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Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

One thing that's funny is when the internal recruiter for company X (that I had to google) reaches out to me and sets up a call. Then their question is why did you choose this company specifically? And I'm like dude, you called me!

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Classic. I had a similar thing happen a while ago. US based company - not named to protect the guilty - wanted me to move to the United States to do some pretty specific work for them. I'm not open to such offers but they went out of their way to make the invitation, offered to fly me out there and a whole pile of other buttering up bits and pieces. So I said if they wanted me that badly, could we do this remote?

You can guess where that ended. In case you can't: "Who did I think I was to refuse their offer to come to America to partake in this great opportunity?".

Interesting attitude change, turning on a dime they went from all smooth and friendly to outright hostile, and that on a track that they initiated. Very weird.

I always love getting a question about "Why are you interviewing for this position?" and replying "I got an email from your internal recruiter".

The follow up is usually "Why do you want to leave your current company?" replying with "I'm not, your recruiter said this was a cool place".

Yeah that just drives me nuts. If you're recruiting, you're trying to sell me on the position.

Imagine if we did this for other things.

"Why do you want to sell me this apple?"

"Be... cause... I grow apples? To sell? And you said you want one, and are holding money?"

Hilarious. There's a car salesman joke in there.

Presumably you don't schedule an interview every single time a recruiter contacts you, so there the question is more of "what made you say yes to interview with us?"

From my experience that answer also means you won't be going forwards so it's just a waste of everyones time. I guess you're supposed to feign immense interest in this cold-call interview.

There might be legal reasons (taxes, employment laws) that are too much of a hurdle for them to allow remote work from another country. I've heard estimates of 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars to set up the necessary structure, not to mention the months that the process will take.

One company a long time ago had an insane HR department with a question like "If there was a different company with the same salary, environment, culture, work as this one (but wasn't this one), would you want to work there?"

This was at the end of the process, after I'd already interviewed with all the technical folks and all the managers and they all wanted to hire me.

Apparently the desired answer was "no." My actual answer was something like "WTF are you talking about," and I somehow managed to get hired anyway. I later heard that if I'd answered "yes" it would have been difficult to overrule HR and get me hired. LOL

I get 2-3 recruiter emails per week. That's ~10/mo or ~100/year. I respond to 5-10 emails like this in a year. Out of these 10 only 1-2 will result in an actual call. So they would be completely justified in asking me why I chose their company out of 100 that wanted me.

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