This Call Was Different
In early 2000, I got a phone call at home from an IT recruiter. This wasn’t uncommon at all. I had at one point or another interacted with half the sleazy recruitment agencies in my city. This call was a little bit different. It was from an in-house recruiter for a tech company, a company that was one of the shining stars of tech where I lived, with a reputation for not only having solid technology in their market, but also being a great place to work.
They were an honest-to-goodness “unicorn” back before anyone called them that. The conversation went something like this:
Recruiter: Hi I’m a recruiter from CoolTechCompany. How are you today?
Me: Doing well, thanks, what can I do for you?
Recruiter: I’m calling because Lynne gave me a copy of your resume, and suggested that I reach out to you about a position we have open.
A bog-standard HR introductory call followed, where I found out that they were looking for a lead Windows systems admin for their internal IT department. Now this confused the heck out of me, because Lynne was my lead, albeit through a dotted line. Let that sink in: My boss sent my resume to a recruiter without my knowledge or permission.
Obviously, this was something that warranted further investigation. So, I called Lynne. Apparently, she had just interviewed at CoolTechCompany and didn’t get the job. On the “thanks but no thanks” call from HR, she told the recruiter something to the effect of “Well, that’s too bad, but I know someone else you need to talk to. He’s better at this stuff than me, and I think he’d love working at CoolTechCompany”.
And then she sent over my resume, which she had from when she referred me for an internal hire job in another division of the company we both worked at. When I asked her why she did that, her reply chilled me. She just said: “You have to trust me on this one. I can’t say more”.
So I had a phone interview with the hiring manager at CoolTechCompany. He and I meshed well, and he decided to bring me in for the full gauntlet interview with the rest of the systems admin team there.
Around this time, I got a meeting request from Jim, a higher-up who had it out for me. At the meeting, Jim informed me that our company had decided to insource all the contract systems admins and bring them on as direct employees—including me. He had an offer letter waiting for me at the meeting.
I opened the offer letter, only to discover that it was a 20% pay cut from what I was earning as a contractor, to do the same job. There was a slight bump in terms of benefits value, but at first glance it was obvious that this was a pay hit no matter how you added it up. Jim also informed me that this wasn’t optional, that the insourcing was going to happen whether I liked it or not, and that this was a “take it or leave it” offer.
Not only would this be a pay cut, but I would also be reporting directly to Jim, as would all the other newly-insourced systems admins on the team. Either one of those would be dealbreakers, but I kept my mouth shut, knowing he didn’t like me. I caught up with Lynne a few minutes later. She took one look at my face and knew what had just happened.
“This is why I told you to trust me” she said, before I even said a word. I could have kissed her. So, a couple of weeks later I went in for the full interview at CoolTechCompany, which resulted in an offer that would have been a no-brainer to accept even if I hadn’t just had my pay cut. I received that offer just before the planned effective date of the insourcing (and pay hit).
The next day, I walked in to Lynne’s cube and let her know that I’d gotten the job. She got this look of utter delight on her face and said to me: “You HAVE to let me be there when you tell Jim”. So, we walked over to his office together, and told him. His response was priceless. He looked absolutely floored, and as usually did when he didn’t get his way, immediately went into argument mode.
“All the other people took the job”. True, but two others quit within the first two months because they didn’t have the head start on their job search that I did. “You’re making a big mistake” (And why would that be?) “Do you think that little company is going to last”? (They did).
The problem was that because of the planned insourcing, there was no mechanism to continue to pay me past the end of that week. Enter Marie. Marie was Jim’s boss, who I had a great relationship with. Now, I felt genuinely bad about this, because IT operations at corporate HQ was her responsibility, and this left her with not only no email server support, but only a day to figure out how to ensure continuity.
My backup had quit for unrelated reasons a month before. I was perfectly willing to give two-weeks’ notice as per custom, mind you—they just didn’t have a straightforward way to pay me for it. So, Marie called me into her office after Jim had left for the day. I told her that I was already in the interview process at the time Jim gave me the offer.
This was true, although I left out the whole part about Lynne. I said the fact that it was such a big pay cut made it a no-brainer to continue the process. Marie had an utterly stunned look on her face. Then she made a huge revelation. “Pay cut? You all were supposed to be kept at parity”.
What I found out later (through my mole Lynne) was that Jim neglected to relay that instruction to company HR when they were preparing the offer letters. They prepared the offers at what HR deemed to be market rate, which in this case was a substantial pay hit. I never found out if he did that on purpose, but given that he’d complained in the past that he thought we were overpaid for what we did, I’d be willing to hazard a guess that he did.
Anyway, even though Marie upped the offer to match my current pay rate (so much for take it or leave it) and promised that I’d be reporting to her given my past history with Jim, I still declined as my new job had a lot more long-term opportunity. HR was VERY confused at my exit interview when they noticed that I’d been with the company for only nine working days.
Incidentally, I ended up staying at CoolTechCompany for over eight years. It was the best career move I ever made. My only regret about it was that I was never able to get Lynne a job there. On the other hand, Marie stepped in and took away all of Jim’s supervisory responsibility, sticking him in a strict technical role. He lasted a few months after that and bailed out to a much smaller company.