There's a hiring process in this sea of red flags

This is the story of a selection process that took place not long ago, during my last job search. I was contacted via LinkedIn by a recruiter working for a large Europe-based company, without the faintest idea that I was about to be involved in the most ridiculous recruitment process of my career so far.

Of course, I have redacted the names, places and figures quoted so that they cannot be traced back to the parties involved, but apart from that, 100% of this story is true. Furthermore, the section titles and some of the quotes are obviously not exact mentions of the real conversations: take them as deliberate hyperboles, keeping in mind that oftentimes the implications of certain words were not that far off.

Let's not quibble further - here's a summary of how it went.

Chapters

• Fully remote, except when we need you
• 1-year contract that we won't let you recede from
• 19 YoE but no degree? Still not a Senior
• Not enough experience? Just lie on your CV!
• Don't want to lie? Let me amend your CV for you
• Still refuse to lie? Then you're a bit stupid, because everybody lies on their CV and employers don't notice anyway
• You should stop whatever you're doing coz the interview is more important
• Actually, we want you in the office because we don't trust you
• We'll want an answer to a question we didn't ask
• You got requirements and expectations for the job? We basically don't care
• We seek candidates with certain characteristics, but we tell the recruiter we want something different because… reasons
• We promise feedback and we forget to deliver
• Bonus track: the Salary Calculator
• Conclusions

🚩 Fully remote, except when we need you

First things first, the job was advertised as follows:

Fully remote, but the candidate is required to be located less than two hours from *city of company's HQ*.

I'm allowed to work from home, but I need to be at a close travel distance from the office - fair enough. Talking to the recruiter, though, it turned out that at least one day of presence in the office was required per week.

Why was it called a “fully remote” position then?

I appreciate that the definition of “remote work” has become inexplicably fuzzy after Covid stopped being a thing, but at least most companies have the decency to describe this as “hybrid work” or “possibility to WFH”. But “fully” remote? How does it make any sense?

There was not enough time to argue about this, however, as things started escalating ever so quickly.

🚩 1-year contract that we won't let you recede from

I've got experience working as a contractor for a few years, and the way it normally works is you initially get offered a fixed-term agreement: you'll work for us for 6 or 12 months, for example; if we like you or there's more work to be done, we keep you for longer; if the project gets wrapped up, bye bye. There's usually nothing strange in this way of working, it's just less secure yet more flexible - "Clear terms, long friendship”, as we say in Italy.

What this recruiter was offering me is indeed a role as a contractor, for an initial 1-year-long project; however, I was also made aware of a small clause to the above, that is:

the company expects continuity from employees.

Leaving aside the fact that a contractor is not an employee, what I understood between the lines was this: “continuity” basically means that the client company expects the contractor to stay and work for them, even without financial incentives, simply out of loyalty because “this is a very good company to work for” (and the innkeeper promises that the wine is the best you've ever tasted).

Starting to smell some smoke here 🤨

🚩 19 YoE but no degree? Still not a Senior

At some point during the initial conversation I was handled a PDF containing the job specs and the expected compensation. Disregarding how crummy such file was formatted (my poor eyes were really hurting), here's an example of one of the tables included in it, depicting the company's day rate budget based on a candidate's experience:

Up to €380/day for a senior full-stack dev, provided they have either:• a MSc and 10/12 YoE• a BSc and 15 YoE• 19 YoE

There's some cool websites that list the average rates of contractors across various roles and seniority levels. When I was living in the UK, checking ITJobsWatch was a habit whenever searching for a new gig.

This was mainland-EU based, but still - less than €400/day is NOT a good rate for a senior engineer. Worse than that: requiring a minimum of 10 YoE AND a MSc for a senior level felt genuinely insane. At the time I was employed in a EU company on track to becoming a senior after 4-5 YoE, and I was already making almost that amount - as a full-time employee even!

I obviously brought my concerns up to the recruiter and got back as a reply something like

sorry, that's just how *company* works. The only way to make more than that is…

🚩 Not enough experience? Just lie on your CV!

Yep, not joking. A head hunter seriously suggested that to me.

To give a bit of a background, at the time I had been working for approximately 5 years. Prior to that I had had a few internships and work placements, which I mentioned in the CV, but since I was studying at the same time they typically lasted a few months. As a result there were a number of gaps during my uni years, and while the work done totalled to about 18 months, it just made more sense to start counting full years of experience. Probably not a overly smart idea, but I don't like pretending to have more experience than I do either.

Anyways, if you summed all the experience described in my CV the total was ~6.5 YoE. I had an entry like the following, covering just a few months in a year as explained:

According to the nonsensical job specs that the Company shared, that was not enough to place me as a senior engineer, as that would require a minimum of 7 years.

Again, I replied to the recruiter pointing out that aspect, and their answer made my jaw drop:

Well, I see you worked since July 2016. You can simply change that to be January 2016 and you'll have 7 full YoE! This will bring you to the higher range of salary as you wish!

🚩 Don't want to lie? Let me amend your CV for you

It got even worse when I refused, stating that I was not okay at all with that. The recruiter's reaction? They edited the PDF directly with the new starting month and, without warning me, sent the copy over to the Company.

I simply reminded them that lying on a CV is flat-out illegal in many countries, including the UK where I was living, Italy where I'm from, and the country where this job was based in.

Do you think this information deterred them from continuing to dig their own grave? Oh no.

🚩 Still refuse to lie? Then you're a bit stupid, because everybody lies on their CV and employers don't notice anyway

At this point the recruiter, having sent the amended CV without my permission, already had some initial feedback from the Company's HR. Apparently they did like me, but were adamant about the fact that, if I wanted to access the higher salary threshold, I had to demonstrate 7 years of experience.

In all this mess, I also noticed an “insignificant” thing: even considering the single month counts of my various jobs and starting from January 2016 instead of July, the total was still less than 84 months i.e. 7 years. For example in 2018 while I was studying for my MSc, I worked part-time for a few months and that's all. If they really wanted 7 years, even lying the way the recruiter had suggested was not gonna be enough 🤷🏻‍♀️

Another aspect that would give me away in no time: in the July 2016 - March 2017 internship entry on my CV, I had included the hours worked: 300 hours mean approximately two months of full-time work, which is true as I remember working roughly from early July to early September with no holidays in between. There is no way for a hiring manager with half a brain to see 300 hours spread over 8 months instead of 2 and not ask questions.

But of course our recruiter had the answer for these problems too!

They won't look into it too much. It's only a few months difference. Most candidates who have 7.5 years of experience will say they have 8 YoE during an interview anyway.

Well, since it's “just a few months' difference”, I don't see why it is such a big deal for the company to consider me, despite being just a couple of months short of 7 years of experience… but hey, I'm just a naïve job seeker who is too honest to even approximate my effective YoE, who am I to judge?

🚩 You should stop whatever you're doing coz the interview is more important

Despite the increasing number of absurdities I had dealt with so far, I agreed to schedule a video-call with the hiring team at the Company. Normally I would have given up and started looking elsewhere by now, but part of me was curious to see how far they would go.

I was not disappointed 🙂

The first call unfortunately didn't go through because of an unexpected work meeting I had to attend. I don't like when this happens, and for this reason I apologised and took full responsibility with the recruiter, sharing my availability for the following couple of days. However, the response on the Company's side was to reschedule the call at a time outside of such availability, meaning I was not able to join the 2nd meeting either.

The recruiter then proceeded by insinuating that I was not taking the process seriously enough, since the company was doing me an honour to offer me a second call, and that they would allow me the luxury of scheduling a third one just because they liked my profile so much. At this point I was basically fed up and did not comment on the insinuation, thinking that the Company deciding not to proceed with me would be a nice gift from the universe.

🚩 Actually, we want you in the office because we don't trust you

It turns out that the Company probably can't afford to lose an insubstantial yet skilled candidate like myself, so the call finally happened.

They say people shouldn't judge a book by its cover or, adapting it to the current context, a potential job from its recruitment process. I'm 100% guilty in this case, but I have a feeling I was not the one being an asshole this time.

Three guys joined the call, two engineers and the team manager if I remember correctly.

First of all, I learned that the “full-remote position” was completely inaccurate: the truth is I would have to be present in the office at least one day per week because, in their own words:

... we don't trust people enough to let them work autonomously.

I could not understate how problematic I found this position, which I did not omit to express during the call. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I have been working full-remote since March 2020 and have multiple examples to prove my self-sufficiency while doing my job, the lack of trust in an employee or even more so a contractor is a very serious symptom of deeper problems within the company's mentality.

Engineers who are not trusted by their managers are less likely to take initiative, bring their own ideas to the table, propose innovative solutions to problems; they are more likely to be dissatisfied with their jobs and to leave their current role to seek environments where they feel valued; probably the most impactful of all, constant oversight and micromanagement can slow down decision making and hinder productivity.

It might sound an extreme interpretation, but I have witnessed similar scenarios too often to ignore such warning signs, especially when they are communicated explicitly by potential managers.

Sure as death, this is not the kind of team I would want to be part of.

🚩 We'll want an answer to a question we didn't ask

Moving on into the actual interview, I was asked to talk about a recent project I had been working on.

Normally, this is a good moment to demonstrate how deeply I understand a project and how I have actively contributed to its success, show that I own it well enough to talk about the whys (objectives, business requirements…) and the hows (languages, tools and frameworks used, technical tradeoffs, challenges faced, etc.). Knowing this is a chance to “show off” my work, I usually prepare this talk in advance, making sure I can cover all the relevant aspects of the projects so that the interviewer can get a general overview of it in a short time frame.

With the project I picked during this interview, the first couple of minutes were focused on the business needs behind it, as it was in my opinion an important aspect to understand, the technical skeleton of the software service relying heavily on such business concepts.

... Except these guys interrupted me several times during these few minutes, as they only wanted to hear about the technical bits: what database we were using, how the Java API had been structured, why Angular was chosen over React. Legit questions, don't get me wrong, but if you ask me to talk you through a project I must explain first what the project is about: such questions about specific technical details don't make a lot of sense on their own, without considering the broader picture.

If you want to know if I can write an API in Java, ask me - you guessed it - if I can write an API in Java! Come up with some interesting questions about the features of Spring Boot or how React/Angular/Vue compare to achieve different outcomes; give me a take-home assignment to complete within a few hours to see how I deal with a practical task… the limit is your imagination.

Just don't ask me a question expecting an answer to a different question. It's pointless for you and a waste of time for me 👎🏻

🚩 You got requirements and expectations for the job? We basically don't care.

Perhaps the most annoying part of the interview was after they finally acknowledged that neither the remote policy nor the planned retribution were going to work for me.

Let's be clear, one of the objectives of an interview is to to clarify these aspects: if no common point is found that works for both employer and employee, we can just say goodbye to each other and end the conversation. It is like on a date: if one's lifestyle, worldview or expectations are incompatible with the other's, there is no point in continuing to see each other and hoping that things will magically work themselves out.

So, the unclear aspects were eventually clarified and I honestly stated that I was not willing to continue the application process; yet the PM went on and insisted on asking technical questions, because

we might want to make an exception for you, after all we like your profile very much and the role in this company is very prestigious.

Tired of giving the benefit of the doubt, the message I got was basically “we don't care what you want, here's our terms and you'll have to accept them if you want this job”.

I'm pretty sure I expressed that I wasn't desperate at all in my job search plenty of times throughout the whole process, but to be fair, I wouldn't have accepted such terms even if the interest came from a FAANG company or something actually prestigious (except for the fact that “prestige” is close to the bottom of my personal “Reasons to work for a company” list, so I don't really care anyway).

I then quickly interrupted the stream of technical questions and asked why the interview was still going on, while I believed I had made quite clear that the conditions they were offering were not acceptable for me and we were basically wasting our time. Finally, the manager agreed with me and we concluded the call.

🚩 We seek candidates with certain characteristics, but we tell the recruiter we want something different because… reasons.
(Or maybe we don't know what we want in the first place)

Onto the follow-up chat with the recruiter, I realised a few more interesting things.

First of all, they appeared to be completely unaware of the “not-at-all-fully-remote” policy that the Company had been telling me about, as they showed to be very surprised to hear that once a week in the office was the deal I was going to get instead. Nonetheless, they insisted asking if I was sure I was okay withdrawing from a process because of the lack of flexibility, and practically begged me to wait until I received their feedback on my interview before a final decision.

Secondly, during the preparatory conversation I had been told that I would've been welcome to discuss my salary expectation directly with the interviewers, since depending on the outcome of our call there would be some room for negotiation. Except when I introduced the topic during the interview, they quickly dismissed it, claiming that they didn't have a say in the compensation matter, as it was instead in the scope of the hiring agency (supposedly the one the recruiter belonged to? Not too sure about that though, I was so fed up I didn't investigate).

So was it a case of the company's HR not communicating clearly with the recruitment agency? Or maybe the two of them agreeing to be deliberately unclear in the job specs, hoping that candidates would be desperate enough to accept whatever deal they were feeling like offering them? I honestly have no idea at this point, just that it was yet another embarrassing thing to add to the list.

🚩 We promise feedback and we forget to deliver

We have almost reached the end of this gruelling recruitment process.

I like to end these conversations with a round of feedback, be it positive or negative: some companies actively ask for it, but I normally choose to give it anyway, since it's also a way to receive it as well, and think they're very valuable tools for learning and improving.

My feedback to them in a nutshell was as follows: I've lost count of all the warning signs observed since the beginning of the recruiting process, from the suggestion to lie on my CV to the interviewers interrupting me without a valid reason. This could be the best workplace in the world (press X to doubt), but I'm frankly skeptical that this will be a good opportunity for me and I will be comfortable working in such an environment.

What was their feedback? 404 - not found. Yep, I never received any communication whatsoever after that, despite the recruiter promising they would get back to me within a few days. Perhaps it was better this way 🫠

🚩 Bonus track: the Salary Calculator

I called this a “bonus” as I consider it the icing on the cake of this whole situation. Not really another red flag since it didn't add much to the nonsense so far, but it's still funny and I found it quite telling, so here you go.

I've got a cool tool on my website that I developed myself and consists of a numeric slider showing various emoji depending on the selected value, indicating how happy I would be based on the salary I'm offered for a job. Lower numbers return 😠 faces, higher numbers return 😀 faces - easy as that. It's half a joke and meant not to be taken super seriously, but also a reminder that I'm not willing to undersell myself during a negotiation.

Well, at least one of the interviewers ended up on such page, and during the call they commented, probably thinking they were being funny:

I'm looking at the salary calculator on your website... I'm afraid our day rate won't make you smile.

What can I say? My Calculator might be presumptuous but it definitely helps filtering out companies that I'd rather cry for hours than work for 🙂

Conclusions

How to conclude this extenuating article?

To be fair, in my experience I took part in several interview processes with some red flags: sometimes it's about the remote policies, which are not too clear from the start and turn out to be not what the job ad claimed to be; often everything collapses when the moment comes to discuss money; other times the work expectations are fuzzy (”you'll work 8 hours per day, but we might need you to stay for some extra time occasionally. Or maybe quite often. We will pay you of course. Maybe. If we're feeling generous. We know you like us anyway, because we're an amazing company, so you'll be honoured to work extra hours. Not a problem for you, is it?”).

Finding so many red flags, including some rather alarming ones, in every single aspect of the process, though, was a first for me.

Clearly I've been whinging a lot here, but also I would like these reflections to be useful for something. Although highly unlikely, if you recognise yourself in a character of this story, or alternatively if you are a recruiter or hiring manager who happened to deal with candidates in ways similar to the ones described here, I'm not trying to blast you with my criticisms or mock you in any way.

My hope is that it is useful for someone, whether it is a job seeker who has participated in embarrassingly bad recruitment journeys, or an HR manager who has made one or more of the mistakes described in this story. In the first case, you're not alone: don't give up and don't make humiliating compromises you're not willing to accept. In the second case… well, something has to change.

Thank you for reading this far, and remember: if your CV feels empty, don't be afraid to lie to make it look richer!

(… Just kidding, don't lie on your CV, it's just wrong. It's okay to some extent to ‘fake it until you make it', as they say, but faking it doesn't mean lying 🤥 ).