Companies don't do that!


Sometime in 2018, a recruiter contacted me about a company that had recently set up a joint venture with another like-minded company to make automotive lighting products. The recruiter had kind of a strange name that made me think they were all about hiring the rockstars to play the game, with all of the buzzword bingo and fratboy mindset you could handle.

Recruiter cold emails me with a terse communication about how they found my resume on JobConstructionSite. Something went up immediately, I didn't have a profile there and I indicated that to recruiter - could they provide a link or a screenshot of what they were seeing? No, but the guy did eventually send me a photo of a conference room table shoved against a wall with some monitors on it. While it was too far away to see anything on the screen, I could tell that it was actually SomeOtherJobSite by the purple color scheme and layout. I mentioned this, and the recruiter simply said "We treat all the job sites as if they were JobConstructionSite."

Ok, so you just told me that details don't matter and you're willing to give someone incorrect information, and it looks like you're working in an afterthought. That's wonderful.

Recruiter didn't include any details about the job with the initial contact, so I asked if he could send me a job description. No, the only thing he wanted to send me was a company name and a title. "Call me," he said.

No, please send me a job description. I can tell you immediately if this is something we can pursue.

"No, call me."

"Do you have a job description?"

"You need to call me."

We went around on this a few times, the recruiter getting angrier and angrier with my request. Finally:

"I don't have a job description, companies don't publish job descriptions so you need to call me."

...

I looked up the company he was recruiting for. Right there on their website lay a careers section with a list of very rigidly formatted job descriptions. The one I was looking for wasn't there, but all of the ones that the company published used the same rigid format.

I'm not sure what recruiter was trying to get at here, but I wasn't going to play the "game." My reply was polite but firm. The company does indeed publish job descriptions, I can see them right here on their website. I've never heard of a company that doesn't publish at least some boilerplate about a job. You started our conversation off poorly, and my needs are incompatible with your methods. Please don't email me again.

That was probably a good thing to do - the venture has been online long enough that they've garned employee reviews. They speak of a hot mess and constant crisis. I'm happy I didn't go there, but to be fair I doubt it would have been worth my time to pick up and move.

I've only received a couple of contacts from this recruiter over the past few years, including a recent one to the (partially abandoned) email address they used 5 years ago. It was just a "Hey, we know you're happy now but we got them jobs!" message.


No one replies to emails, so I just hit unsubscribe and sent it to spam.