Well, it's finally time to share my first (but certainly will not be last) real-life story with everyone! I recently had an interview that went…not at all how I was hoping, and I just had to share with you all.
Like a lot of people, I'm currently in the process of looking for a new, better-paying job due to a number of factors and internal drama happening with my current office – nothing you haven't heard before, I'm sure. And yes, I will gladly share some stories once I'm settled into a new job. And like a lot of other people, the interview process is proceeding at a frustrating pace with results to match. But this most recent interview really takes the cake.
I was interviewing with a large, national telecommunications company for a remote project management position, and honestly it was going really well for a while. The people I was speaking to all seemed to like me and my experience, we had some shared interests, and the job description sounded similar to what I was already doing but with a significantly higher salary. All good, right?
Wrong!
I get to the third and final video interview, and that's when they decide to pull the rug out and reveal what the job would actually be. To keep things brief, the red flags included:
- Final interview was with an entirely different team of people, only one of whom I had previously spoken with in a prior interview
- The actual job would be on a different department from the one I had been interviewing with, and would be involved in cold-calling sales operations rather than the project management I had applied and interviewed for
- The job as advertised, which I had applied for and had two previous interviews speaking about, is actually not a position that the company hires for externally at all – which means they knew right from the beginning that they were going to offer their “alternative” role instead
- One person on the interview team mentioned that they “require” their employees to have a replacement hire lined up before leaving for a new job; first of all, how is that even enforcable? And secondly, that tells me that your turnover rate is so high that you're desperate to keep asses in seats by any means possible
And last but not least:
- One of the interviewers actually used the phrase “Work hard, play hard” when describing the position
Needless to say, I asked them politely to remove my name from consideration.
And these companies wonder why no one wants to work for them anymore.