Just wanted to share an experience I recently had seeking a job. I’m a newly graduated engineer and the position was for a mechanical engineer. Here’s a timeline of what happened:
June 29, 2015: First interview
July 8, 2015: Request for references
July 30, 2015: Second Interview
August 5, 2015: Receive call from employer (engineer who would supervise me is caller) with verbal job offer. Employer offers $35/hour on a one-year contract with no benefits. The position I had interviewed for was to receive full benefits. However, based on need the employer decided to offer only a contract position without benefits. The economy for engineers is not good here (Alberta) now so I accepted his offer. The engineer told me I would receive the offer in writing from HR soon.
August 6, 2015: Employer (same engineer again) calls and tells me the offer has now changed so that the rate is now $30/hour. He says that, after reviewing my experience, it was decided upon by HR to drop the rate. He tries to convince me to take the offer based on the fact that I will get OT to make up for the drop in rate. I let him know I’m not happy about the offer I accepted not being honoured and he proposes that I email him that day or the next with a counter offer. At this point his tone kind of indicated to me that regardless of what my counter offer would be, it would be rejected and they would pull their existing offer.
August 7, 2015: I email the engineer a counter at $37.50/hour with no benefits. He replies about an hour later telling me that the difference between $37.50 and $30 is too great. He lets me know the offer is now closed and they will be moving ahead with alternate candidates.
Honestly, this entire process seems highly unprofessional to me. I would appreciate any thoughts anyone may have on this.
So to get this straight, you interviewed with the understanding you’d have benefits, they call you after a month of this understanding and tell you “oh, we can’t give you benefits after all” with no increase in salary to make up for it, then call you back again and cut the salary too, you counter with a higher salary to make up for the lost benefits, then they tell you to get lost after all that time and trouble?
It sounds like they’re trying to take as much advantage of the fact that “the economy for engineers is not good here” as possible.
Yes, that’s right. I was told in the second interview that I was being favoured for a one year contract rather than a permanent position. However, they didn’t mention I wouldn’t be receiving benefits until I was made an offer.
During the phone conversation I had where I was made my first offer, I was told that, despite receiving no benefits, I would gain experience in these tough economic times. The same was said when the offer was reduced.
I should note that this company is an oil field services company. I do understand that companies in the oil industry are suffering and there are few positions available, so I accepted the $35/hour offer with no benefits right when it was extended to me.
To go back on an already agreed upon offer seems really low to me. If they wanted to pay me $30 rather than $35/hour, then why not just make that offer in the first place. To then just flat out end negotations after I propose a counter offer is disappointing as well.
All things considered though, it is probably best I don’t work for people and an organization that behave this way.
That is what I am looking at doing now. In Alberta most companies are in one way or another involved in the oil industry, so jobs are hard to come by now. I will have to try to find a position elsewhere in Canada or abroad. Another option I have is to go back to school for an advanced degree and wait for the economy to improve.
Something similar happened in my company; after an office had been made, HR decided the agreed upon signing bonus was too high. We lost an excellent candidate, and never found one of her worth. The department was restructured, and her intended responsibilities were contracted out, at a significantly higher additional cost than the signing bonus.
Consider yourself lucky. You dodged a bullet.
One thing that is worse than no job is a shit job. Such jobs take the life out of you and are difficult to recover from. Take today’s enthusiasm and look for a good fit. You won’t regret it.
But then, it’s always easier to find a job when you have a job. Might have been better to take a shitty job, and update your resume as you continue your job search. At least you’d have an income as you looked.
You being a new college grad I can see accepting the second offer, that was $35/hr with no benefits, just for the experience. But them lowering the offer again I think is a sign the company isn’t being ran well at all and may be in such dire financial straits that it’s going to start lay offs soon anyway. Contract engineers are very easy to drop in a lay off situation.
You were right to reject the $30/hr offer and move on, that’s not a company you want to work for–part of navigating the job market in your career is going to be learning to sort through places you don’t want to work in the first place.
Pretty classless for them to offer lower pay. That should have been the end of it right there. The supervising engineer may have been trying to do you a favor by giving him some work and he got stepped on by HR or someone up higher. It was pretty clear that a counter offer at higher pay wasn’t going to be accepted. Time to move on, hopefully you won’t have too big of a pile of experiences like this before you find a good position.
Simple bait-and-switch tactic. They thought they had a gullible kid on the hook that they could fuck with with impunity, and that you’d take any crumb they offered. Somebody probably got bitch-slapped when they got your counter, but then they couldn’t back down.
This is why I hate doing negotiations verbally. Next time, ask the manager to email you his offer so you can take a look at it and let him know you’ll respond by the end of the day or in an hour or whatever. Then you have something in writing in case it gets fubared later.
With a company in distress it could’ve been less sinister. They probably need someone in the position, and when the job was created/approved by HR that position was a permanent full benefit position. Then somewhere along the line word came down that the budget for that department was cut so now it had to be a no-benefit contracting position. Dropping it from $35 to $30 is where it gets less understandable, but it’s possible it was HR trying to play games (probably to the hiring manager’s chagrin) just squeezing more out of the college grad candidate.
Even offers made in good faith are often worthless, especially if they are verbal. A friend of mine once made a verbal offer to someone that he had every intention of honoring. Someone further up the chain of command had a different idea. The candidate had already given notice at their place of employment.
In my career in IT, I have been lied to so many times that I pretty much expected it. I have been lied to (in writing) about bonuses, job title, nature of the job and vacation time. I have not been lied to (at least in writing) about the salary.
You are currently doing what and making how much? You are not putting your engineering skills to use. The longer you are out of school without practically applying your skills, the less attractive an employee you’d make. You are living in an area where engineering employment is tight. Not taking this job puts you in the position of considering moving (expensive) or going back to school (expensive).
They offered no benefits - but its Canada. Your employer doesn’t give you your health care package (in the U.S. that’s a big deal, but unless I’m missing something, in Canada no benefits means vacation and holiday pay - maybe retirement funding?)
You should have sucked it up and taken the contract job. Then continued to explore other opportunities. This could be the work of a bad manager, a bad HR person or it could be endemic to the company, but you’ll never get the opportunity to find out if this was one bad seed.
(My husbands biggest platform for success started with a really horrible manager. She didn’t last, he did. He got promoted several times, learned a ton of stuff, and left to become a Vice President at another large company)
A year on a crappy contract would have made you a better grad student with practical experience who went to grad school to get a better job and learn more about his field instead of the guy who went to grad school because he couldn’t get a job. Employers really prefer the first guy.
A year commitment in your career is nothing. You can put up with crappy for a year. It would be different if you were turning down this job because there was something likely and better on the horizon, but there isn’t.