I have been interviewing for a huge software company which operates worldwide for the managing director position for the DACH (Deutschland, Austria, Corpus Helvetica) or how i love to call it SWAG (SWitzerland, Austria, Germany) region of Europe.
The companies approach to enter markets is mostly by buying out existing software companies which do some similar software regarding financing, refinancing, project management, cash flow / liquidity planning etc.
I currently work in corporate real estate, having gained more and more experience & responsibility over the past 12 years. In those past 12 years i have switched jobs 5 times, some due to shitty work conditions, some due to not being able to climb the corporate ladder further.
With each job change i gained a higher salary, different & new responsibilites and most importantly a larger network. At the beginning i would just know about finance modeling, then i started negotiating with tenants, banks, external parties, conducting fit out works and CAPEX, driving down costs, increasing revenue up to the point where the asset is ready for sale for an institutional client. Please note that i only work in corporate markets and not residential markets at all.
I was also responsible for opening new offices, setting up directorships in Luxembourg steering teams of up to 20 people and help the strategic growth of the company.
Projects range from 50m up to 400m, so over the course of the past 12 years i would say i have had roughly 3.4bn under asset management.
So i get called by a headhunter, I talked to him, talked to the COO for Europe, talked to the person who will vacate the job (according to her she is quitting since she is getting a hefty settlement due to the buyout) met with the team in Frankfurt, Germany and have overall a good first impression.
They were in dire need of someone with contacts throughout the whole real estate / finance / private equity market and needed someone to setup a whole network of services on 1st and 2nd level support also while increasing sales and opening offices in Germany, Austria & Switzerland. Oh did i mention you get to do the yearly reviews with all your employees as well and you will be the key account for high profile clients like Allianz or BMW and report to the CEO who sits in France and develop strategies for the company.
So i tell the headhunter that i doubt such a unicorn would exist since this role has so many different tasks and if it wouldn't make sense to get back to drawing board and create a team for the DACH area – which he actually did! That headhunter was honest and transparent throughout the whole process. Pay began at 120k/year which i deemed way too low for all the work involved but he wanted me to actually bring up the planning issues and discuss with the CEO.
So i get scheduled a meeting with the Head of Europe / CEO Europe and to discuss the job, my past experience and the goals of the company altogether and what I have experienced while meeting his colleagues.
Oh my was I in for a ride. For cultural reference i am German and the Head of Europe was French. I don't know why it still exists but in finance/real estate there is always some sort of rivalry betwenn these two folks.
He asks me to start telling about about my previous experience and wants me to explain each time why i switched jobs which i happily did. He interrupted me numerous times, not because of my English/French communication skills but just because he wanted to throw in his 2cents everywhere. That was my first red flag.
When i was done with explaining my CV he turns dead serious and goes like “So i see you have been changing jobs very frequently and it seems to me that you are either unhappy wherever you go, or you make people unhappy so they let you go” – 2nd red flag
He then asked to provide him with referencens from my past 5 jobs so he can verify i am in it for the right reasons and not just the money. Please bear in mind this guy sold his company to the software company and got a huge paycheck out of it – i asked him if he is serious and he goes “yeah why wouldnt i be” – he didn't even realize that he just gained a huge paycheck and questions my motives for being only in it for the money oO
I told him that his hipocrisy is completely ridicolous. His father gave him money to fund his “start-up” 17 years ago which he never managed to really take off and was just involved with few banks in France offering small scale / qualitiy of life products which didn't even have a sigificant impact. He had a team of roughly 15 people, most of them selling software and some poor call center people outsourced in India.
He then got acquired by the software company and he was appointed as Head of Europe for sitting around for 17 years, being inflexible and he was not able to enter the french market successfully but still yeeting a big paycheck with the buyout. I asked him on how he would plan to target the whole german speaking regions in Europe as he doesn't even speak German at all and obviously has no clue on how different companies / operations work since he never even once switched job or his position at all. His English is crappy at best and seems more to be a stutter effect in a sound programm than an actual person speaking english – After asking him how he plans on verifying all German or English contracts he says he will hire a translator to put it in French. Please note that the mother company is an US based firm.
I explained that the qualified talents will always seek challenges elsewhere if the current job doesn't offer enough room for growth in terms of monetization, work life balance & responsibilites. I asked him whether i can talk to his employees and especially former employees who left so i can determine if he is actually a “good” boss or if he is “just in for the money”.
Needless to say he was not happy about me scolding him for his skillset, overall behaviour and asking for referencens from his employees. The headhunter reached out to me that he still would like to proceed and he thinks i am by far the strongest candidate with a realistic approach as i was the only one to question the assigned tasks in the original role.
The aftermath:
The Head of Europe has been fighting several weeks with the current (now former) MD of DACH and the COO of Europe for his decision to not continue with my application (like hell I would work for a buffon like you). Lots of people started leaving after the former DACH manager left as the Head of Europe wasn't able to formulate a consistent strategy and apparently everything went downhill from there.
Headhunter called me 6 months later asking me whether i am still interested – i found a new job and will stay for at least another 3 years and then only if don't have to work for Head of Europe. He said there were some “structural changes” in the organizational chart and that the former Head of Europe has been paid off with an additional severance package and is no longer in the picture. They still haven't set up a team nor a new md for the german speaking region. I told him good luck in his search but i assume he knows this will be a very tough nut to crack now.
tl;dr – CEO of prospective employer wants to guilt trip me into job hopping too much. I reverse UNO card him for never changing jobs being the most inflexible CEO gaining only a fraction of the experience he actually should have – company realizes they appointed someoneone with way too less experience on the head of europe position and consequences happen