Soooooooooo tired of being jerked around

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1

I don't know why I'm such a gullible git, but Monday (against my better judgement!!!) I let a technical recruiter hoodwink me again.

AGAIN. Sheesh.

He said that he had a hot job for a big technology firm. The job description was a perfect match for my resume. I needed to be "ready to go" Tuesday morning. They'd bring me in for an interview on-site around nine a.m. and that if everything went as planned, I'd start training in the afternoon as the person doing the training was already en route from Canada. Accepted my rate. One year contract. Wait for his call in the morning just around seven to tell me exactly when to arrive and who to meet. Blah. Blah. Blah.

I was up at six-ish. Showered and dressed up in my business best. Did all my of testing, shots, meds. Fired up, packed up and ready to go.

Waited by my charged-up phone with the e-mail window on my computer open and ready. Seven. Eight. Nine. Nothing.

Nine-thirty sent him an e-mail. "Waiting for response from the hiring manager." Waiting? Response? WTW? I thought this was a done deal. I thought they were desperate to get someone in to work with the trainer?

Ten. Eleven. Noon. Jerks.

Three. Five. NOTHING.

Gosh, I certainly am an idiot. Lies. All of it was lies. Of course it was lies.

Why am I such an idiot? I've been lied to by technical recruiters more times than I can count. I've also gotten jobs through them, but the liars run about 25 to 1 against the honest recruiters. It's sickening.

I was so depressed that I fell asleep in the early evening and woke up at midnight, feeling stupid, stupid, stupid. Nightmares of wrestling with someone who was trying to drown me.

NEVER AGAIN. I won't even take their calls or open their e-mails. They're worse than used car salesmen. A thousand times worse than used car salesmen. How can people just LIE all day long for their business? What kind of scum chooses to live like that? I'd rather be homeless, sleeping in a ditch, than lie to innocent strangers all day long.

Of course the stress sent my BG's through the roof. I woke up from my early sleep at 178 mg/dl, having eaten nothing for hours. And when that happens I start craving sweets. I corrected. No big deal. But now I'm pacing around like a caged cat wanting something, anything to relieve the stress.

NEVER AGAIN. I'm done with liars. DONE.

2

I can totally relate to what you have written, take care, Sai (from Hyderabad,India:).
Also, I think I have a few dubious profiles in my friends' list - I donno how to make sure my employers are not sneaking around for my personal information.
I would love to know how to protect myself - at least on TuD.

3

LaGuitariste, yep been there...done that...got the t-shirt...many t-shirts.

When I was working as a consultant those periods when I was out of work were stressful enough without adding these jerks to the mix. I finally learned the companies I could trust that I new the offer was for real. The rest I flushed. Like you I would even answer their calls (unless it was to call them a rather derogartory name).

Stand tall. You are better than they are.

4

I've dealt with plenty of technical recruiters as well, and most of them aren't worth their weight in salt. I can tell by the firm they work for and how they phrase their emails if I should even bother with them.

Always ask to speak with the hiring manager before accepting a position. Find out if the environment is conducive to you, and if someone actually READ your resume or just passed it along.

Also, if they accept your rate without any negotiation whatsoever, they're just paper-pushers with no real authority. I once, through the course of a phone call, added $5/hr to my initially proposed rate, then $10, and the person I was speaking to had no problem with it whatsoever. These guys are competing with thousands of other recruiters trying to fill THE EXACT SAME POSITION, and speed is the only thing they care about.

I could go on and on about them.....

I'm sorry your day was so lousy. Better luck next time.

5

Thanks, y'all. I think it bothers me on two levels. On one level it's the personal inconvenience and stress -- no one likes being lied to, jerked around and stood up. On another level it really upsets me that we as human beings allow this level of corruption and dishonesty to FLOURISH in the business world. I mean, if I screw up my credit rating as an individual, my bad behavior will follow me around for years if not decades. That's how businesses protect themselves from ME. However, businesses that are corrupt, dishonest and filled to the rafters with liars are REWARDED in the marketplace for their bad behavior.

Where is the equivalent of a credit report for businesses who (for example) promise new-hires a bonus will be part of their salary and then manage to (year after year) never quite make enough to actually pay a bonus. (That is: LIE to every new-hire in order to get them to accept a lower salary.)

Or promise an employee that they can "bank" their vacation days over a period of years and save up for a six-week trip to Europe to study abroad (this happened to me) but then, three weeks before the long-scheduled, long-planned vacation, lay off the employee and refuse to pay them a dime for their six weeks worth of unused vacation days.

Or for companies whose recruiters LIE to every technologist they contact, pretending that their company has been retained by a hiring company to pre-screen potential employees, when in fact they have NO business relationship with the hiring company and are just harassing the hiring company's HR staff with unsolicited resumes in the hopes that one of them will stick?

Or for companies who will hire contractors telling them (this also happened to me) that the job is a 12-month contract as a programmer using the latest-greatest, in-demand programming language, when in fact, the hiring manager NEVER intended it to be anything other than a 2-month analyst job -- that the contractor will never even touch the new/cool/in-demand technology they were told they'd be using all day (never had enough user licenses to even install it on my work laptop), thereby creating a huge hole in the contractor's resume which will be very hard to explain to future hiring managers. Why would they do this? Because they understood that NO SERIOUS PROGRAMMER would want the real job, so they LIE to get you on-board hoping that once they have you on-staff you'll resign yourself to sticking it out (knowing full well that if you quit, you won't be eligible for unemployment insurance again and you'll have something even messier on your resume to explain to future hiring managers.)

I could go on, but the lies, lies, lies cover every aspect of work: how much they can afford to pay you, whether or not you can expect a bonus, what is actually covered in their "benefits" package, what your working environment will be like, how long your contract is really for, what kind of work you'll actually be doing, the customary hours, what kind of technology you'll actually be using on the job, etc.

These companies will just lie, lie, lie and there are no repercussions. In fact, it's worse than that: they are REWARDED for lying -- higher profits, more competitive edge compared to the honest businesses, etc. It's nauseating to me that people all around me are choosing to LIVE A LIE rather than live a life of integrity. It's soul-crushing to never be able to trust anyone I work with or interact with for business. Even worse are the sociopaths who will laugh and say, "Hey, it's just business." as if being a bald-faced, unscrupulous liar is somehow admirable and to be expected as normal. Not to me. To me, it's completely, unforgivably, hideously ugly.

6

The whole job market is a nightmare, and I'm sorry you keep getting the run-around from a bunch of snake oil salesmen. Though I don't deal in recruiters much, I can't tell you have many jobs I've applied to that turned out to be incredible scams ( searching for gigs on craigslist is like fishing for minnows in a shark pool). And I'm with you, far too many businesses use disgusting tactics to try and beat you out of what you earned. I hope things start working out for you soon, man.

7

Thanks, Nick. You're right: sharks. That's what it feels like. Trying to swim between these hideous, soulless sharks with dead eyes who don't have any higher feelings than, "Feed me now....more...more...must have more..."

Yeesh.

8

sorry for that big mess. I am a software developer and when I was looking for work I would get this recruiters that would insist on rushing through things. I think they get paid to put resumes in their resume bank. I wont talk to a recruiter at all unless they can tell me the name of the company they are recruiting for. If they cant tell me that or more details I wont talk to them. They have gotten worse lately from what I have seen. I am not looking now but somehow they find my resume from long back and I can just tell they are fishing for people and not really knowing how to fill a position.

9

Thanks, PatientX. I thought I was getting pretty good at screening out the bald-face liars, but these dudes slipped under my radar. They did have the name and address of a real office of the big tech firm (I confirmed on Google maps), and they had a convincing-looking job description and a plausible story.

Some of them are just "better" at lying than others, I guess. God help their wives/husbands and children, is all I can say!

I'm already filtering out the ones who are just fishing for the names and contact information for my former hiring managers. (Really dudes? Really?)

Also the ones who are fishing for my Social Security Number (no one gets my SSN until after an on-site interview at the hiring company's offices and a mutual agreement to go forward.)

I get contacted by these bottom-feeders about eight to fifteen times per week, and you are correct: they seem to be worse than ever in the past few years. Some of them don't know better than to spell MS SQL "Sequel Server" or that C# and C++ are not the same language. How one can be a TECHNICAL recruiter and not know that PL/SQL is Oracle and T-SQL is MS SQL Server is beyond me.

10

They're all scammers and I don't trust any of them. You're right too about shady business tactics in general that run rampant. I agree with you, I don't understand how these people can sleep at night.

My husband lost his job a couple of months ago and left with the company owing him big bucks in commission pay. With a few demand letters from an attorney, he only got partial payment.

Recruiters started calling him and one of the recruiters told him that he had an interview set up with the President of a major company who was interested in hiring him. Come to find out...there was no interview set up. The guy is a sleazeball.

I'm wishing you the best. When things like this happen, I have to believe that this just means that there's something better coming and it's right around the corner.

11

Thanks, smileandnod. I'm sorry to hear that your husband was also victimized by creeps. Disgusting.

The good news is that I do have an phone interview with a hiring manager (one that I set up, not going through a third-party recruiter) on Monday for a full-time, regular job at a really good company. I would love to get out of the consulting side if I can find the right job -- if for no other reason than I wouldn't have to interact with creepy, fly-by-night technical recruiters again for a very long time.