‘I saved you’: Rejected job offer turns out to be a blessing in disguise when a recruiter admits that the prospective company was corrupt

A recruiter turned away overqualified job candidates to save them from the exploitative tendencies of a corrupt company. Although it was disappointing at the time, this weirdly heroic act saved an IT professional from getting stuck in a bad career, and he found out a year later exactly how lucky he was to have avoided that position. 

Getting locked in a bad job is exhausting. Without the energy or the wherewithal to continue your job search, oftentimes, overworked, full-time employees will sit complacently in an exploitative space simply because it's familiar and it's easy. Deserving higher pay, better hours, and more respect from the higher-ups, overqualified employees shouldn't have to swim upstream to find a good-paying job with a decent workplace. 

This prospective employee was applying for jobs like crazy when they finally landed an interview. With misplaced excitement, they crushed the interview and aced the quiz section of the job application, but to their surprise and their dismay, they were rejected without explanation. A year later, after finding a good job with decent hours and a nice salary, the same recruiter who had rejected him walked into the workplace. When he recognized the IT pro, he admitted to the real reason his job application was rejected; he was saving him from exploitation. 

Author image for Jesse Kessenheimer Jesse Kessenheimer
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  • Woman sitting at her desk with her laptop open while other coworkers scrutinize her work.
    via Karola G

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

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  • The recruiter who rejected me just got hired at my company. She told me the real reason why I was rejected. So this is kind of wild.
    via RELPL
  • Mid-2024, after about three years in IT Support, I decided I wanted to move up-sysadmin work, or at least a higher tier support role. Started applying everywhere. Got an interview at a cloud computing company close to where I live for an IT System Support position. Seemed good.
    via RELPL
  • I did a technical interview. Then an HR interview. Then a technical test. Then a personality test. Everything felt like it went well. They said they'd be in touch soon. Two weeks later: rejected. No explanation.
    via RELPL
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  • I kept job hunting with zero luck. Eventually quit my job after 2.5 years there. Took a trip. Enrolled in college. Dropped out after two semesters (wasn't for me). Took another trip. Went back to sending out what felt like hundreds of applications.
    via RELPL
  • Finally landed an IT Manager role at a startup. Not exactly what I was looking for, and the commute is rough, but the pay is solid and there's room to grow. I've been there about a month now.
    via RELPL
  • A few weeks in, I'm onboarding a new recruiter. Her face looks familiar but I can't place it. A few days later we're chatting about past jobs and she goes, "Wait-I remember you."
    via RELPL
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  • She was the recruiter from the cloud computing company. The one that rejected me. Then she tells me what actually happened:
    via RELPL
  • They pay 27% less than what I was making at my previous job
    via RELPL
  • High turnover across the board-employees, managers, especially HR managers
    via RELPL
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  • They fired her because she kept rejecting candidates who were "too good"
    via RELPL
  • The only people who accepted offers were people desperate enough to take anything . I scored 100 on their technical test
    via RELPL
  • Woman typing on her work laptop to apply for jobs.
    via Karola G

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

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  • She looked at me and said, "I saved you." So yeah. Spent over a year feeling like I fumbled that opportunity. Turns out it wasn't an opportunity at all.
    via RELPL
  • TL;DR: Got rejected from a job after acing their process. A year later, the recruiter who rejected me got hired at my current company and told me she "saved me" the place paid way less, treated people terribly, and only hired desperate candidates. She got fired for rejecting people who were too qualified.
    via RELPL
  • NanoCurrency Interesting. But you should have the option of choosing whether to take the job, not her.
    via NanoCurrency
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  • OP RELPL Even better: write the wage in the job posting, wouldn't have wasted my time.
    via RELPL
  • Watermelon_Salesman Don't trust HR people. They have HR souls and speak in HRspeak.
    via Watermelon_Salesman
  • OP RELPL My girlfriend works in HR, we've been together for 4 years and counting
    via RELPL
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  • morphballganon Maybe she's telling the truth. Or maybe she came up with that story to avoid a culture of resentment.
    via morphballganon

    Whether she's telling the truth or not, this does seem to be an easily solved quandary. The company's bad reputation might have been cleverly hidden from prospective recruits, but an insider knows what's really going on.

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