Day 318 – More Recruiter Craziness

Apparently I've learned to draw an expression that approximates eroded self-worth and an underdeveloped sense of entitlement. Nothing like experience to inform one's art.

          I got some more craziness from the recruiting profession this week. Is it that they are so overwhelmed by bad circumstances that they can’t rise to the occasion? Times may be difficult, but I just don’t understand what is going on that makes it impossible for recruiters to just follow up on what they say they’re going to do. The nature of what they do hasn’t changed at all. There may not be enough jobs to place everyone who is looking, but the drill from the recruitment standpoint is still the same: match a qualified candidate to an available job.

          I got a call on Thursday evening from a recruiter in Tampa. I was out riding my bicycle with my wife at the time. We’re on a diet together and trying to throw regular exercise into our regimen. If I succeed in losing a few pounds, at least I’ll have reduced the gross weight of the total unemployed. It may be my only contribution. Anyway the recruiter thought my skill set matched up nicely with a controller position opening up in the Tampa area. A sporting goods manufacturer is expanding and opening a new facility there. This was a new position—a rarity in the current economic climate and a welcome one.

          I was glad to have picked up my cell phone on the way out the door. I stopped the bike under some trees so I could talk to the recruiter without sounding breathless. She wanted to know if I was okay with relocating to Tampa. I am, of course. My kids and grandkids are over there. I told her so. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe the grandkids date me, although anyone who can add and subtract can tell my approximate age from my résumé.

          We set up a time for an in-depth phone interview. She was to call me back Monday morning at 8:00. I had a good feeling. Something in the tone of her voice, the flow of conversation, the pace of our exchange made me feel confident that I was finally on the road to gainful employment.

I spent the next three days going over in my mind how I would respond to the likely questions. The usual questions I already know how to answer. It’s the new ones that are problematic for me—the questions that get at the core of my severely eroded sense of self worth—the ones about what I’ve been doing with myself in my long idleness—the naturally implied question under the veneer of sympathy that accompanies long-term unemployment—‘what’s wrong with you?’

I needn’t have worried as it turned out. No one called at 8:00 on Monday. No one called in the a.m. and no one called in the p.m. No one called on Tuesday either. I gave them a day to have got the date wrong in their calendar. I’m always ready to extend the benefit of the doubt. What else have I got to do?

Day 262 – Big Chance

          I scored another interview last week. This one had me excited for several days. It started with an e-mail from a fellow I used to work with at Albatross. He was something of a wit, but he was also knowledgeable, engaging, and extremely competent. We were both division controllers when we worked together. When he left to take another job at a home appliance manufacturer, all his work got assigned to me. This was in addition to my own work. I didn’t get any more money. By that time I was already used to that kind of treatment.

This fellow—we’ll call him Ted—once showed me a graphical report that he used when he had worked previously at BMW. It tracked production starts and deliveries against incoming orders and against budget. It was part of a group of indicators referred to as a dashboard, and its purpose was to alert management to trends that were likely to result in too much or too little inventory. The report was divided into bright red and green areas separated by a bright yellow warning track. When the trend lines were in the green, things were good. When the lines went into the yellow warning track, it was time for management to wake up and do something. When the lines went into the red area, someone was going to lose their job. Things were never ever supposed to get in the red.

Ted felt we should adapt this report to our own needs an Albatross. I agreed. I duplicated his formulas and entered some trial data from my own division. Where Ted had used bright primary colors, I elected to use pastels. For one thing I thought the pastels would use less ink, thereby saving the company a few cents a page. I also hated the glaring colors. I preferred the more restful shades of rose, canary, and sage. I showed a sample to Ted. He was not impressed.

He said, “The formulas are fine, but I prefer the heterosexual palette.”

At the time I thought this was the single funniest thing I had ever heard at work. It probably wasn’t, but I was under a lot of stress already and my emotional responses tended to be a little exaggerated. Still it was a pretty clever thing to say, and my estimation of Ted’s value as a human being surged upwards by a considerable amount as a result. When he left I was sorry to see him go…and not just because I had to do his job for free.

According to his e-mail Ted had just taken a job with Volkswagen of America at a new assembly plant they are building in Chattanooga. He thought they might have a place for me as well. I sent my résumé.

          A few days later I got a call from HR with some preliminary questions about my experience and credentials. They told me a little about the job they thought I might fit. It was a capital assets analyst position—something I have never done, but also something I thought I could easily assimilate. I told them I was interested even though it would mean taking a lower annual salary and having to relocate. It’s a buyer’s market for labor. I judged that the potential for improving my situation at VW far outweighed the initial negatives.

          HR called back next day to schedule a video conference interview. I had to drive up to Vero Beach to a video center and talk to three people from management over a video connection. The three managers turned out to be the young woman I had already talked to from HR, Ted, and the accounting manager. I figured I had a pretty good chance of coming off well.

          I like video conferencing. As a rule you get two screens to look at. One displays the people at the other end of the line. The other displays your own image. It’s like you get to constantly check yourself in the mirror while you talk without it being immediately obvious to the people you are talking to what you are doing. This is great interview feedback. If you lose your poker face or nervously play with your earlobe or dart your eyes around the room like you are being probed by alien life forms, you will know right away that you need to adjust your on camera mannerisms before it is too late. I wish all my interviews were on video conference.

          I suppose that for some people there is a danger that they will be so distracted by their own image that they will be unable to focus on the job at hand. These are the people who are too attractive—or think they are—for their own good. If they also happen to be enthralled with the sound of their own voice, they will be doubly handicapped. Fortunately I am not one of these. I know such people exist though. I have met some, and you probably have too. You can read about some others here, and here.

There is a FaceBook group called Sexy Accountants. I used to belong. I joined because I thought I could get the sexy accountants to read this blog. I was especially interested in getting them to read the entry titled Budget Burlesque. It didn’t work. Apparently accountants who think they are sexy are too self-absorbed to read about other would-be sexy accountants. If you go to this group’s page and review the list of members you will immediately notice that the sexy accountants mostly are not. There is maybe one notable exception. I’ll leave it to you to decide who that is.

          Now as it turned out, the video interview with Volkswagen that I thought would be a cake walk was instead fairly arduous. They asked hard questions that forced me to get creative in responding about my abilities and shortcomings. The accounting manager was especially pointed in some of his questions. I guess he was making up for what he assumed would be ‘softball’ questions from my friend, Ted. He wanted to know a lot about my management style, which I found odd as the job was not a management position.

He also asked a lot of typical questions from the HR interview handbook—questions like what are your three best and your three worst qualities in terms of performing this job, and give specific examples of each from your work experience. I know how to answer that question, but that doesn’t make it easy. It’s one of those questions where you are expected to seem like you are considering it on the fly and thinking on your feet, but where you have actually rehearsed the answer so that it conveys a precise message while sounding spontaneous. It is bullshit. There is nothing that answering this question skillfully can convey to the interviewer except that you are a good liar. Of course a good liar may be precisely what they are looking for.

I like to turn questions like this upside down and then talk my way out of the shambles I create. For instance, I like to say that my best quality is that I am lazy. Saying that never fails to get the interviewer’s attention. They can’t believe anyone would say that in an interview. They always need to hear more, and they never fail to pay close attention to the explanation.

I tell them that I don’t necessarily mind hard work, but I hate having to do anything twice. I hate wasting my time, so it is important for me to do everything correctly the first time. When you get it right the first time, you don’t have to do it again. It’s a simple and rewarding concept. To execute it you go just a little slower than everyone seems to think that you ought. You spend a little time thinking about what you have to do and how you are going to do it before you start. This kind of thing seems to satisfy an interviewer because, I suspect, they don’t know how to think the process through to its logical conclusion.

In practice, if someone sees you sitting at your desk thinking, they are apt to surmise that you are thinking about what you are going to have for lunch or about the colors and textures of the receptionist’s lingerie. They are apt to think that you ought to be working as hard as the grunts across the hall frantically spinning their wheels off in the wrong direction.

The result is that your work outcomes will shine but your performance reviews will be bad. I try to forestall bad performance reviews by keeping my door closed. That way I get excellent performance reviews right up until the moment that I get fired. My managers like my results, but they can’t stand that they don’t have any idea what’s on my mind. It makes them nervous.

The Volkswagen accounting manager wanted to talk about my familiarity with Microsoft Excel. I told him I was an early adopter—that I had been using Excel since the early eighties. I told him that I had taught Excel as an adjunct instructor in a state university in Arkansas. I told him I was a power user. He commented that I must then know about the several glitches in the Excel code that produce erroneous results. I did not. He insisted that I must, else I wouldn’t in fact be a power user. I apologized for not knowing what he was talking about. I told him that I had used Excel extensively on a daily basis for decades and had never run into a problem. I couldn’t say there were no problems, only that I had never experienced them. He nodded in a dismissive way, and that was pretty much the end of the interview. He said they would contact me within a week or so.

I thought I had really blown the interview at that point. I figured the guy had taken my different experience with Excel as evidence that I was full of crap, and that my chances were blown out of the water. I left the video center and drove home, dejected. I was even a little pissed at Bill Gates, and not for the first time in my life.

Before I got all the way home—the trip is about an hour—the HR lady called to invite me to Chatanooga for a face-to-face meeting with some board members that were coming in from Germany. She said they would make all the arrangements and e-mail me the details. I honestly didn’t know what to think about that past that I must have fallen down a rabbit hole or slipped into a rip in the fabric of space and time. It was not a comfortable feeling. 

Day 178 - Jobs, Lies, and Videotape

          I scored an interview last week, the first one in this area. It wasn’t a recruiter either. It was a real job. There have been no listings for controllers or CFOs in this area. I decided to lower my sights some. Now that we have offloaded so much of our stuff and cut our living expenses to the bone I can actually get by on a lot less money than I’m used to making. The job I interviewed for was an assistant controller position for an outfit that publishes contract bid lettings for construction contractors. The salary range is less than half what I used to make, but realistically that’s still four times what I get in unemployment benefits. It’s amazing to me how many different ways I’ve had to adjust my thinking.

          The HR manager called to set up the appointment. She e-mailed me directions to the office. Included in her e-mail, which I didn’t actually read until it was too late to respond, was a request to reply to her explaining why I was willing to work for so much less money. I figure this has to be as problematic for potential employers as it is for me—maybe more so. Anyway I went to the interview without responding. The interview was with the controller, a pleasant enough young man probably 20-25 years younger than me. His concern was whether I would be able to adjust to working for him when I had obviously been used to having a lot more authority and autonomy in my previous positions. This is a good question, one I wasn’t really prepared for as I hadn’t really thought about it. I was more hung up on the money issue.

I think I answered it pretty well. I told him that I was all about the work and that as long as I was engaged and making a contribution it didn’t matter to me who I was taking direction from. Besides with 30 years experience I wasn’t going to need very much direction, a happy circumstance that was going to free up some of his time that would otherwise be applied to managing me. This seemed to satisfy him. We got along very well. He told me the office was full of women—the whole office, not just the accounting department. He said that in terms of men it would just be him and me.

I told him about the question the HR manager had asked in her e-mail, and that I hadn’t been able to respond. He said they were worried that once the economy had recovered I would bolt for a better paying position. I knew this. It’s certainly a legitimate concern. The truth is that of course I would. Who wouldn’t leave a junior position for more than twice the money?

I knew I had to lie. The controller knew I had to lie, else he would have asked the question right away. It was the only thing either of us really cared about.

I did have a pretty good story though. I told him about Nelson. I told him that I knew I was going to be settling for less money when I decided to move down here to take care of Nelson, that money wasn’t the issue anymore. I was here because my family needed me to be here, and I had altered my lifestyle and my expectations to make it work to everyone’s benefit. I wasn’t about to change all that for more money.

It was a good lie because it was almost true. He acted like he believed me, but I didn’t get the job. The HR manager e-mailed again on Friday to tell me they were going with another candidate.

Here’s another problem with the economy. How many people besides me are regularly put into positions where their only logical recourse is to lie? I’m guessing millions. And why is that? We’ve got this whole shell game built up around the process of finding a job to the point where everybody is spinning everything on both sides of the desk.

Employers are spinning stories about the health of their company and the nature of the workplace environment. Candidates are spinning stories about their experience and its relevance, about their willingness to do stuff they’d really rather not. The interviewers are asking questions calculated to determine the best liar from among the candidates that were chosen based on how compelling the fictions were in their résumés.

If they videotaped the process and hooked everybody up to polygraphs, no one would ever get or take a job. Is it any wonder, given the nature of the selection process, that we have the occasional crisis of ethics in the business community? This is how it is in the best of circumstances. A recession just exacerbates the whole mess.

Day 15 - First Interview

          The phone interview was interesting. It’s been several years since I looked for a job, so I’m rusty at the processes. Still I think it went fairly well. The man I talked to in Tulsa was engaging, had a lot of good things to say about the company, and didn’t ask too many hard questions. I hate it when they ask you stuff like ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years’ and ‘what are your 3 best and 3 worst traits and why?” To my thinking there’s no useful information conveyed in the answers to questions like that. If you manage to answer well it’s because you have heard the question before, anticipated it, and formulated an answer in advance. Then you have to act as if the answer you give is spontaneous rather than rehearsed. The interviewers know this—or should. Certainly all the candidates know this. So the best that an interviewer can hope to gain is some sense of how well the candidate prepared. In other words they’ll know that they’ve got someone who is good at interviews, but not necessarily if they’ve got someone who is good at the job.

          Thankfully this guy did not ask any questions like that. Perhaps he wasn’t prepared for the interview. I was because I have good answers to those particular questions. They are bald-faced lies, but they are good answers. They are calculated to make me seem smart, thoughtful, industrious, team centered, ambitious (but not overly so), and sensitive (but capable of being a jerk when required). That’s a lot of information to pack into a couple of sentences. I try also to be a little funny. I don’t want anyone to think that I take myself too seriously. I tend to draw the line there. I’ll pretend to be anything they want me to be to land the job except someone who takes himself too seriously. If that’s what they are looking for they will have to keep looking because that’s not me and never will be.

          Oh I suppose I could pretend to take myself seriously if I was of a mind, but you have to consider the consequences when you undertake a deception like that. If the company is looking for candidates who take themselves seriously, then chances are pretty good that they are already loaded up with such individuals, and that just sucks all the joy right out of a workplace. Those are the kinds of places where you could die, find yourself in hell, and never know that you weren’t still at work. I just escaped two such places in a row. I’m not going to volunteer for a third by making stuff up.