I appreciate the heads up. My scam sense is good, but it’s hard to be perfect when there are so many kinds of scams out there.
I think most of us would at least sniff the scam at the upload your CV and pay $5 stage. But I still wouldnt feel great if I had sent my CV to scammers.
I’m interviewing with a foreign company. It’s pretty small, about 30 people, and I’d be only the second US employee. They have plans to expand the US team, but this still would be a pretty huge cultural shift for me.
Not sure if I’m really thinking this through. If anyone else has done anything like this I would appreciate input.
The job itself seems great, it’s more the cultural issues I’m concerned about.
You might get better feedback if you were willing to name the country as that probably makes a difference. However, it’s understandable that you may not want to.
I haven’t been in this spot myself, but my general experience is that foreigners tend to cut Americans quite a bit of slack in this regard, so as long as you aren’t super-obnoxious and make an effort, you should be fine with respect to cultural issues.
I mean like corporate culture more than culture culture. Automatically being in an outgroup in almost all situations.
I’ve been a fully remote worker since 2006, but this is a different ballgame.
I have no experience, but my gut says that a Euro corporate culture would probably be less toxic on average than the average US corporate culture, although the differences between companies are going to be large compared to the difference in averages.
Would you have foreign counterparts (or soon to be domestic ones) in your role you could associate with, or is this hire in anticipation of you being up the ladder a rung or two with ~1 foreign peer and no domestic ones (and only underlings would be on the horizon)? My company’s culture is pretty good, and while at big gatherings the non-US workers tend to associate by region or country, people in the same role tend to mix easily also.
I have worked extensively with chinese and japanese teams the last several years and all I can say is that the cultural differences are vast - but that’s only part of it, time zone issues require good management or things take an impossibly long time to turn around.
I love how soulless interviewing is. I talk to some recruiter last week for some place, 15 minute call, normal stuff. They do a “online assessment” to start i.e. write some code for us before you get an interview, OK fine whatever. I start doing it and work on it a few times over the weekend, in all takes an hour. It all works perfectly, does exactly what the instructions says, passes all the built in tests. As I turn it in I realize that its implied but not specifically stated that I have to do it all at once i.e. get timed. I put in a note saying oh sorry didn’t see that.
Rejected 3 days later with a form letter that says “Our team really enjoyed talking to you but…”. I never met their team.
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Yeah, most industries have tried really hard to streamline and automate the hiring process, mainly with the result of making the whole thing stupider. And, to be fair, cheaper. It’s a great way to save a few pennies and give thousands of people a negative and long lasting bad impression of your company. This is Corporate Management 101 stuff for the 21st century.
Dehumanization. But at scale!
Yet somehow they still all pay insane amounts of money to recruiters
Corporate America is absolutely soul crushing in every way
fuck third party recruiters too.
I was at the final stages of an interview where I was told verbally they were 100% both by the recruiter and the hiring manager/team.
we enter salary negotiations and I asked this dipshit to let me negotiate for myself, he didnt, and I’m not sure what happened, but the entire thing fell through and I was enraged. never again. think he got greedy/tried to play hardball on them. i was up front right away about my salary expectations so nothing shouldve been surprising.
In today’s interview drama, the interviewee lived hundreds of miles away and had a poor connection and his audio and his video was unsynced. One of my coworkers who I considered a pretty even keeled guy was private messaging us saying the guy had someone else in the room who was lip syncing with the interviewee to give great answers and that’s why the audio and video didn’t sync.
When he brought it up to the executive who was doing the leadership interview the executive sounded like he couldn’t believe someone could even come up with that accusation, which to be fair, is right.
The lip sync thing is an actual thing. Not sure how prevalent it is, but I wouldn’t discount it 100%. People are getting very creative with interviewing scams. Google proxy interview support for a deep dive.
This is a classic example of obscuring a cost rather than actually being efficient.
Before this was all outsourced, companies had more internal HR folks that would deal with the monotony of hiring/firing. But everyone hates HR and those people cost money! It’s really easy to say let’s fire the 5 HR dummies and replace them with a budget of 3.5 FTE of HR dummies in external vendor fees. That’s efficiency! Usually the guy who implements that idea and puts a big green checkmark on his personal annual to do list isn’t the guy that has to deal with a) the shitty performance of the vendor or b) the budget overruns with the vendor that wipe out all the alleged gains anyway.
But, curiously, he doesn’t have to return any of his bonus.
When I got my first couple of jobs in the early 2000s my experience was:
a) As a nobody right out of college with no serious work experience, I interviewed with a couple of people that I would be working with and then the second interview was with the office leader of the company. I chatted with the office leader for about 15 minutes and he said “tell me what number I need to offer you in salary and when you want to start”. The end.
b) Two years later I made a move for more money, I interviewed with a couple of people that I would be working with and then the second interview was breakfast with the office leader of the company. We did a handshake agreement and he told me to tell HR when I wanted to start. I didn’t even have an offer letter from that company, I just told the HR person I wanted to start on a start date a few weeks later and I just showed up that day and they gave me a job.
This was all a million times more efficient than submitting resumes and cover letters through on line portals and having a series of phone calls with a bunch of fairly irrelevant nobodies until you get to talk to the actual hiring manager and then have to complete 9 more steps in “the system”.
Looking though it I still how people could try and pull it off but the specific interview there were none of the tell tell signs that they mention.
Luckily I don’t think he’ll get the job so we won’t find out if he did pull of a good con job or not.
Generally I’m surprised at the amount of paranoia my coworkers have when interviewing people. So far they’re accused, after the interview of course, about 40 to 50% of the interviewees of something nefarious. And these are the coworkers who usually don’t do crazy things.
I may have encountered proxy interview support before, albeit indirectly, and it was pre-covid, so it was over the phone, not on video chat. I interviewed one woman for a highly technical position, and it was plainly obvious that she was massively incompetent after ~2 questions and oddly had no shame about this. I had no idea how she got to even be in the chair opposite me, and my boss said that she must have had help during his phone interview. I can’t rule out my boss at the time being a horrible interviewer, though.
Third party recruiters are mostly total shitbags.
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As are first and second party recruiters.
Come to think of it, recruiters suck.