Yesterday evening I walked away from a “final interview” for a job that while it would have underpaid me both based on my market value and based on my inflated Federal salary would have allowed me to work within walking distance of my house, at home part of the time, in casual clothes, and for an organization for which I already provide my support with my donor dollars. Why?
A combination of existing circumstances and simple ethics.
Monday I had my “mid-year” (read: I’ve been there 4.5 months but this is the time when mid-year review forms are do so check, check, check off that box we must) at LoathsomeJob during which UberDirector wanted an “honest assessment of my time in the department.” What I told her:
- All of my co-workers have been very nice and great in helping me get oriented.
- I’m working with co-worker K. on getting more familiar with our blast email system and we’re getting some templates in place to make those communications more useful to subscribers.
- I’m having difficulty adjusting to working with so many people after coming from a small organization.
- I’m an introvert so I do not thrive a culture that includes regular, large group meetings. I’d much rather meet with people informally or in a small group.
- I don’t understand why the non-web communications staff feels the need to bounce around like a pinball inside a super collider when it comes to deadlines.
- I am used to having more autonomy when it comes to getting my tasks done.
Those last two garnered excuses:
- non-web communications staff have very demanding jobs and that’s both “just the system” and “just how Communications people work.” I responded by saying that a system is really just the people in it and if you want to change the system just change the way the people behave and also that I spent 5 years working in multi-national non-profit that required our press and print communications staff to consult with our international office and regional offices around the globe on a daily basis to coordinate multiple external communications events and that I’d never seen a comms staff function in this way.
- UberDirector “has been very concerned because” I’m used to “operating on my own and making all the decisions.” For this I allowed as how I understood that there was a decision hierarchy and that I wasn’t objecting to lack of final authority but that I was used to getting a goal and parameters on achieving that goal and being trusted to apply my skills and experience without a lot of supervision, and, frankly, that hadn’t been my experience over the past few months of how things operate in our group. Then I gave her a specific example from the previous week that clearly illustrated how her meddling got in the way of efficiently achieving a goal. Well, that’s “just how things are here.”
All of that said, they wanted to know how I wanted to “shape the job to” me rather than just having me “mold to the job and the environment.” Using more of my technical skills is out because “we have certain contracts that restrict what people can do.” and that just letting me work on two sites, even though the workload would be tremendous and would be something I’d enjoy, “wasn’t really feasible right now.” I was, however, encouraged to get training so let me extend my thanks to the American taxpayer for the user experience design training for which you are about to pay. But all in all I walked out of my “mid-year” feeling a little bit like the person who had beat the crap out of me on Friday night had just given me two dozen roses on Monday afternoon.
It’s in this environment that I walked away from potential out.
I had a phone interview last week that was scheduled for 15 minutes. It ran for forty. Admittedly, I enjoyed hearing more about the organization’s plans and the job and how I might fit in but that doesn’t change the fact that the time used was nearly 200% over what was requested. That was my first clue.
My second clue was that even after telling this man that I worked downtown and that I’m in the process of getting ready to leave town on vacation he suggested a second interview time of 3:00 pm on the day before I leave. That would have required a minimum of 2.5 hours of either sick or annual leave for me to be on time. It took us about half a day to arrange for a 6pm on Wednesday interview.
The final straw, though, was about 25 hours before my scheduled interview getting an email asking me to provide a “…sample online assessment/audit or strategic online/new media plan for which you were the main author, and for you to review your approach, what you discovered, how you helped the organization, what tactics you used, etc. Do you have any such document that you could share with me ahead of time?”
While I understand that if you’re hiring someone who is going to help you evaluate not only your web communications systems but your internal systems you would want to see process documents, requesting that information at what is effectively the eleventh hour indicates to me that this gentleman and I have fundamentally different approaches to project management, or indicates a certain manipulativeness on his part. At this point in time I am prepared to deal with neither of those as individual possibilities nor both of them in combination.
Also, the end product of about 95% of my portfolio is public facing work, and while I’m happy to step through those projects and describe starting points, goal formation, assessment processes, and the operating strategies that enabled the projects to succeed, even if I could pull those documents together into an interview worthy package on such short notice that someone would ask to see proprietary work product documents produced for another, local organization seems inappropriate to me and indicates a basic business ethics incompatibility.
I am willing to admit that I may be oversensitive to manipulation at this point but really, am I not the one who would have had to live in the job? If I’m going to be miserable, it should at least be lucrative.
And if turning down this interview was a mistake, well, at least it’s my mistake.
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