Friday Fails: share the worst recruiting fails that you experienced as a candidate or an employee trying to hire someone
Dec 21, 2018
17 Comments
We’ve all had bad recruiters try to get us to join their company. What were the most interesting, irritating, creepy, or weird ways that they tried to convince you? What were the most egregious recruiting fails that you’ve witnessed?
I’ll start...
Award for biggest fail: recruiter booked the interview for the wrong day on everyone’s calendar and all of the interviewers were working from home the day the candidate showed up. I called them and had to stall for 30-45 minutes until they arrived. Super awkward.
Award for creepiest recruiter: recruiter sent an email that said she had been stalking me.
Honorable mention for biggest fail: recruiter tried to recruit me for my own backfill—after I gave notice and 1 week before I left.
comments
He takes me to an area of the office where the air conditioning sounds really loud. I am seated at a desk and he gives me a piece of paper with the question 'Implement the Twitter backend.' And the list of entire features that Twitter has. Bonus is implement the frontend.
There were a list of FAQs on the back side. The recruiter explained what was written and left. There was no time limit.
I had come a little far to attend this interview. So I started off with setting up a web server, setting up a basic database. I started setting up maven. The air conditioner was droning on loudly in the background. The task started to feel very daunting. I started to think, how long did Twitter engineers take to implement the first version of Twitter? How long will I be sitting here solving this question?
Not very long. I decided to get up and leave. I told the recruiter that I have to leave due to an emergency, and requested him to reschedule the interview.
I walked out and never looked back.
We then talked about 2h and his requirement was far from what I wanted to do.
The next day the recruiter called me to say that I didn't get the job. Said what I had to say about his incompetency and hung up.
This was start of January. In May I get a call from a different recruiter from the same bank who apologies for not calling earlier, but she just wanted to say that I didn't get the job. 🙃
He got a job, in prison.