What the title says: I’m not particularly proud of it, but I had an experience that I wanted to share. I was recently laid off and am in the job market. I’ve been speaking with many recruiters of varying repute and I’m not sure if it is the supposedly great job market or what, but I feel like the amount of bad behavior on the part of recruiters has skyrocketed. I applied for a remote job today and got a call from what turned out to be a 3rd party recruiter. The guy proceeds to tell me that the job is only temporarily remote and that I would need to go into the office eventually. It said this nowhere in the job description. I live across the country from the company’s headquarters and only applied because the JD said remote. Then he said that it might be possible to work remote indefinitely. I said ok. Then we talk about rate. I asked him the max rate for the position, and he told me. Then later, he sent me an email confirming with a rate that was less than what he said on our call. When he called back, I asked him about the discrepancy and he tried to say that I misunderstood. I yelled at him for lying about the nature of the role and lying about the rate and ended the conversation.
I feel a little bad because I’ve been dealing with a lot of this bait and switch nonsense from other recruiters as well and he doesn’t deserve the bill for all that. But at the same time, you can’t lie about material aspects of a job or engage in other bad faith trickery to fill your pipeline. Maybe this isn’t the best place for this post, but I felt the need to vent at the end of a long week.
Edit: While I was writing this post, someone from the company called me again. He disavowed all knowledge of the previous guy who called me, but I let him know that I wasn’t interested in doing business with them. I told him that I apologize for being rude to the first employee but not for my general sentiments. Just be honest.