Robert Half Int'l, Austin

Infuriation: Phony interview appointment, no real job

Phony interview appointments happen more often than the honest public realizes. Why would a recruiting agency make a phony appointment for an applicant? We can't be sure, but we suspect it may start as a phony entry on a status report, the kind of report listing recent accomplishments for recruiting staff. We suppose that there are minimum quotas of activities that must be listed on these reports: how many jobs posted, X number of applicants solicited, Y number of interviews scheduled, and so on. Another possible explanation is that the account manager sends an invitation to the hiring manager, saying that Candidate John is available at X o'clock, and then the account manager runs with that plan without any confirmation. We just don't know the cause, but in this case, the broken process caused a candidate to await a phone interview that never came, for a job that never was. Regardless of individual fault, when the process breaks this way for a recruiting company, then that recruiting company is itself broken, and that's why this whole office is in the Recruiter Hall of Shame.

How can the earnest applicant spot these scams? NEVER respond to any job solicitation without a real job description and without knowing the name of the ultimate client. NEVER accept an appointment for a phone interview without knowing the identity, name and company, of the caller.

Applicants can't even trust Robert Half, a long-time recruiting shop. In this case, the Robert Half recruiter solicited our nominator for a high-profile position, supposedly for the client company of a well-regarded business consultancy company, to fulfill a contract for yet another organization. That is: Robert Half => consultancy company=> client company=> end-user organization. This is obviously a no-accountability bowl of spaghetti, since Robert Half claimed not to know the client company.

Whether it was the Robert Half account manager's fault for lying about a job to begin with, at some point in the recruitment process, the recruiter surely realized that without (a) any job description, and (b) claiming not to know the name of the ultimate client, that this job was not real.

In this case, after revising the resume to meet the job title (remember, no job description for this unidentified employer, supposedly the consultancy company's end client), the applicant was told to expect a phone screen at a certain hour. The Robert Half recruiter promised that the business consultancy company had insisted on keeping their client a mystery, and that all would be revealed in the phone interview.

You know what happened - nothing. The hour came and went. Our nominating applicant called the Robert Half recruiter, who supposedly called the account manager, who supposedly called the business consultancy, who supposedly said that they had suddenly freed up an internal resource who would do the job. If these calls actually took place, this was better communication from Robert Half in one burst than had occurred in the previous weeks, which is ... coincidental, to say the least. It's also highly ... coincidental ... that a well-regarded business consultancy would have been so derelict and uncommunicative, and wouldn't have cancelled the appointment, and so this smells like a garbage excuse from a recruiting company.

The proof? The JOB NEVER EXISTED! Our nominator reached out to personal contacts, familiar with the end-user organization, who told him the job was a fairy tale. And so we have another fairy tale post for the Recruiter Hall of Shame.