The Lion, The Witch, and the audacity of recruiters - HaulethThe Lion, The Witch, and the audacity of recruiters<br>2026.07.04 :: 12 min :: #culture #rant<br>I am searching for a job. If you've read my posts recently you may have noticed my "for hire" block (hopefully it will disappear soon). During that search I noticed a lot of different behaviours from recruitment teams. However, two of them pushed me to write this article because of how bad they were.Company names and details are changed to avoid any legal troubles. I will try to stay as close to my experiences, but some details may be blurry.Story 1: Hop.NS#<br>While I was checking some old colleagues of mine at Microsoft managed corporate echo chamber LinkedIn, I noticed that one of my old colleagues works there and they had open positions available. I know the company from the past, when they had quite an "interesting" hiring process, where they ordered you to work for a week on the take-home project (fortunately they paid for that time). I hoped it changed a little since then, and it did - now they hire you for one week, where you work on the project. But let's not get ahead.I pinged two friends that work there so they could pass my details to the HR to speed up the process a little bit. They were quite happy to do so and after that I had a scheduled call with their CTO. The position was described as "Senior Elixir Developer", which fit my area of expertise and interest perfectly. I talked with the CTO, we discussed details of the process, the teams, the job as an Elixir developer, and everything seemed perfect. They sent me papers to sign for my trial contract for that one week, where, according to the CTO, I was supposed to work on a task, that would become my job if they hired me. The paperwork went through smoothly. I waited for that Monday to see what interesting projects I might be working on for that one week. Monday came. At 09:00, I was ready, and the wild ride began.Day 1#<br>I checked my email and saw some credentials to log in to my (temporary) corporate email, standard stuff. I wanted to join their Slack workspace - uh oh, it didn't work. It said that I needed to contact the administrator. Okay, but I didn't have any way of contacting them. I tried a few times and when it didn't work, I sighed and went to LinkedIn to message my friend over there to make someone give me access. It took a while, so after spending 2–3 of my 40 contracted hours just trying to access Slack, I finally got in. Now I needed access to GitHub. After some more pleading and another two hours of waiting, I was able to clone the repository. Cool. However, I still didn't know what I would be doing there, as the person who was my overseer was in South America, so I had a call scheduled at 18:00 to get details of my assignment. Nice, a whole 20% of my time there would be spent watching paint dry. So while I was waiting I was reviewing the Elixir codebase (remember, that job was described as Elixir developer). The codebase wasn't that bad. I opened a small PR with a few fixes.On the evening of the first day there was a call with a person who was responsible for my task for the trial week. I wanted to see what interesting task awaited me. The task was clear - I was supposed to maintain their browser extension, written in TypeScript, and extend it with new features and UI design. I asked whether that was really what they wanted me to do, as I had a little experience with that stuff. I did it to make them reflect on what they just said, but the person on the other end of the conversation confirmed that it was what I was supposed to do. They even told me, directly to my face, that:I do not need to worry, because all backend work should be already done.<br>Awesome… So you say that I do not need to worry, because the job that I want to do is what is already done, and the job that I really do not want to do is what I need to do…The call ended, and I went to sleep, wondering what they were trying to achieve. Because it feels that it was making me to go postal.Day 2#<br>I tried to run and understand what the hell I was supposed to do and how it even worked. For that I needed to install Google Chrome, which I prefer to avoid in favour of Safari and Firefox. I spent a few hours trying to build that thing locally and figure out how to run it, which required some additional ping-pong with other people to obtain credentials and other bits of access.In the meantime I talked with one of the people that vouched for me for this job. The conversation went a little bit like this:Me : Is it normal that for the trial week, you give a task that is completely unrelated to the area of expertise of the candidate?Friend : Normally it is done in a way that the candidate should be out of their comfort zone. However, if a backend developer would receive purely frontend work, then I would say that something went wrong.Me : Guess what…<br>I discussed the matter with them for a while, and they said that if they would be in...