So the interview with the asshole was on Friday. The guy couldn’t even bear to look at me. I never mentioned my wife and her treatment by him but, boy, he was fearing it the whole time.
It’s hard to look at it objectively of course but he gave the worst interview I’ve ever been in on. The first sentence out of his mouth was an obvious lie (I even saw the person next to me write “lie” on her notepad) and it went downhill from there. He couldn’t answer the first question asked to him and rambled without giving an answer on the second. I had question number three, so I started off easy, asking him why he’d lied about his title on on his resume. After denying it I asked him why his company’s website listed a different title for him and why his listed duties matched that title instead of the one on his resume…and, oh, why didn’t he have any experience in half of the duties required for this job he’s interviewing? He claimed that “he had so many titles and responsibilities he couldn’t remember his exact title at any one time.” Oh, so that’s why you called yourself (the equivalent of) Director of Sales when your real title was Office Manager, Sales Department. Gotcha.
Oh, it got better. The next question I asked him was “well six people have left your department within the last year including (guy that many of us in the room knew), what would those people say about you if we asked them?” He claimed that he didn’t supervise or know most of those people (LIE: he directly supervised two of them, indirectly supervised another two, and his boss was a fifth) and he wasn’t sure what they’d say. Well, what about the Services team you supervise now? I asked. “Er…” Yes, I knew he’d been demoted from supervising them. “I think they’d say I was a fair manager, uh…” he trailed off.
I saved the best for last. He’d earlier claimed he’d been the “right-hand man” of the previous AVP at his job, who he lied about “leaving for other opportunities”. I said, now, the previous AVP was let go by your company two months ago (at this point he was so rattled he didn’t even bother to “correct” me). But despite you serving as the AVP’s right-hand man, you weren’t even considered for the job and they had to ask someone who was planning to retire to stay on to serve as permanent AVP! What do you think you could bring to our company as AVP that your previous company didn’t see in you? You could see he wasn’t expecting that one to put it mildly…his first response was “well I didn’t really want to be AVP at that company.” The person next to me actually started laughing at that answer. I don’t remember what else he said, but at that point it really didn’t matter.
So a few of us got together after the interview. We all agreed, jeez, not only is this guy inexperienced, every other word out of his mouth is a lie. So we’re thinking, OK, now today or Monday we’re going to sit down with the VP and discuss the candidates we interviewed and make a recommendation. I mean, that’s how it works here. Every interview I’ve been in or run, the interviewers sit down with the hiring manager and discuss what happened. So I asked the VP’s secretary when this was planned to happen. You could tell she didn’t want to answer this question…there were a lot of “well, I mean, we haven’t thought…” Finally she admitted that the VP had no plans to talk to us about the candidates, at all. “But if you want to talk to the VP personally, you can do that.” Oh great. That’s really going to sway him, and I’m sure he’s going to have the time to sit down with six interviewers individually.
So, yeah, the fix is in, big time. It’s HR policy that an HR rep sit in on any interview–that didn’t happen. The interviews were scheduled the day before Thanksgiving break and the first one was scheduled on the Monday after…when three potential interviewees were conveniently scheduled to be out of town on business trips.
I’ve really got two choices to make. I could go to HR (the interim HR director is someone I trust and who trusts me) and point out the falsification on the resume and the irregularities during the search process such as the lack of an HR rep at the interview, and see if it would do any good. With the old HR director, I would have said no, but this new HR director plays by the book–and is too new to worry about office politics. Or I could say, well, fuck it, the VP wants this guy, they are personal friends from way back and he wants someone loyal in the position even if that costs him half of the office (half of the office quit or were fired largely because of him at his last company, so that’s no exaggeration). And then I go looking right away, start calling the contacts and search firms and consulting businesses I know (I really thought I was the worst networker around until I started looking at the list I’d made for myself).
I think right now I owe it to my family to have one last throw of the dice and talk to the HR director. Any job I find is likely to be a long way away from them. And much as I’ve struggled to make myself part of the family, I need them too.
I suppose I should just be thankful that they’re not post-its, like I originally thought.
