The most unprofessional recruiter I’ve ever seen

June 9, 2021

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Throughout my career in tech industry, all of the recruiters I’ve worked with are decent, or at least professional enough to coordinate me and the recruiting teams in their company without issue. Sometimes they’re slow in response or sounded less passionate about the job, which I totally get, everyone gets burnt out sometime. The worst case, they ghost people after interviews, that’s about it.

And I’ve been interviewed with at least 40 companies throughout my career, and talked to even more recruiters, so trust me I have relatively large data pool. Until now I didn’t even know recruiters, or any professionals from a major company, can deal with other people with such a low standard.

TL;DR: This is a story of me getting ghosted by a recruiter three times on scheduled meeting. Each time they sounded like previous events never happened and literally ignored all the alternative backup plans I provided or they promised.

TL;DR 2: Maybe I helped Dropbox Turing tested their AI email replying machine for 3 times?

I’m gonna say the company’s name but not gonna point out the person, just to pretend it’s not personal. I kinda feel like it should be. It’s one of the technical sourcer from:

Dropbox. #

The story begins as I started job hunting a few weeks ago. I messaged some recruiters who have reached out to me on Linkedin in past few months about openings. And my Dropbox contact redirected me to one of their colleagues. A few days later person G sent an email asking me to book a meeting on their calendar for an initial chat, pretty standard stuff.

Day 0 #

At the scheduled time (Friday morning), I got a call, picked right up and got hung up immediately. After a few minutes, I sent an email to G to check is it still a good time to chat. No response. So I move on to my other interviews.

This is pretty common. People get conflicts. People forget meetings. No big deal. The phone call at beginning is probably random spam which happened to call me at the same time. Usually I’ll get an apology email/call a few hours latter at most when they checked their email.

Apparently not this time.

Day 5 #

After a long weekend and 2 work days, G showed up in email saying they’re trying to call me several times but didn’t succeed. That could be true but I can’t imagine anyone not checking their email or IM when they can’t reach the other person they’re meeting with, and only have time to reply after 5 days. But fine.

So I replied and thanks for the explanation (even though it’s 5 days late). I also confirmed my phone number and attached my zoom link for backup. The second call is scheduled.

Day 6 #

At scheduled time, I opened my zoom meeting just in case. I got a call, picked up right way. I only heard corporate meeting like button press sound, so I said I can’t hear them. I got hung up immediately after that. I called back, directly went to voicemail. I waited in the zoom meeting for 30 mins, no one showed up.

Day 8 (Saturday) #

G sent the exact same email like last time, just like the second meeting didn’t even happen, saying they tried to call and didn’t succeed, please schedule a new meeting.

I replied: (of course wording is more professional and not just bullet points)

This was the second time this is happening
My phone worked for every other company I talked to
I attached a zoom link as backup but no one showed
If you don’t use zoom, please provide any other meeting client as backup.
I got that it’s hard for you to track info both in email and calendar, but if you can’t accept or provide alternative then the same thing would happen again the third time.

G replied apologizing saying they will attach a zoom link to the calendar invite next time. So I scheduled the third meeting.

Then I got a calendar invite without any zoom link, with the template description of they’ll call me at my number. I thought it’ll get updated at least during work day, but apparently that didn’t happen.

Day 11 #

G also replied on day 11 saying looking forward to connect. o…kay?

Day 12 – today #

At scheduled time, didn’t get any call. Of course no one showed up in the zoom meeting.

To be honest it’s probably my bad to even give them a third chance. But whatever.

Now I’m using the 3rd ghosted meeting to write this blog and replied the following, cc’d the only other person I know at their company who initially forwarded my information to G.

Hi,
At scheduled time I didn’t get any phone call for my phone which works for every other company, nor did see the promised zoom link in calendar invite, or anyone shows up in my zoom meeting attached previously, for the third time.At this time I’m not going to try to continue blocking off time and waiting.
Best of luck on your recruiting.

(I usually say hi following the person’s name as everyone else does, but at this point I don’t even wanna.)

Too bad the other person I cc’d isn’t G’s manager.

!https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/svg/1f937-1f3fb-200d-2640-fe0f.svg

At this point I highly doubt if G is a real person. Maybe they’re just training an AI assistant to reply to emails and use me for Turing test? Who knows.

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