- Headhunter firm contacts you about a very high-skill and specific kind of job but claims not to know what the pay range is. You make your rate for that kind of work perfectly clear, you get a “should be no problem” answer to that. Sounds interesting and you are bored anyways so why not give it a closer look. Both the headhunter firm and the company they are hunting for are very large, serious and famous companies. The kind that make it sound quite dreamy to have something to do with either one of them.
- You are redirected to the firm in question for an interview with two of their managers, both of which would be direct supervisors to you should you transition. Usual stuff, for you rather basic questions, strange hint that I should avoid telling the headhunter firm all the details about how it goes from now on.
- You do (2) like a champ, get an HR interview after some days. HR tells you their usual stuff too, including silly questions, but you can almost literally hear them swallow a big lump when you tell them what your current level of pay is and that you do not care to change jobs for less than +30% over that. You get an “oh, we think it should be possible” and a “let us talk again in a couple of days”.
- Nothing happens for 2 months but whilst digging online you find a shadow version of the same job post from a year ago, starting at less than half of what you make now. Headhunter firm keeps mailing you every two weeks to ask if there is anything new, you copy and paste the same reply with “I'll let you know when there is news, thanks”.
- Firm asks you out of the blue to go through a new interview with a new manager, since one of the previous ones changed groups and the other one abruptly went over to a different branch. You do the exact same interview like in (2). You notice that some of the emails you are getting in the process are before 6 a.m., some are past 10 p.m, coming from the same persons.
- Repeat HR interview like in (3), exact same questions, exact same answers. Only this time you learn projects are already underway and urgently need serious staff to run them. A “Could you start in a month?” comes up. You won't budge in under 3 months but you still want to see what the offer is, after all the effort you put in.
- Some weeks later, the offer arrives. About 75% of your current pay is on the table but with a promise that “with only 30 hours of overtime each month, you could make your current rate, plus, there are stock options”. Is keeping so many eggs in the same basket really attractive to anyone nowadays?
Of course, you can imagine what any normal thinking fellow could have told them after all of the above. You are now likely blacklisted for the blunt reply, but in a way, you are also rather proud of the thought. During the time it took them to get to the offer phase (just shy of 4 full months), you got a 10% pay bump at your current job without having to ask, simply because of severe understaffing and to say thanks for covering more ground than you should have.
All the headhunter firm and the company got in the end is that you will never recommend them to anyone, and you have a lot of friends in the same line of work and you all meet for a coffee every couple of weeks.
What the bloody hell is wrong with these companies?
Do they really think that people are that stupid, desparate or cannot do some basic math?
Fishing in the dark like that and hoping that by some miracle they can land good employees for responsible jobs, but employees which are at the same time somehow dumb to work out what is good for them?