On The Road Again

  A little more than two months ago my contract ended at the place I was programming at in Ames. I didn’t have another job lined up and had resolved to be a bit choosy in picking my new job with the end result hopefully to be making closer to the incredibly generous rate I was being paid in Ames and working closer to Marshalltown than the 60 mile commute to Des Moines I had in the past few years.

  In order to let the world of recruiters know I was available I updated my resume on dice.com and changed my status on LinkedIn to ‘looking for work’. Almost immediately recruiting companies started making contact with me. Most of the jobs openings were what I considered low-paying ‘contract to hire’ jobs with no benefits with the idea that the promise of being hired after six months to a year will make up for the low rate.

  I explained to the recruiters that my salary range was higher than the openings and also explained that that my range was subject to change. That was good enough for most of them. One recruiter submitted me for a direct hire position but would not accept my explanation about not considering a particular contract to hire position. The same recruiter wrote to me two weeks later to ask about the contract to hire position and I replied asking if he heard anything about the direct hire position he had submitted me for. I got a reply asking me if I would talk to his supervisor about the contract to hire position.

  I said OK and talked to the supervisor in the afternoon. The supervisor told me that he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t consider the contract to hire position because he had ‘been in this business a long time’ and they were offering the going rate. I couldn’t resist asking how old the supervisor was. He was 32 which meant that I had been programming before he had been born and we probably had vastly different ideas about what ‘a long time was’ (he has been a recruiter for 7 years which may be a long time for being a recruiter but I wouldn’t think so).

  The supervisor and I weren’t going to agree but when I asked why I didn’t get any feedback about the direct hire job he said he was going to call his contact at the company in the next week and apologized for the ‘mis-communication’ which was really non-communication since there would have to be a communication in the first place for a ‘mis-communication’ to have taken place. I heard back from the recruiter the next week saying the position had already been filled which tells me that this recruiter had no relationship with the company except to spitball resumes in their direction or else he maybe would have known how the hiring process was getting along. I haven’t heard from the recruiter or the supervisor since which means I haven’t had any time wasted by them which is a positive in my book.

  When you deal with the recruiters of the world (or at least in Central Iowa) you get a good feel for who has relationships with the hiring companies and who is just throwing resumes at companies. Most of the recruiters are trying to get candidates for a few jobs at the same companies. When only one recruiter is mentioning a company that is a good sign they have a personal relationship and you will be considered more carefully if they submit you. By the middle of February I had four in person interviews and two phone interviews in the span of two weeks. All the face to face interviews went well enough and three of them were for what I would consider top-shelf companies that had good pay and interesting work. I thought I did well in the interviews where I was asked concrete questions (solving deadlocks, dealing with an unforeseen issue) and less well where I was asked questions where the right answer was some buzzword that I wasn’t familiar with. I felt the buzzword type of questions were trying to see of someone my age was up on newer technologies since they were almost always brought up by younger interviewers.

  I decided that I would want to work for three of the four companies I had interviewed with and would accept an offer from any of them given the right compensation. The only problem was that the companies are all 60 miles away in Des Moines. I had a phone interview with a company in Grinnell that was 45 miles away and had the perk of being able to work from home two days a week but they were deliberate in their hiring process and had scheduled a face to face interview for a week after the other interviews.

  The next week my face to face interview in Grinnell got postponed for a week but a recruiter called with a job opening in Marshalltown. We talked in Wednesday and scheduled an interview for Friday. The only problem was I got a job offer on Friday morning from a company in Des Moines. I said I wanted to take till Monday to think it over which was accepted. I told the people in Marshalltown about my situation during the interview but they told me that the process would take at least two weeks to determine if an offer would be made or even if a second round of interviews was going to be necessary.

  The interview went well enough and I let both the Marshalltown and Grinnell recruiters know that I had to make a decision on Monday. I didn’t hear from anyone so I decided to accept the job I was offered and take myself out of the running for the other jobs. Did I make the right call? I’ll never know. I do know that I was concerned with being the second choice from the other jobs and not having any job after interviewing for a bunch of top-shelf jobs.

  There was a third option that I didn’t pursue which was to accept the job and renege on the deal if a better offer had come along. From a cold analytical standpoint this was the correct option to take as long as I didn’t mind giving my word and going back on it. For me this was not an option. I’ve accepted jobs in the past and then gotten counter offers to remain where I was and increased offers from other companies and increased offers from other jobs. I’ve never gone back on my word and never regretted it either. I like being able to go to sleep not thinking about having broken my word. Also almost every job I’ve had has either provided me extra income after leaving or new skills to make me more valuable to the next job and I don’t expect this job to be an exception, The only downside is that I am back to the hour long commute each way which is 40 minutes longer per day than the commute to Ames and an hour longer than the commute to my living room if I could have gotten a work-at-home job.

Unlike Willie Nelson I am not looking forward to being on the road again, perhaps because while Willie will be in places that he's never been, I will be on the same stretch of asphalt over and over and over...