How Not to Hire: True Tales from the Trenches

Oi! Here’s what gives my profession a bad name. My good buddy Mark is conducting a search, and had an interesting run-in with a recruiter. Here are his own words:

As a recruiter you’ll appreciate this:

The other day, I had a phone interview with a big company in the Twin Cities, conducted by what turned out to be Ms. Young Clueless HR 2007. She asked a standard set of questions, then asked if I had any… which she then couldn’t answer. I asked basic stuff, like how many states the company had ops in, what the actual job duties were, etc. She even guessed at the location thing, “Gee, I’m not sure… ummm, 13, maybe 15 states… I dunno.”

But my favorite part was at the end when she pitched me the job by skipping over the job duties and in a sing-songy voice gave me the bullet-pointed rundown on the benefits, ending with (and I quote), “And we have a really neat 401-K!”

Really neat interview, I must say.

Later,

Mark

As one of the SHRM presidents said long ago (I’m paraphrasing), “The biggest obstacle to success in Human Resources is that there are no barriers to entry.” No wonder people say “I Hate HR!”