Job Slammed: Headcount Cancelled

So, I've been out of work for a bit, using a combination of some investments and unemployment checks to keep my head above water while I looked not just for a job, but the right one... a job that not only paid somewhere near what I believe I'm worth, but that provided challenges I would find interesting and opportunities for growth. All the while, I've had the impending birth of my second child looming on the calendar, motivating me to find something.

So, finally, it looked like I found something. The money was a bit less than I wanted, but the job looked really interesting and the company seemed to be a good place to work. I did a half-hour phone interview on Tuesday the 16th, then went in for 3+ hours of in-person interviews on Friday the 19th, and on Monday the 22nd the headhunter who had been arranging all this called and told me I had the job... almost.

See, this is a small company with a one-person HR department. Their head of HR was on sabbattical in Tajikistan or Kazahkstan and they had a contractor in as a replacement, but that contractor was on vacation and wouldn't be back until today. They couldn't make an official offer until the HR person returned and could both check my references and put together the official "offer letter". So all week, the headhunter is telling me to be ready for the offer letter to come today and let's try to jump on it quickly.

At 3 p.m. today, I e-mailed the headhunter and asked where the offer letter was. About a half-hour later he called me to tell me he finally got in touch with his contact on this and the position had been cancelled. It's not that they had given the job to someone else. They hadn't changed their minds about me or decided they liked someone else better. I hadn't done anything wrong. The upper management cut the money that was budgeted to pay for the position.

Here's the odd part of this. One of the things I asked about in the interviews was the "work/life balance." The answer was that it had been good, but as the workload in the department increased, it had started getting out of hand, and they were really glad to be getting another person in to help it return to sane levels.

So, since the position is cancelled, the work/life balance doesn't improve and possibly gets worse. By cancelling the position, they demonstrated to me that this is a bad place to work. But if they hadn't cancelled it, it would have been a good place to work.

How's that for logic? If it makes your head hurt, the line for aspirin starts behind me.

Sigh.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Job Hunting.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.