Because the salary was in Canadian dollars.
What are you even frothing about at this point?
Yes, the job listing that I responded to stated that benefits were provided. During my second interview, when the hiring manager told me they were considering hiring me on a one year contract, I asked if the responsibilities or benefits would differ between the advertised full-time position and a one year contract. He told me there would be no difference. Only when I received the verbal offer of a one year contract at $35/hour was I told there would be no benefits.
Still think you dodged a bullet. When a company can’t even get on the same page about the kind of position or how much to pay, that’s a big red flag that they’re going to be just as bad to actually work for. Ignore the idiots attempting to apply US law to Canada.
You’re young, I think you’ve learned a valuable lesson without getting burned, and if an advanced degree will help by all means go back to school, especially if you’ll get paid to do it. I don’t know how small a world that industry is, but it’s completely possible that others who have experience in the field know about the company you were dealing with and that it’ll have a reputation of its own. It’s possible that most people will think you dodged dealing with a bad company.
There’s also this interesting story of companies seeing their offers rejected.
OK, as far as you know, you were never even considered for a full-time position.
Who you are calling a hiring manager is really an engineering manager, correct? My point is that his job is engineering, not hiring. Most engineering managers get their position based on experience, engineering skills, and managerial skills, in that order. It’s not that managerial skills are not important, but the whole purpose of the HR department in a corporation is to keep the line-managers from having to deal with that stuff and make sure it is applied equally throughout the company. The engineering manager was trying to hire you, not find a soul-mate. Everything he told you can easily be explained by the simple fact that he did not know the facts but did not want that to shut down the conversation. His was trying to build your interest, not to finalize a contract.
You also need to understand a contracting industry (I am not talking about working contract jobs). The industry is getting smaller. Six months from now, there will be fewer people employed in Oil and Gas than there are today. If you had taken the job, you would have been one with a job in six months, instead of one of the ones looking for one (assuming you stay with the industry). There is a LOT of money in O&G. A Lot. But, those with the money don’t just throw it away. When times are good, good people are hard to find and the companies will offer a lot to keep them from looking for greener pastures. When times are bad (as they are now), the money is short, so even offering a job can be a lot.
As I said before, you may want to really consider changing industries, since O&G is very cyclic, and lay-offs among engineers is not uncommon, neither are pay-cuts and reduction (or elimination) of bonuses. If you can make it, you can make a very good living, though. Making it, however, involves playing the hand your dealt and not burning bridges.
In the first interview I was told the position was full-time. And my mistake, I meant to say engineering manager.
In my experience, most companies can’t even get on the same page on who reports to whom, so in a shrinking job market, I don’t see this as a red flag, at all.
Bolding mine. I do know the industry, having retired from it after 35 years. Even though I worked over 2000 miles away (Houston), Chances are that I either know said engineering manager or I know someone the manager interacts with every day. Over my career, I’ve worked for 4 to 6 of the largest Oilfield Service companies (the exact number varies because of corporate buy-outs reducing the number of companies), and interviewed with nearly all the rest. While it is unlikely that anyone but the OP will remember this (although the engineering manager may remember the clueless job candidate who tried demanding a higher pay than he was told they could afford, I doubt he will remember his name), I can say that such behavior isn’t going to get him anywhere in this job market.
That is interesting…
Of particular note is how the blogger ended this blog entry.
Were you offered the full-time position? I didn’t think so.
Look, I’m trying to help you. I’ve been in this industry, not only longer than you’ve been alive, but probably longer than your parents have held jobs. One of the things I have learned is that engineering managers do not always know the ins and outs of what HR does. What I am saying is that this guy may have been as up-front with you as he could be, but his boss (or, more likely, his boss’s boss’s boss) has moved the goalposts a few times since June, and haven’t bothered to tell him. Not only that, he is also powerless to do anything about it. He probably still has his job because he doesn’t allow this to affect how he does his job.
Remember;
[ul]
[li]Another word for mistake is experience.[/li][li]The only stupid mistake is one you don’t learn anything from.[/li][li]If you think a company isn’t conducting its business the right way, maybe you need to start your own company.[/li][li]The number one responsibility of a business is to make money. If it can’t satisfy this number one responsibility, the others don’t matter.[/li][/ul]
I can’t say about Canada, but in America, even if the offer is in writing it doesn’t mean much, if anything.
Outside of a CBA or a bonafide contract, it’s not going to be enforceable.
Why? Because most jobs that aren’t union are “at will,” meaning companies are free to change anything at any time.
My job can change my pay tomorrow and that’s legal. They can take away or add benefits at will.
As long as these changes are not made directed at a protected class, they’re legal.
So courts will not usually enforce even a written contract because of this. They can hire you and fire you on the same day. So what is the point of enforcing even a written offer. Even if you’re salary, they only have to pay you one day. (Salary employees receive their entire week’s pay, except starting weeks and ending weeks, of jobs, which may be prorated).
Now there are certain contracts which are genuine employment agreements, almost no one but high ups, such as CEOs, COOs, CFOs etc get these. And of course CBAs which are negotiated by your union and often covered under different rules.
All of which is irrelevant to the OP’s situation, since he’s asking for opinions about a situation in Canada, governed by Canadian law.
There are good companies out there. Perfect? Maybe not, but there are plenty of companies that do right by their employees because they understand that good employees help them make money.
In the OP’s case, the engineering manager should not have been making the offer in the first place. HR should have done that. They may be a fine company with one manager who overstepped his responsibilities in making a verbal offer to a candidate.
The personal insults don’t belong in this forum. Knock it off.
Not a mistake at all. In this context hiring manager and engineering manager are synonymous. I’m an engineer who has hired tons of people, and in all cases I made the decision about which candidate to hire - given input from those on my staff who did interviews and signoff by upper management and HR.
It is clear to me that this company is in turmoil, since it is not a good practice to play bait and switch. Which means that even if you took the job you might be out the door in three months as the junior person. Only you can decide whether you regret making the high counteroffer, but it being a bad move is not a slam dunk.
And pay no attention to usedtobe. He appears to have no experience with the hiring process at all, and has said some absurd things.
He never claimed to have been offered the full time position. He only interviewed for it, and then was told on the second interview that he was really interviewing for another less attractive job. This isn’t oil science, after all.
In my experience the hiring manager does make the offer by phone, but only after everything is signed off by HR and a letter or e-mail is on the way. You want to give good news like this in person.
What we don’t know is whether the hiring manager got approval for the $35 rate which then got cut in a budget cutting process or if he just assumed he could offer $35. One place I worked my boss wanted to cut the offer below the number HR had suggested, which is crazy. (So was he.) Suffice to say I didn’t have a lot of success hiring on the outside. Which, given the project, was lucky for the candidates. So, a candidate can’t possibly know what is going on.
Is this like the European model? My son-in-law from Germany could not leave his job until his (renewable) contract ran out. He was a full time employee covered by a contract, as opposed to the US at-will model.
Is the difference well understood in Canada? If you have been following the Uber case, it is very much up-in-the-air in the US. 25 years ago we had lots of contract employees (working for a contracting company - are they still independent in Canada?) - who got converted to employee status with no change in job function.
Here is what we suspect happened (I am a Canadians, working in Alberta. My hubby works in an oil and gas dependent area, in mechanical engineering, where he hires (and fires) people):
The engineering manager saw your application for the full time, position with benefits and thought “Wow, this guy is great on paper, but just a little green yet…I can’t offer him the full time position because we really need someone more experienced, but it would be great if we can get him on and train him up a bit. Then, when the industry turns, we can offer him something more permanent!” He then called HR that said “Sure, you can offer him something contract, around $35/hour”
After that, when he went back for the written offer - HR came back with “Yeah, we just had our budget meeting, we can’t make the $35/hour work. Sorry about that. We can do $30, but can’t go higher than that.”
Now, the manager is a little embarassed - he knows he has verbally offered you something that he can’t back. So he says to himself that he will happily go to bat for you if you counter with something reasonable - instead you blow past everything with a crazy out there of $37.50. Now he doesn’t feel badly at all about walking away from you.
That is what is happening right now in Alberta. People got used to making monster money with overtime, but the industry changed. It will rebound, it always does, but in the meantime, people gotta eat and people gotta pay bills.
That doesn’t explain why the OP wasn’t told that this was a contracting job on the first interview. His greenness is pretty obvious from his resume. Good people would email him and ask if he still wanted to an interview for a contractor job, but most people would tell him when he arrived. I suspect it is more likely the permanent job went away between the first and second interviews, but not the need for someone. It’s far easier for a company to “fire” a contractor than a permanent person, and if a permanent position became open moving the OP to it would be simple. Moving the other way, not at all simple.
I’ve been in a lot of meetings in my life splitting positions between contractor and permanent.
(PURE SPECULATION) Maybe after the first interview, the Engineering Mgr really liked him, but he wasn’t the strongest candidate, so this was a way to try him out and see if he would make a good fit?
Judging from your posts in this thread, I feel comfortable in saying nobody would consider giving you hiring authority.