Betsy Spang - Seilevel, Austin, TX

Infuriations: Job-blocking, treating applicants like children, complete lack of any business experience yet positioned as the jobs gateway.

Betsy has been put in place by Seilevel, an Austin-based company specializing in analyzing and defining software requirements for client companies. This work is both intellectually and experientially demanding, yet little Betsy has NO BUSINESS EXPERIENCE WHATSOEVER. None! Her entire post-college career (elementary ed major) consists of one school year spent student-teaching, under supervision, in an elementary school. Now for about two years, she's the so-called HR manager and recruiter for Seilevel. We're sure she impressed everybody with her creative color-coding of applicant folders, being able to order lunch for the office, and other elementary tasks. (Or her daddy invested heavily, perhaps.) As a recruiter, her job should be to ensure that applicants are not from Mars, set interview times, and forward emails -- you know, like a cocker spaniel sniffing a visitor and then disappearing. Instead, she's deciding applicants all on her inexperienced own.

This is worsened by her interview style. Applicants may relate tales of great achievement or costly disaster in the business world, but it's like speaking of nuclear physics to a cocker spaniel. Betsy has no idea what those words mean, and so periodically responds with completely inappropriate "Alriiight! Greeeaaat!" (like wagging a tail.) We suspect that she's really self-congratulating for her ability to recognize that English is actually being spoken, so who knows what she's actually noting in what's sure to be a child-like scrawl with little flower doodles in the margins. And speaking of writing, your carefully conceived, scrupulously written essay required in the application - the one referencing client engagement methodologies, your past work, all that - might as well be the list of ingredients on a dog food bag, because Betsy has no way whatsoever of comprehending it.

The very worst, though, is that her management at Seilevel previously went out of their way to brag about the "rigorous" interview process at their company, of "up to half the staff" being involved in hiring decisions. They posted this divorced-from-their-own-reality on at least one LinkedIn forum when they invited submissions for positions for new grads and experienced professionals alike. They obviously don't know or don't care that Betsy is making their hiring decisions for them, about the equivalent of a cocker spaniel screening for nuclear physicists. For that, shame on you, Seilevel, and you've earned your company a place in the Recruiter Hall of Shame.