I had the strangest job interview experience recently. The recruiter has been warm, cheery and exuberant almost trying to sell me on the role but when pushed for detail he had very little to offer. It was a bit of a red flag but I let that pass. Reading about the company itself, I learned that they were in more than a fair share of trouble and the tenure of folks in comparable roles was very short - they bounced in and out within a couple of years. The hiring manager herself had been employed in a dozen companies in the last twenty years and about a year old in this role. I decided to proceed and see what would come to pass - some parts of the job were interesting to me to consider it.
It was to be a thirty minute Zoom call to which she showed up five minutes late. It appears that she was reading from a list of questions but there were no prepared follow-ups so she asked none. I felt like I was delivering a monologue. Then around five minutes in a man started to show up in her background - moving in and out of the frame. Then she ducked behind her chair and then the man was gone from the frame and finally she dropped from the call. I was not sure what had happened and for a minute wondered if that woman had suffered bodily harm - maybe the man had her in a chokehold behind her chair. She had started to act a bit nervous once he appeared in the frame. It was not clear if she was at home or somewhere else - there was a low level of ambient noise but she was not in the office. Five minutes later, I dialed in by phone and her secretary picked up and said the woman's battery had died and she would be back online any minute.
So I hop back on to Zoom and crickets. Then a few minutes later she is back and the man is not in the frame. She keeps repeating she does not have anything else to ask and I should ask her questions - this seems like a trick or a stress test. She seems to want to ascertain how I will cope in a low to no information environment and still get my job done. What if I don't know what I am supposed to do, how she measures her and my success and no one is willing or able to tell me. Can I still perform? I have interviewed and been interviewed more times than I care to remember but this has to be one of the most unique and bizarre experiences.
In the second part of the call when the woman has been reunited with a power source, she started to slide down in the frame until only the upper half of her face was visible in the screen and then she disappeared and dropped for good. I was left absolutely stunned by it all - companies usually put on their best show when trying to recruit, but this was exactly the opposite. Absolutely nothing went well. She was in such a rush to drop that even the pleasantries we exchange with candidates we passed on in the first five minutes, were not exchanged. She might as well have dropped dead - it was so sudden.
There are a few ways to think about what happened. Maybe she hated me at first instance and thing was dead on arrival - she would sooner poke her eyes out than work with me. Now she is left with twenty minutes to kill and she did everything she could to reduce her own pain of tolerating me. She could be on her way out or may have been put in her notice - filling this role might be one of the last acts to complete before she is out - to that end she really does not care as long as she checked the box. She can hire any warm body and get out or say no one could be found in the time available and get out. The most optimistic version I could come up with - maybe the place is an absolute toxic cesspool and this woman out of the infinite kindness of her heart was giving me every reason to abort the mission, bail, run and never look back. I guess I will never know because I will never hear back.
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