Applied online and was contacted by Recruiting sometime later. Initial conversations began in mid-December. Major red flag during the screening call was when the recruiter said that at ServiceRocket, you’re guaranteed payment of 90% of your salary, but the other 10% is essentially held hostage across each quarter, only released to you if you manage to hit goals that you set with your manager each quarter.
What? LOL.
It took a MONTH after this conversation to learn if I was moving forward because the company went on winter break and didn’t come back until early to mid-January. I needed to do a couple of reminder pokes, but the manager finally asked to meet with me.
They asked me some of the most generic, thoughtless questions they could’ve asked and sounded bored the whole time. I actually got the “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question (though they changed it to three years), which can’t be a clear enough indicator that not a lot of prep was put into this interview.
The manager really liked my replies, though, and I was asked to do a writing assignment.
The assignment was beefy: write a 600 word blog on a pre-selected topic, read and analyze the top-ranking blog post in Google search results on this topic and list out three points each on what it does well and what it could improve, write four social media posts promoting your blog for LinkedIn and Twitter (eight posts total), and then read and edit a blog excerpt.
The recruiter assigned it in the evening on a Wednesday and said it was due next Friday, but gave a due date of the upcoming Friday. I missed this discrepancy when I first read their email, and on Friday as I was working on it I noticed it and immediately emailed them for clarification. Did I have two days to complete all this work or a week?
Because they were located many hours ahead of me in a different country on a different continent (a really baffling decision for recruiting people in North America), they weren’t going to see the email until the following Monday. So I busted my chops to get it all done and done very well by the end of that Friday, though I also had questions about some really vague instructions in the assignment directions that I asked for clarification on when I turned in my work.
Three business days passed and I had no acknowledgement of receipt of my assignment, no answers to any of my questions. On the second business day, I reached out to let them know that I’d received an offer from another company and asked if they still wanted to continue the process with me. By the end of the third business day I pulled out of the process, let them know I accepted the other offer, and that I found it really disappointing that they never at least acknowledged receipt of the assignment I worked hard to get done on time nor answered any of my questions about the assignment even though they said to reach out if I needed help.
They replied very early the next morning and claimed they hadn’t seen any of my emails due to a work event. They said the manager really liked my assignment and wanted to move forward with me, but they understood that was no longer an option and that they didn’t fulfill responsibilities on their end that they should’ve.
If the recruiter didn’t see my emails (what recruiter doesn’t check emails for three days?), I don’t know how it’s possible that the manager reviewed my work; I didn’t have their email address, only shared my work with the recruiter, who would’ve had to have seen my emails to then share it. Their email also came in so early in the morning that it was unlikely the manager had seen it unless they were awake pre-dawn, rapidly reviewed it, and told the recruiter they liked it before emailing me.
The story didn’t add up but I’m relieved to be done with this company. Deeply unprofessional and disorganized and really disrespectful of my time from our first conversation. Awful experience.
