While I normally groan when recruiters call me at work (and wonder why I’m whispering) and roll my eyes when they ask me to go in for a consultation, my attitude has changed lately. With the cat thoroughly out of the bag that I’ll be leaving my current position in the near future and with the typically slow holiday season, dealing with recruiters has been quite entertaining. These calls and consultations represent a nice break in my day and presents an opportunity for UNINTENTIONAL COMEDY.
The most impressive one to date was the one I met with today. He called and left multiple messages on my voicemail last week despite my not picking up the phone once. Each call had slightly greater urgency. Initially, I thought, “God, this fuck is annoying.” By the third call, I realized “This guy is hilarious. Something ill-advised will occur as a result.”
Today, I returned his call and agreed to go to his office in Midtown to meet him. While I used the lobby kiosk to fill in my information, I was able to peer into the office. The office was unlike anything I’d ever seen. In one large room, there seemed to be two teams of mostly 20-somethings sitting in close proximity, hounding candidates on the phone. There was constant coworker chatter, constant calling and a degree of bullying. Like any entry-level sales jobs, the only adults were the supervisors and the rest were essentially children.
I finally got in front of my contact, who proceeded to ramble at high speed (me: how does he breath?) about how their process is different (me: but still sleazy) and jotted down a bunch of things on my resume that I don’t think he even understood. He had the gall to tell me that the way he speaks, people think he can code in any language (me: not what I was thinking), but that he “can’t code a lick” (me: he is lucky if he can name the platform that powers his favorite porn site). At the end he introduced me to two members of his team (me: whoever was not on the phone at the time). I wonder if he really thinks that they work as a team, when I am pretty sure there are other motives, such as… I don’t know, lead retention in the incidental case that a salesperson (eg. him) turns over?
The best part is of course, at the end of the day when I took his card out of my pocket and looked him up on Facebook.
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THIS guy is going to be my “Placement Counselor”? I am not sure how many things an ‘07 graduate could counsel me on if the best placement he was able to get himself was in a bullpen of similarly immature sales grunts.
Tags: worst
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