The whole thing smells of management at that company not having the authority to do or offer anything. It’s clear they didn’t even have authority to offer a full-time job with benefits considering it changed to contract with no benefits so quickly.
With your counter offer well above what they were able to do, you showed that you really weren’t playing ball. If you had been a little closer, who knows? Maybe it would have gone the same, maybe not…
The OP is in Canada and the job was being offered directly by the company, which should have been through purchasing. Before for some demented reason they had “HR” involved in this too. At least in the US, companies would go through a contract house for this, because they don’t want to get involved in problems with contractors claiming to be employees who are entitled to the same benefits other employees there get such as a stock options. The contract house marks up the cost of the employee and the employee is paid from the “employer” which is the contract house, not the client company. In this arrangement it is more often a W-2 than a 1099. But for the OP in Canada, this “client” company is directly treating the OP as if they were a direct employee but without benefits. It could be more bait and switch than this. Some US companies interview employees and then direct them to go to a contract house for the job.
Based on posts at the Ask the Headhunter site there are lots of companies where HR rules, restricting managers from even talking to candidates unless it goes through them. I’ve always worked in tech companies where HR is smart enough to know that they can’t make hiring decisions, and instead arrange for interviews, do the paperwork, and prepare a suggested salary amount. You’d think O&G would be using this model. And this company seems to because the OP spoke to the manager.
Well, color me educated and somewhat surprised. HR should be much more knowledgeable about any policies and legal issues involved with hiring and, for that matter, firing of employees. I can’t imagine why a company wouldn’t use HR as a communication buffer in those situations.
I’ve been at companies where candidates in the pipeline ran into massive cuts, and it isn’t pretty, especially for recruiting managers who spoke to candidates in good faith.
Excellent points about setting salary and about contract status, by the way. As I said, all our contractors come from bonded companies, though we can get them to hire on people we want as contractors. We’d never try to downgrade a regular candidate this way - or I hope not. It’s never been suggested.
But that wasn’t the offer the OP accepted. The OP didn’t play games and accepted the first offer, it was the employer who started in with the unprofessional nonsense.
I guess I should move my company to Canada, where I can play games with employees like this and they just take it on the chin. Coming up with all kinds of justification that it’s OK to be treated unprofessionally by management. “I say $30.00 an hour? No, you don’t have experience here is your paycheck with the adjustment. It’s now $15.00 an hour and you are going to like it, because you will get all this experience. First, start off by emptying all the trash in the building.”
$37.50 likely came after the OP calculated the actual value of benefits.
It doesn’t matter, it was stupidly handled by a company you can’t trust. Benefits and then no benefits. A rate and then a lower one. Was the OP very experienced in handling this kind of situation, of course not. Someone with experience would have rejected further consideration of the job if they tried to change the terms after they were offered and accepted. As for having it in writing or not, you have to be able to trust people and if they are going to lie to you because it isn’t signed and notarized, then you need to find trustworthy people to work with. This company isn’t one of them. You people here criticizing the OP, would be the same ones that if the OP took the job and a year later run into problems there, you’d be the first to say “You shouldn’t have taken the job after they changed the terms of the offer after you accepted it. That was a red flag! I would have walked!”.
Yes, but as we can see by several posters the OP should have accepted anything they offered. Even if it came with a daily beating, because to not accept a questionable offer is considered rude and unprofessional behavior. The second the OP decided not to get abused any further, the OP’s name was entered into the employer blacklist database and will never get a job again.
But how can the HR drone know if the database administrator can tell a SQL query from a Resistor overflow partitioned anomaly procedural technician integer?
If all you care about before you hire the person is that, yes, they really did go to such and such a school, and they really did work at the jobs listed on their resume, their references really do exist and really do recommend the candidate, and the candidate has the legal right to work in the locality in question, then HR can handle all that.
But in, say, software development, there is no possible way this can work. The only person who can determine if the candidate has a chance of being able to do the work asked of them is the person they’re going to be reporting to. How else is it supposed to work? Yes, HR can set up interviews, and tell the hiring manager what salary range they’re allowed to offer. But the actual guys doing the actual work have to make the hiring decision, or the company can’t function.
I realize you’re being snarky, but I swear such a thing does exist, at least regionally. I found this out after I left an employer involuntarily (but I know now that they did me a big favor in the long run), and I wasn’t the only person who was experiencing this. The lawyer I had to hire to get my unemployment was one of my sources.
And I am damn sure to add the weasel words in the “offer.” We want to hire you but nothing is certain until everything gets signed off. And like I said, I never talk money until everything has been signed off by HR and management with the proper signature authority.
When you say involuntarily, do you mean as a result of a layoff or for what they considered as cause? I can see the latter but not the former, fair or unfair.
But absolutely no one anyone would ever want to work for would put the OP on a blacklist for having the nerve to make a too high counteroffer.
Poysyn, could you ask your husband if this kind of contract house is used in the O&G industry in Canada?
I’ve never heard of it before, and frankly it sounds like the kind of legal jiggery-pokery that I mentioned earlier, when an employer is trying to disguise that they actually have employed someone. If the contract house is just a flow-through for the salary, and the individual is really working for the employer, then it sounds like a sham to me.
I was in a “quit or be fired” scenario, and I believe to this day that my boss made something up, because it could have been easily documented with screenshots and they wouldn’t show them to me.
It wasn’t just for jobs in my field, either. Any time I applied for a job, any job, the instant they saw I had worked at that particular place, the interview was immediately over. That was something else my lawyer said he’d heard multiple times from people who had left that place around the same time.
That’s weird. But it sounds like it was the place, not you, since if your name was on some kind of list you wouldn’t have gotten an interview. And because it wasn’t just you. I won’t further hijack this thread by asking more but you got my curiosity aroused!
I’ve been fairly continually employed through multiple recessions, and have only ever been unemployed by choice. I’ve chosen shitty jobs over being dependent on my parents or someone else (a boyfriend, God Forbid) before I had the means to say screw it. If you’ve always had the financial independance to be picky, you are more fortunate than I have been. It took me 30 years to get to the point that I could say screw it. And I certainly couldn’t afford it right out of college.
We have never heard of anything like this outside of a temp agency. Most bigger companies have either in-house lawyers or legal on retainer to check out contracts. But things are also really weird in O&G right now, I can’t stress that enough.
I would use an example from my own line - Government work - our civilian Hr process can be painful at best - we often offer candidates a temporary contract to keep them until we can get everything worked out. Sometimes companies can do the same. I was on a temporary contract at one of my first (corporate) jobs. I was seriously underpaid for what I was doing, even though I was maxed out with my temp agency (they charge the company 1.5 -2X what I was making). I bided my time, proved myself, then said I was leaving unless they brought me on permanently. It happened surprisingly quickly after that.
