The Lion, The Witch, and the audacity of recruiters

This approach works extraordinarily well for essentially all interpersonal communications. Friendships, relationship prospects, etc.

Absolutely. I've had two experiences that stick in my mind - one, where the recruiter told me within the first three minutes that the hiring manager had already seen my resume, they'd both agreed there was amazing alignment, and then proceeded to talk to me for forty five minutes about the company and answer questions to make sure I was interested in the company (I was). Yes, of course, his job, but it wasn't just trite vague and generic "We have excellent benefits", but talked about their path and plans and approach. He was very responsive, and sure enough, excited hiring manager call, and then just one more call, with the VP of Product, who outright said the hiring manager was making the call and decisions, if I was talking to him, I was basically a "finalist", and that he wanted most of the interview to be me asking him questions, not just so I could learn more, but he could see my levels of inquisitiveness, etc. I got that job, the recruiter was very responsive, we even joked that I had a brief moment of doubt when he sent me a message "to connect" after the two interviews: we'd had all our previous conversations via Zoom. I said in my email, "feel free to schedule a Zoom for any time after X or give me a call directly" (admittedly trying to feel things out), and he said "Oh, I can just give you a quick call" (and I assumed it was thanks but no thanks).

The other, they made things work. While normally, we're all accustomed to "Actually X has a conflict, so we need to reschedule" and on and on and you can find yourself a week, two weeks later, waiting still, this company said "X has a conflict, but we're going to put someone else into the interview", and then they had a challenge with someone being sick for a panel interview - "We're going to do the interview without them", i.e. they were committed to "we need to and want to keep moving forward". Every time I've had that rescheduling limbo, as you say, it's a sign (obviously there can be some exceptions), but when a company is working to make things happen, it's generally a good sign about your prospects, the company, or both.

I think I agree with the spirit of your post mostly, but this bit:

> Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"

I could not imagine asking a recruiter this, if it’s anything like the current recruiters we use, they know none of this, are likely incapable of figuring out how to learn this, and it’ll be blind leading the blind to expect this.

Honestly, it’s fine to expect a fair bit of inefficiency in your first few weeks as you onboard to systems, learn who people are, etc.

I think it’s just as well he was opinionated and realized it wasn’t going to work. Ironically, if this was actually the start of the job, I think bailing might have made more sense. Given that it was just a one week work trial, I feel like there’s little downside in just toughing out the remaining couple days and then deciding. Personally, if I found out the Typescript thing was a secret test of adaptability (which seems extremely unlikely) I would move on, I wouldn’t want a place that plays those kind of games.

OP here

> Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates.

I did speak up during the call if that is really what they want me to do as I have literally 0 experience with that. It was literally my first action after I heard that. I pointed it out to them, that it is not what I was expecting from this position.

They didn't care. It was how they roll.

> I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.

I do agree. The situation is certainly frustrating. But to me, "by the first evening, I was ready to go postal" is... something of a red flag about their manageability? I'll acknowledge that we have our lanes, and that LI is much more established, but if you were at a startup or smaller org, the whole "not my job" anger after just a few hours would be problematic.

> every recruiter I've worked with has been shit

That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s an obviously solvable problem but companies don’t solve it because incentives push them to this model.

There are of course exceptions where recruitment is well run, but for the most part they want (to the extent that emergent behavior from an institution can want something) useless people doing it.

(As an analogy, it’s sort of the same reason why all corporate training is shit, all HR is dumb, etc. Part of the explanation, but not all of it is the need to give the appearance of doing something for compliance purposes. You need something and to be seen to be doing it, but the quality is irrelevant so you get the worst possible.)