A recruiter lined me up an interview. With the employer that just fired me | Hacker News Reader

A recruiter lined me up an interview. With the employer that just fired me

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236 pointscharlieirish80 comments

One time HR of a company I got fired from contacted me out of the blue, and sent me a coding test made in a extremely poorly formatted MS Word .doc (not even docx...)

I was kinda amazed at how bad it was.

So I sent an e-mail to the CEO, I still had his contact and when I worked there I had a lot of freedom to talk to him and whatnot and had his personal e-mail.

I explained in the e-mail his HR was attempting to recruit me back, and if he had changed his mind and wanted me back I would accept it, but if not, at least he should take a look at the quality of the .doc his HR created.

He e-mailed me back some days later, said my e-mail made him go and check what the HR department is doing, he found out they all are being incompetent, so he fired all of them and hired a new HR, he said he doesn't want me back, but thanked me for fixing his HR, and promised such unprofessional approach wouldn't happen again.

EDIT: for those thinking firing HR was too harsh, just some more context: they e-mailed me a .doc out of the blue, with bad questions and bad formatting, they didn't told me what job I "applied" for (and I didn't apply for a job in first place), they never said what the company wanted, or what the job was or anything, and they acted in a kinda arrogant manner, as if they were HR of a FAANG company, something like: "Oh, complete this document, and if you pass we will inform you when the next interview will take place, you have 36h to complete this." Also, somehow the .doc was the third inverview, somehow I passed the first two?

They could have sent you a consulting fee at least :-/

> he found out they all are being incompetent, so he fired all of them and hired a new HR

I get the feeling that this CEO isn't very good at CEO-ing. Presumably the solution if the next HR team doesn't work out is to fire them and keep trying?

A lot of managers and CEOs behave in this way. It is their privileged training ground. Of course it isn't effective if the environment is more to employee than employer like current situation. Once in a while they will hit a jackpot of star employee that is willing to be enslaved. If things turn sour, they can just jump to another company. As long as market and board of directors are incompetent like those HR, these kind of pricks will be able to survive. Their niche are there.

He's watched The Apprentice, how hard can it be?

All you need to do is yell and boss people around!

The biggest success for these people is if they spend so much time micromanaging one person, the rest of the employees can actually run the business without them interfering.

You know how some companies have a rapid process for re-imaging any PC that's not working properly, rather than trying to troubleshoot it? Same thing.

they all think they are FAANG.

It's a lot of leader/follower mentality. When you don't know what to do and can't make your own informed decision, you copy and mimick behaviors of others that are leading and successful. It happens in all facets of businesses. Most professional roles are highly risk averse and many roles can safely fall on "but Billy is doing it, and Billy is the best." When questioned about their choices, they can regurgitate the reasons Billy took the approach he/she did as a failsafe and ask of the person questioning the approach thinks they understand the situation better than Billy--all a sort of appeal to authority fallacy few pick up on. Smart leadership would at least look at the numbers and question why their business doesn't try something different than Billy because basic performance of that approach doesn't seem to be working too well for them and maybe something else would work better.

what is this explanation for? acting like FAANG is stupid, so don't do it.

Sometimes in order to realise one’s acting stupid it’s necessary to read explanations of why some other people are acting stupid. Chances are one might be experiencing some of the same feelings since we’re all human after all.

This is amusing as fuck. This happened to me once after I left what looked like a sinking ship. At the new job I made 20% more for roughly the same position. On the interview at the old place, I learned the req was from new management “building a team”. Apparently the old management had left for greener pastures too. The new management was empowered from “new investment” to “rebuild core business”. It was hilarious because I knew enough to turn every question around and make them squirm. They had bought me lunch at the conclusion of the interview so I politely thanked them for their time and told them the whole story as we had dessert, then excused myself at the last bite so I could go back to work.

Not sure why this was flagged before, but vouched for it. It is an amusing anedocte that illustrates a broken piece of tech recruiting.

Not particularly deep or enlightening, but not worth being flagged also IMO

I’ve been in the industry for 40 years; The absurdities keep repeating.

> It is an amusing anedocte that illustrates a broken piece of tech recruiting.

The guy didn't list the employer on his resume:

> The resume I passed doesn't have my old job listed by name, but it's a copy paste of the job listing.

How was the recruiter supposed to know this person had been fired from the position if he didn't list provide a complete and accurate list of his previous jobs?

I believe the company should know by themselves from his name only, not to learn about it from his resume.

It might be common for companies to not know that, but I don’t think it makes it less broken.

Names aren't unique. I have a pretty common name, I even have the same name as someone else at my current (not very large) company.

Should I be blocked from everywhere that has fired someone with the same name?

Do you also have the same age, e-mail address, phone number etc.?

The recruiter might not be from the same company and creating/sharing these kind of databases with everyone and their mother seems like a hell from the data protection/privacy standpoint.

Feels like an edge case that it's not worth fixing. How often is this going to happen? Do you really want to collect tons of personal data from your candidates before they even show to an interview? Is it worth it to keep personal data of your ex-employees just because of this and is it even legal? (might not be in EU)

You can definitely keep your ex-employee's names on file for a couple of years in the EU. Sometimes you might even be legally required to depending on what field you work in, or because you must document just exactly who did something.

That said, sharing it with a recruiter is very likely a big no go. Even sharing it with HR might be sketchy if you are allowed to keep it only for other purposes.

As for collecting data from your candidates, I am pretty sure that you can gather enough to make them uniquely identifiable (name, birthdate, etc.) without any troubles.

I think they should be experienced enough to verify what people say. The world is full of bullshit because it works and experience teaches you to be aware.

> didn't list provide a complete and accurate list of his previous jobs

I was always told to only provide relevant and accurate previous jobs (which evidently Firr didn't do, either) and that, ideally, each CV should be tailored specifically to the job you're applying to. Same with qualifications - don't lie, but there's no need to say you did a music GCSE if you're applying for a job at a datacentre.

Vocal minority on HN tends to not like it when someone pulls back the curtain.

I wonder why this guy was fired. Really can't tell.

I feel like he's just giving the hiring manager/recruiter a hard time, for no reason but personal amusement.

Thats exactly how I took it as well. This didn't seem funny but just cringey.

It's both funny and cringey. Is it unprofessional and a dick thing to do? Yes. It's also hilariously absurd.

Is it even hilarious? Hasn't everyone who's used a recruiter joked, at some point, about them finding their old job?

I've had a recruiter try to get me to interview from a job I'd just given notice on (before my notice period was even up!) However, I didn't actually _take the interview_; that's what makes this case funny.

When it happens, you usually say "how funny would it have been if I had interviewed again with them?"

Today we found out, it would have indeed been hilarious. (But yes, a dick move)

Got the same opinion about it. Unprofessional? Yes. Hilarious? Also yes.

Every time I see something like this, the onus of being professional lies solely on the employee. I just don’t care anymore. I’ve met enough “unprofessional” people that were the most productive in their team to know that unprofessional is used as “stepped out of line” these days.

"Unprofessional" is business speak for "I don't like you personally, but can't find any technical fault with you."

Wearing shorts is "unprofessional". Why? I don't know. I sling code, pants aren't helping or hindering with that. I grabbed shorts this morning, let's not make it complicated.

There are enough companies that accept shorts.

There are. The point being is that "professional" is usually a dog-whistle for something else.

Honestly it felt pretty textbook narcissism to me. Shamelessness, wanting attention regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.

Social media in a nutshell.

It would have been funny if he played the interview straight rather than show up with a fake moustache. If you're going to troll like that, don't reveal your power level or else the game is over.

Playing it straight would allow for the possibility that he really wanted his old job back and thought that by reinterviewing that could happen, diminishing his position. It would also require him to have been extremely outspoken to create a punch line at exactly the right time, rather than it being an ever-present gag.

That would've been funny then actually. I mean how irate would your manager who just got you fired now realizes his new employee is you again!

The fake mustache and joking about didn't make it seem serious at all. He should've just annihilated the interview.

According to him, being snarky: https://twitter.com/firr/status/1454493608179126273?s=21

It isn’t hard to believe that someone who would take a prank this far under this context would have done something worthy of firing. I too wish I knew why because I assume it is probably also an amusing story.

To me he clearly show signs of the personality that got him fired. On the other hand you have to ask how messed up the company was to not only interview him again but spend so much time having back without red flags telling the interviewer something is wrong.

I wouldn't be surprised if he got re-hired for more money.

Recruitment often is kind of separate deal from everything else.

It was kinda unfortunate that his former direct boss had any saying in the matter of recruitment.

He didn't have that employer on his resume. How would the recruiter know he was just fired from there? Why would the hiring manager check to see if they had fired this person? This guy is a troll. No wonder they fired him.

I'm not sure it would have mattered. I've been contacted before by recruiters trying to hire me for roles at companies I already work at, exactly the same role and everything.

And you rejected the option of getting paid for the same job twice? ;)

I didn't! I played along, getting as far as having a video call with the recruiter, in the office I would be hired into, eventually showing the recruiter where I was sitting and made the CTO wave to her.

Needless to say, we didn't continue using that agency anymore :)

Well you can't fault them for not finding qualified candidates.

Obvious culture fit, strong enough technicals to pass all the interviews. Yeah. Slam dunk. They found people who definitely would be able to get hired.

At least one company that I worked for contacted me to ask if I'd like to work for them again. So keeping tabs on your former employees and being aware of them in your recruitment process is something companies do.

Oh yeah. Similar laughter: the same company that denied me SEPA payment and insisted on payment in advance due to lacking creditworthiness, tried to hire me as an administrator with 60k€+11k€ bonuses a week later.

For me it was a 100 ppl startup in which i had just left a position as head of Engineering. A recruiter sent me a cold email telling me she liked my LinkedIn resume for a developer position at said startup.

I emailed both the head of HR and the CEO who are good friends. It was hilarious.

This type of thing happens all the time when you live in a small city with only a handful of places that match your tech stack. Recruiters often send you jobs for companies that you were rejected by, or that you rejected during the interview process, since those instances won't appear on your resume.

Isn’t it likely people grow though? Like I went through all the interviews at Google. Didn’t get an offer. They said maybe in the future. So I assume I wasn’t senior enough for the position. Years later and now HR is trying to recruit me. Perhaps this time I could solve their challenges better.

It's possible people grow over time, it's also possible the company changes over time. As a company gets older, positions can require more specialists, so who they are looking for changes. Also, bigger companies can afford to hire lower-skilled employees to train internally if they have a good amount of seniors, compared to when they just start out and require almost everyone to be a senior in order to just survive and reaching any sort of success.

Yes, and I hope companies and employees reconsider each other in the future. Sometimes companies have a hang-up about rehiring an employee that voluntarily left (I heard Bloomberg is an example), or some employees vow never to return to X company.

I once gave a months notice. I wanted to leave but had no plans.

I got a call about a position I was unusually qualified for.

Anyway I found out they were willing to pay double my salary to replace me. So I stayed on a few more months at double pay.

Quality corporate trolling. @gadrev is right, well worth the read.

I feel like the ending is a tad embellished, but I want to believe this is real.

obviously massive error but there is not complete incompetence as the recruiter did indeed accurately match candidate-to-vacancy

> but there is not complete incompetence as the recruiter did indeed accurately match candidate-to-vacancy

Good point. The employers often BS the recruiters because “they don’t need to know that”...

I've had a team member fired, and then about a year later a recruiter passed their resume back to us.

We had a new manager since, so the new manager asked me if "Firstname Lastname" was the person we fired. I told them yes and that we shouldn't give the candidate the time of day.

It's not impossible for this to actually be legit. At one employer, engineering fired someone for poor performance, and a year or so later the CEO, having forgotten about this, got them back in as a consultant on his pet project. This was very awkward for everyone.

Please take five minutes to read through this ;D

Hilarious.

"I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."

I am in stitches, so good.

> How did you know it was me?

Imagine the odds of that happening. I wonder how it feels like to be in his situation.

Probably quite likely, especially if you were fired and didn't list last job - your CV and a vacancy matching your skill set have arrived on the market at the same time.

This is some serious Jim Halpert stuff right here. Tip of the hat to you, guy.

Lived in town with pretty much two companies needing devs. Plus some consulting for them. Had position working for as consultant for one of them. Got some recruitments which awfully lot sounded like they would have been hiring new co-workers for me, didn't care enough to check out... Makes one wonder, do they spend any effort?

I once got rejected for a job, only to be accepted for it a couple of weeks later through a different recruiter (and with a higher rate). I pretended I "didn't know" it was for the same company. Must have been funny to have my CV show up twice.

It also turned out to be the most horrible company I ever worked for.

The thing this proves to me is that getting hired in Tech is more of a game of lottery than anything else.

How badly do you have to screw up as a programmer to be fired in the current labor market?

As badly as Zillow perhaps: https://vinvashishta.substack.com/p/zillow-just-gave-us-a-lo...

I heard from someone on the inside that Zillow didn't lay off any engineers. It was all building inspectors and other field staff for their failed house flipping biz.

That article doesn't really cover the important bit. Yes, the distribution changes, but that's not just something that happens, it's adversarial.

https://mobile.twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1456032851477028870

I'm quite sure there were people in Zillow's data science team who understood this, and maybe even tried to say, hey, this model we developed can't really be used for this new purpose you want to use it. But it's hard being that naysayer.

I was at an interview with some people who were doing some things with machine learning on time series data... a topic I know little about, but enough to have heard of Eamonn Keogh and his many, many criticisms of how that's being done by ML practitioners with no time series background. What they were doing was pretty much everything on Prof. Keogh's "what not to do" list. But how do you tell them that? And how would it be if I'd already worked there for a while when you found out your company's business model has some pretty big flaws from a data science perspective?

As long as they pay well, there's certainly a temptation to say, I only make the models I'm told to...

As badly as "my company is in trouble and my division needs to do cost-cutting" or "my boss is jealous" honestly

We are making money, but we should be making lot more. Let's cut people and make a press release. That ought to improve the stock price...

> What I should have said: "we should consider each technology thoroughly before committing to implement it in upcoming projects"

> What I said: "I don't think you understand the technology well enough to recommend what to research"

That'll do it, in many cases.

https://twitter.com/firr/status/1454493608179126273?s=21

any companies offering sour patches?

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