certainly a temptation to say, I only make the models I'm told to...
- fennecfoxen 5y agoAs badly as "my company is in trouble and my division needs to do cost-cutting" or "my boss is jealous" honestly
- hunglee2 5y agoobviously massive error but there is not complete incompetence as the recruiter did indeed accurately match candidate-to-vacancy
- no-s 5y ago> but there is not complete incompetence as the recruiter did indeed accurately match candidate-to-vacancy Good point. The employers often BS the recruiters because “they don’t need to know that”...
- francisofascii 5y agoThis type of thing happens all the time when you live in a small city with only a handful of places that match your tech stack. Recruiters often send you jobs for companies that you were rejected by, or that you rejected during the interview process, since those instances won't appear on your resume.
- jdavis703 5y agoIsn’t it likely people grow though? Like I went through all the interviews at Google. Didn’t get an offer. They said maybe in the future. So I assume I wasn’t senior enough for the position. Years later and now HR is trying to recruit me. Perhaps this time I could solve their challenges better.
- capableweb 5y agoIt's possible people grow over time, it's also possible the company changes over time. As a company gets older, positions can require more specialists, so who they are looking for changes. Also, bigger companies can afford to hire lower-skilled employees to train internally if they have a good amount of seniors, compared to when they just start out and require almost everyone to be a senior in order to just survive and reaching any sort of success.
- francisofascii 5y agoYes, and I hope companies and employees reconsider each other in the future. Sometimes companies have a hang-up about rehiring an employee that voluntarily left (I heard Bloomberg is an example), or some employees vow never to return to X company.
- sabujp 5y agoany companies offering sour patches?
- tomhunters 5y agoImagine the odds of that happening. I wonder how it feels like to be in his situation.
- yodelshady 5y agoProbably quite likely, especially if you were fired and didn't list last job - your CV and a vacancy matching your skill set have arrived on the market at the same time.
- treeman79 5y agoI once gave a months notice. I wanted to leave but had no plans. I got a call about a position I was unusually qualified for. Anyway I found out they were willing to pay double my salary to replace me. So I stayed on a few more months at double pay.
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- aloukissas 5y agoThis is some serious Jim Halpert stuff right here. Tip of the hat to you, guy.
- ksec 5y agoThe thing this proves to me is that getting hired in Tech is more of a game of lottery than anything else.
- ajb 5y agoIt's not impossible for this to actually be legit. At one employer, engineering fired someone for poor performance, and a year or so later the CEO, having forgotten about this, got them back in as a consultant on his pet project. This was very awkward for everyone.
- gwbas1c 5y agoI've had a team member fired, and then about a year later a recruiter passed their resume back to us. We had a new manager since, so the new manager asked me if "Firstname Lastname" was the person we fired. I told them yes and that we shouldn't give the candidate the time of day.
- bartimus 5y agoI once got rejected for a job, only to be accepted for it a couple of weeks later through a different recruiter (and with a higher rate). I pretended I "didn't know" it was for the same company. Must have been funny to have my CV show up twice. It also turned out to be the most horrible company I ever worked for.
- Ekaros 5y agoLived in town with pretty much two companies needing devs. Plus some consulting for them. Had position working for as consultant for one of them. Got some recruitments which awfully lot sounded like they would have been hiring new co-workers for me, didn't care enough to check out... Makes one wonder, do they spend any effort?