Comment by stefanos82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stefanos82 | Hacker News Reader

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Oh I have a better story! :D

An HR called me after a 1 and a half years I originally applied for a C++ position at a FinTech company to ask me whether I'm still interested in it.

I replied "of course I am!" and she asked me to send her my resume, updated.

As soon as she received it, she immediately replied back "but here says you are an Assistant Systems Administrator; how about to arrange you another position that is closer to what you are currently doing?".

I was like "WOMAN! Read the darn line after what you read that says 'Teaching assistant (C++) during office hours', I have the necessary experience! Are you playing with me now, why did you even call me in the first place?!".

I nearly exploded from my nerves and she didn't like it.

She started shouting at me and closed the phone.

I checked her name online; lo and behold, the very first result Google returned was her (age 23) thanking an Anger Management Center for talking courses how to handle her wrath(!) with annoying customers.

I was speechless! You let a young, fresh graduate without previous experience to handle the most difficult department of your work...at a freaking FinTech company that deals with billions of dollars at a global scale?

Things have gone very wrong at so many levels...GLOBALLY!

> I nearly exploded from my nerves

Why? Why not just calmly explain the situation? Why let your emotion get the best of you?

I saw you disregard someone else's advice as well earlier, I think you're forgetting that you have to mould yourself around what the market wants not the other way around.

Let me give you another perspective: you messed this one up. In multiple ways. Maybe the HR person wasn't great or professional, but you did a wide range of things that sort of demonstrated that the company might not have been a good fit for you. I'm trying to say this in the nicest way, but I see multiple red flags that would get you exited from interviews at a wide range of professional companies, and strongly suggest you revisit how you approach these sorts of situations.

So... you got angry at her and yelled, and then got more angry because she yelled back? Forget qualifications, I wouldn't have hired you either.

Thank you for your honesty.

I know I did not handle it properly, but since you were not in my shoes at the time of the incident, you should not condemn me nor judge me for my reaction.

There's a whole theme behind the scenes with this particular HR that led to this unfortunate reaction; still though, I appreciate your sincerity and I am thankful for that.

There is almost never a good reason to be impolite! Sometimes in interviews they try to piss you off with the exact purpose to see how you handle these kind of situation… you clearly failed! My first job after university was for a big tech company… during the interview the interviewer was very aggressive and borderline impolite trying to push me “over the edge”… I handle it with calm and politeness. Needless to say I was offered the job on the spot at the end of the interview (in real life the interviewer was a delightful kind person and all the rudeness was an interviewing technique)

Rest assured, I don't condemn you. But given what you've said about the experience, I would have judged you as unfit to employ in that moment. I'm curious about your focus on the HR person's history taking anger management classes: do you think that your own anger could be better managed?

I think we have a clash of cultures here, so I don't expect people to understand how insulting was her behavior in the first place that led to my reaction.

Let me remind you: > An HR called me after a 1 and a half years I originally applied for a C++ position at a FinTech company to ask me whether I'm still interested in it.

She literally ghosted me for 1.5 years while I was sending emails for months without response; even my calls were ignored, so I decided to stop trying...and then she decided to check her Discard email folder to look for possible candidates and when she read my updated resume, she went "oh, you are not a good fit"!

Then why did you even call?! Could not you just send me an email and ask me for an updated resume so you can check whether I'm suited or not for your company's needs?

I honestly don't understand you people, seriously.

> I honestly don't understand you people, seriously.

I'm not sure why you'd say "you people"; I'm not in HR, I'm purely technical, and I find many HR folks to be incredibly frustrating and even infuriating at times. But I do not express that to them. Rather, I have, but only through a mediator, after I've cooled off, to help ensure that I wouldn't say something regrettable. As frustrating as they can be, if you yell at the HR person helping my team find a new member, bzzzt, next.

To be fair, you should probably have multiple versions of your resume, each customized for a specific type of job. If this was a C++ job, relevant experience should have been the first item, not SysAdmin. Are there inexperienced (or experienced, but still dumb) HR people? Of course. But knowing that, you didn't present yourself in the best light to overcome a predictable obstacle.

Yeah this is a good approach I try to customize my CV off a base for every role. Even shoving it in a new company-name folder in Dropbox.

Even though the person is asking for them to apply they are probably asking a lot of people so are going to scan your resume looking for keywords and alignment to a role

Probably a nepotism hire

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