Some time ago I was approached by a recruitment consultant. The usual call. They had a terrific opportunity right up my street and wanted to know my availability. So we had a meaningful conversation.
The job was working for a certain Stuttgart-based manufacturer whose name begins with M and ends with ercedes. The gig was remote working (based at home), but with occasional trips to head office in Stuttgart, maybe twice a month. It was a long-term contract (12 months) and paid a rate of €[redacted] per day.
A flurry of emails followed to confirm the basic details of the job, and after a week of shortlisting and consulting with the client, the offer of a Teams interview was made and accepted.
Weeks passed. A serious amount of weeks passed. I wrote the job off because this is sometimes how things go.
And then, out of the blue six weeks later, I got a call. Can I make myself available for the aforementioned Teams call? I said yes I could. On Saturday afternoon?
This obviously took me back a bit, but I was feeling mellow and I had nothing much going on that lockdown Saturday afternoon, so I said yes.
I had a nice, professional job interview, via Teams, with a guy based in San Francisco but at the time of that call, he was working in Ohio. He was working for a consultancy who had been engaged by the German company, to deliver a global programme, for which the role I was being interviewed was a key component. He concluded the call by saying he was putting me forward for a second interview. Nice!
Less than a week later I had a call from the recruiter, the second interview had been dispensed with. I was in! When could I start? I revisited an earlier conversation where I said I had to give four weeks notice, which I would gladly do just as soon as the contract of employment arrived, I’d checked it over, and had signed it. The recruiter said fair enough.
Then there was nothing. A week passed. Then a fortnight. Then a (whatever term is for three weeks). Then a month. During this radio silence I emailed the recruiter a couple of times and got static back. I called and left voicemail.
In week five I got an email asking if I could start work in a week’s time. But there was still no contract. So in a bid to streamline things I sent my top three questions to the recruiter and said words to the effect of ‘I really need to see the contract of employment and I really need the contract to answer these three questions.’
For a fortnight I got nothing back, just more radio silence.
Then, in the middle of the third week of this bout of radio silence, I got a call from the recruiter saying they were just waiting for a purchase order to be raised, and then they would be able to release the contract to me.
That was so many weeks ago I have actually lost track of how much time has passed.
It just seems like an odd way to run a business (whether it’s the recruitment agency, the consultancy in the middle, or the Stuttgart-based manufacturing company).
Certainly is a strange way to do things.
But they are always a bit slow in getting back to you: I applied for a job with a Bavarian-based manufacturer that begins with B and ends in MW. Eight years later, I’m still waiting to hear from them.
Even though this was months ago, I’m still trying to figure out if it was Mercedes, the consultancy in the middle or the agency who dicked me around.