HRLori

This is the handbook I aspire to writing.

Kudos.

Don’t we all just hate them? Stand by your words, people!

[via Laughing Squid and Toothpaste for Dinner]

It’s really nice sometimes, even when you’re not looking for a job, to get an email from a recruiter. It strokes the ego of your professional self because someone else out there recognizes how valuable you are, what talent you have and why out of thousands of people, you were the one they wanted. Just one email about potential employment can make your whole day.

Except when it doesn’t.

Such was the case with “Robert”, a guy, per Gawker, who got an email from one such recruiter. The recruiter, Joe Goddard, found Robert’s resume on Monster.com and decided to contact him, despite the fact that Robert was not willing to relocate.

The exchange (courtesy of Gawker (where it looks much prettier):

You will be Located at the global HQ, in beautiful Northwest Arkansas, home to about 450,000 people. Enjoy all the amenities of a metro-area, with the feel of a laid-back college town. Live near the gorgeous Ozark Mountains, you’ll have 4 seasons, beautiful lakes, streams, Direct Jet Service to every major city in the country, No crime, great schools and fantastic low cost of living!!!

Thank you,
Joe Goddard

Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:18 PM
To: [Joe Goddard]
Subject: Re: .Net Programmer/Developer career Opp – fortune 500!!!

Since you got my resume off of Monster, I’m sure you saw in my profile that I’m only interested in jobs in Columbus, Ohio, because you surely check these things before firing off e-mails.

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Joe Goddard wrote:

A lot of people are open to other options, outside of what they put on Monster. Now I know why you’re looking for a job – because you’re a smartass LOL, you dick.

From: [Robert]
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:26 PM
To: Joe Goddard
Subject: Re: .Net Programmer/Developer career Opp – fortune 500!!!

And I know why you’re shotgunning jobs – you’re an unprofessional hack.

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Joe Goddard wrote:

Maybe, but I’ll make 250k this year, while you’re unemployed lol

From: [Robert]
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:29 PM
To: Joe Goddard
Subject: Re: .Net Programmer/Developer career Opp – fortune 500!!!

Actually, I’m not. But then again, to know that, you would have to read my resume. Something real recruiters do, by the way.

You’re quite amusing, really.

On Apr 12, 2012 4:34 PM, Joe Goddard wrote:

I’m amused as well, this is fun. You must really love your job, considering you’re looking for a new one. By the way, does you current employer know you’re looking? J

From: [Robert]
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:55 PM
To: Joe Goddard
Subject: RE: .Net Programmer/Developer career Opp – fortune 500!!!

Yes.

And you must love yours, too, leaving an email trail like this one.

From: Joe Goddard
Date: Apr 12, 2012 5:00 PM
Subject: RE: .Net Programmer/Developer career Opp – fortune 500!!!
To: [Robert]

Ummm, since I own the company, I’d yes, I do like my job. Regarding theis email, you can rest assured I’m not a damn bit worried about this. You smartoff to me, you’re not gonna like the response. Also, I will make sure all 247 IT staffing firms in my network see this email, so they can redflag you, just as I have. Good luck in your job search hahahahahah

Probably not the best way to get your candidate. It certainly didn’t do wonders for his company’s image. Threatening a candidate and all.

Perhaps if he just said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I missed that part of your profile”, then all would be right in Joe Goddard’s world. No good can come from emailing a stranger, dangling your ego and salary in the stranger’s face and then calling him a dick.

Except maybe a silly blog post.

But it didn’t stop there. Via Venturebeat:

Yesterday, OMGPOP Chief Executive Officer Dan Porter shot off a few messages on Twitter in an attempt to have the last word:

“The one OMGPOP employee who turned down joining Zynga was the weakest one on the whole team,” Porter tweeted. “Selfish people make bad games. Good riddance!”

Porter didn’t stop with that. In another tweet, the CEO said, “What’s so interesting about success is the number of failures who try try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many….” Or in other words: They see me drawing something — they hatin’.

How does one even start? The CEO of a OMGPOP, a company that was bought by Zynga, a larger company publicly bashed an employee who made a decision that the employee felt was best for him? It just doesn’t make sense. Why does the CEO even care? Or, if he truly did have reason to care, why address it in such a public forum?

It is true that the employee, Shay Pierce, wrote a column for Gamasutra explaining why he didn’t take the Zynga deal, probably revealing too much in the details of his employment, but even so, he made an express point of having no hard feelings.

I’m not bitter. I have zero complaints about anyone at Omgpop and I congratulate them for their success. Zynga had the right to ignore my attempts to negotiate; I had the right to walk away. This has all been legal and amicable.

This tantrum isn’t doing Porter any favors. Several people called him out on his pettiness. Just a sample below:

This is such a poor example of leadership. The high road would have been to wish the employee the best and be on his merry (very merry) way. It is up to any CEO to lead the company into the future, not look back with disdain. People come and go. Those who stay want to be there. It is evident that Shay Pierce didn’t want to be there. And that was his choice.

Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com said it very well in regard to his own employees:

It’s simple. We believe that we are building the best company in the world to work for. But, in the end, everyone has a choice as to where they want to work. We want people who choose Fab.com.

(Full disclosure: I work for Fab.com)

And since this story broke, it seems that Dan Porter realized the error of his ways, deleted the tweets and apologized. Several times.

I hope for his sake, these apologies can help restore Dan Porter’s credibility. Because deleting the offending tweets sure didn’t.

UPDATE: It seems Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter didn’t think too highly of Porter’s remarks.

Even more reaction can be found on Kevin Marks‘ blog here.

Yeah, probably not the best move he ever made as CEO, but perhaps he’s learned something. However, according to this tweet, I don’t hold out much hope.

UPDATE 2: It seems the story goes on. An “anonymous source” told Business Insider

We received a particularly angry email yesterday from a source within OMGPOP who took a number of shots at Pierce.

This person said that while Pierce did indeed resign, that was “convenient” for everyone, because he was about to be let go for being a poor worker.

“He frequently took long lunches, his coding was poor, and right before his team was about to release our new Facebook game, Streets, he took off for a week to promote his own game at the GDC conference,” says the source. According to this OMGPOP source, this all happened while Pierce’s team was pulling late nights in the office to prepare for launch.

The article continues with Pierce stating that he was never given any indication from management that he was going to be fired. The source stated that Pierce was “on the chopping block” but hadn’t been informed of it.

Whether or not Pierce was a good employee or about to be fired is beside the point. Even if his post on Gamasutra was not completely honest or if it offended other people on the team, it is still not acceptable for a CEO to publicly bash a former employee in the way that he did. It is beneath his position and frankly not very nice.

Then again, we’re all human and we all make mistakes.

Porter admitted that the he was harsh in his language describing Pierce. “Yes it was, but my point is that it wasn’t about Shay. It was about the 41 other people who made it happen,” Porter wrote. “Those are the people I would throw myself in front of the train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.”

Just when you thought you heard it all, another person makes an even bigger splash in the resignation pool.

Greg Smith, an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, resigned today with an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

This type of anger and resentment is unfortunately becoming more and more common amongst employees but to see it come from the very top is somewhat, albeit not completely, surprising. The Financial Sector has gotten toxic, there’s no other way to put it (Occupy Wall Street anyone?). But what I find interesting is what Mr. Smith’s (how ironic) greatest disappointment is how Goldman Sachs management treated their clients.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many of those “muppets” find another place to invest. Even if I weren’t someone being referred to as a muppet (or worse), just the possibility of it happening would send me running.

Or as Mr. Smith stated, “It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

A truer statement has never been said.

While we’re on the subject, it looks like a trend is starting as another powerful executive has resigned via an editorial page. It just doesn’t have the same impact after it’s already been done via the New York Times. Even so, one can see that he makes a good point:

“The Empire today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about remote strangulation. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.”

It’s probably harassment.

At least according to Division of Labor and as featured on Fab.com

Illustration by Craig Swanson and idea by James Cennamo.

[via Laughing Squid and Dangerous Minds]

The folks at Twitter put together this awful, yet wonderful, recruiting video. It’s like a car accident on the highway, you know you shouldn’t stare, but you do anyway.

The funny thing is that they are actually hiring. This video might just do the trick.

[Via Laughing Squid]

My apologies for going silent for the past few months. It’s been an adventure of sorts.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer on March 28, 2011. The tumor was in my left breast and was an invasive ductal carcinoma that was 3.5cm long, Estrogen, Progesterone and HER positive. Stage IIb. The only reason I even knew something wrong was that I had pain in my left breast. I went to the doctor who referred me to a radiologist. I was given a mammogram, an ultrasound and a very, very painful biopsy. After a very, very long weekend, I was told (by phone) that I had cancer. I was flummoxed and floored. This couldn’t be happening to me.

With a recommendation from Dr. Tammy Leopold, my primary care doctor, I then went to see an amazing breast surgeon, Dr. Sharon Rosenbaum-Smith, a beautiful firecracker of a woman who let me cry in her office. Through the tears, however, we were able to make a plan. I was presented with 3 options – a lumpectomy, a single mastectomy or double mastectomy. The deciding factor would be a test for the BRCA gene mutation, but this would delay any action by at least 2 weeks. After careful consideration that day, I opted for a double mastectomy. I joked that had wanted a breast reduction anyway and that it should be a matching pair, but honestly, I had a strong suspicion about how the test would turn out since Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Jews, of which I am one, have the highest risk of being a carrier. And as it turned out, I was right.

The surgery was scheduled for April 21, 2011. Dr. Rosenbaum-Smith performed the mastectomy and Dr. William Samson performed the reconstruction. I opted for simple implants, so tissue expanders were put in to create a capsule for the permanent implants to later be exchanged at a second surgery. I must say, Dr. Samson is a brilliant surgeon and I’m really pleased with the results so far.

Recovery was hard, but didn’t take too long – maybe a week or two and then I was back to work.

May 23, 2011 was my first day of chemo. I opted for the TCH regimen, however chemo is chemo and it sucked. Once every 3 weeks for 18 weeks. It was the longest 18 weeks of my life. And I lost all of my beautiful hair. And I continued to work full-time throughout the process.

The chemo beat the hell out of me. Luckily it finally ended on September 12, 2011. When I recovered from the ravages of chemo, I started radiation on October 12, 2011 under the guidance of Dr. Andrew Evans and went every day for 28 days straight.

And if going through radiation was bad enough, the company I was working for did massive layoffs and finally, shut down – sputtering and coughing the whole way. And, yes, I was the only HR person around to make sure everyone got paid (and remained to be even after the company was gone). There was no COBRA being offered, so there was no COBRA to administer, but that’s a whole other story. I did, however, ask that the company stay open through November 1 so that employees (myself included) had benefits for an additional month. And then I got let go.

I also had a bit of difficulty with the TSA. Some of you may have read about it as a number of news sources picked it up. It was a really stressful situation, but in the end, the Director of JFK Airport security and the TSA personally apologized to me. Go figure. At least some good came out of it. At least I hope so.

Needless to say, 2011 was a really crappy year.

Yet it got better in December. I got an amazing new job at Fab.com as the Senior Director of HR. It’s an incredible company. And the worst of the treatment is behind me.

My second surgery is now scheduled for February 6 – two weeks away. 2 days after my Dad’s birthday and 1 day after my brother’s. The surgery is a combination exchange (expanders for permanent implants) and ovary/fallopian tube removal. As I stated above, I’m BRCA positive, specifically BRCA1+ which carries an 88% chance of breast cancer (duh) and 44% chance of ovarian cancer.

This time I’m not waiting around for the cancer to come to me.

Both are out-patient procedures, so I don’t expect that I’ll be down for long. But I’m still a little nervous about the anesthesia . I’m told that’s normal.

I guess in a way I was lucky that my tumor was HER+ because there are so many things to throw at it. So I still have Herceptin treatments through the end of May. It’s an infusion, like chemo, but it’s not chemo. And I also have a pill that I will have to swallow for the next 5 years. Even so, I’m more hopeful than I’ve ever been.

In other words, not done yet. But what have I learned so far?

• I should have known about the BRCA test long before this. I want to spread the word as much as possible. Ashkenazic Jews, like myself, are at extremely high risk. And there are laws in place that help protect people from genetic discrimination should they test positive.
• That breast cancer is the gift that keeps giving. Lymphedema in my left arm. No, not the yucky kind -just some slight swelling due to the removal of 7 auxiliary lymph nodes. Luckily I have the best Occupational Therapist in the world, Cynthia Shechter . She specializes in Breast Cancer/Lymphedema Rehab and has been an amazing friend to me through this whole process.
• The only thing I wish chemo upon is cancer.
• Radiation isn’t as scary as it sounds. It’s just incredibly inconvenient.
• You know who your friends are when something like this happens.
• I’ll never again have to wonder how I would look if I were bald.
• Be careful what you wish for. It may come true.

From Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew PR.