“I got this job offer and I was so anxious to get it,” said Ray, “but now I’m starting to get sketched out by the whole situation.”
“How so?” we asked him.
“The VP was out of town,” said Ray. “That’s why the offer was held up. I couldn’t get anybody to return a phone call. I actually had a call scheduled with Vincent, the Director of Marketing who’ll be my boss if I take this job. He missed our call and never wrote me or called me back. He just sort of blew it off. So today I got the offer via email. No fanfare, just ‘Here’s the job offer.’ I don’t know if I want to work with these people.”
“There have been several other signs,” said Ray. “When I went for my first interview, the HR lady told me that they’d been deluged with responses and that I was lucky to get an interview.”
“These are the signs of a sick organization,” we said. “Why would anyone tell you that you’re lucky to get an interview? That’s naked fear. Now they’ve made you an offer. If this is the greatest amount of love they can show you, it’s only going to get worse after you take the job.”
“I feel as though Vincent is putting a peg in a pegboard by hiring me,” said Ray. “Just one more item off his list. This is a bad deal. I’m going to decline the offer and keep looking.”
Ray waited until noon the next day to compose a message to Vincent. Ray planned to thank Vincent for the job offer but politely decline it and continue his job search.
Ray didn’t even need to invest the few minutes his “thanks but no thanks” email would have cost him. At ten a.m. the next morning Ray got an email message from the HR lady. “I can only give you until the end of the business day to accept our offer,” she wrote. Ray sent back an email message telling the HR lady, Vincent and the rest of the Not Ready for Prime Time Business crew to take a hike.
“I never felt better about my own marketability than when I sent that message,” said Ray. He got a better job about four weeks later. Here’s what Vincent and his colleagues got wrong:
They didn’t say in close contact with Ray, their leading candidate and eventual pick for the job, during the recruiting process.
They didn’t live up to their commitments. Vincent, the Director, missed a scheduled phone call with Ray and never followed up. How could Ray attach his brand and career to people with such low standards for their own business processes and their own relationships?
They didn’t tell Ray that a job offer was coming. They just dashed off an email message.
The interview pipeline began with a fearful, rude and completely unnecessary pronouncement (“You’re lucky to be here on this interview”). That’s a huge red flag. There are employers whose recruiting processes only allow them to hire docile, beaten-down people with no self esteem. Ray isn’t one of those. He wants to work with enthusiastic, mojofied colleagues. He doesn’t have time to spend in a dysfunctional workplace.
If you don’t feel the love when a company is trying to recruit you, you’ll never feel it once you have the job. People broadcast their intentions from the very start of the interview process, if we are paying attention.
Don’t believe anyone who says “You may be mistreated in the selection pipeline, but it’s worth it to get hired here.” That’s a lie.
In Human Workplaces the people who come to job interviews are viewed and treated as valued collaborators, not to mention potential customers, employees, vendors and referral sources. When you can see that the process is more important to the people involved than the human relationships are, run away.
That organization does not deserve you.
If your calls don’t get returned during the interview process, if you can’t get your questions answered and you feel like a piece of meat to the people you’re interviewing and corresponding with, get out of Dodge.
Only the people who get you, deserve you, and the universe smiles on folks who insist on their own value — people like you!
“Listen to your gut, Ray,” we said. “That’s the key.”
“What do you guys think?” Ray asked us.
“We’d be sketched out too, if we were you,” we told him. “You’re the top candidate, and you have questions that don’t get answered, and Vincent the Director blows off a call with you? These people are not focused on talent. They are not tuned in to the people-energy channel. That’s a big issue.
“There must be other signs in your interaction with them so far.”
