Thankfully, hanging in.
September 6th, 2007 | by Scott Jennings |I took a principled stand today, and I’m not completely sure how I feel about it.
This morning, I was getting dressed for an interview when I got a call from another recruiter who wanted to talk to me about a QA job I had applied for. I breezed through the screening questions while I tied my tie and headed out for the train, and scheduled an interview for tomorrow morning. I asked him to send me an email with the details since I was out of the apartment, because I’m sort of a big deal.
After I nailed this morning’s interview, I came home to the email I was promised. What I was really after from an email was a domain name to browse to — command-C, command-T, command-V.
The first glance was impressive enough, the website was clean and attractive. Once I started reading it, though, I got a little nervous — they say they’re in the business of “delivering information directly to users on their desktops and outside the clutter of email.” It’s a client/server setup where end users install the application and “opt-in” to the information they want to see, and the company delivers targeted marketing to their users on behalf of their clients. Nowhere on their website could I find the client software, and no mention is made of how the client software is distributed or installed.
This sounds more than a little bit like spyware, right? I mean, they have a nice website and offices in Midtown, but so did Hitler.
I did some more Googling, and came up surprisingly dry. There were a few page rank-builder websites with the same fluff press release, one small agency portfolio with an internal campaign, a one-man PR shop who wrote the press release, and a LinkedIn profile from a guy with a degree in jazz performance who seems to have sold out completely. The Craigslist ad I responded to was in the first page of results. Still no mention of the client software or any companies who are using them to advertise.
This is obviously no place for me to be working, and as bored and anxious as I am to get back to the grind, I’d never accept a job offer from these folks. So I just sent an email to the recruiter (who my Googling identified as the company’s CEO) telling him simply that I will not be able to interview with his company, and apologizing for the inconvenience.
I have two really good interviews in the queue to hear back from, and should both of those fall through, I’ll take my third trip to square one. But even that will be a temporary situation — as challenging as I’m finding the mid-career interview process, I’m still interviewing regularly and knocking the rust off my presentation and my network is still actively looking out for me. I’m going to have good news shortly. These jerks were bad news.
Feel free to tell me all about how I did the right thing.
