OT: need advice about difficult career choice

Whaaaaaaat? No interview? I missed that. I retract my previous opinion. If they can't do at least a 30 minute meet and greet, forget about it. At best, wildly unprofessional. At worst, you're being sold into slavery.

More importantly, there will never be a good time to have children. They are totally worth it though. Just sayin.

I posted my resume on several online job boards and updated it every month to keep it on top of searches, at least until August of this year. So I'm not surprised that they found my resume. In my line of work, the employer always pays the recruiter. For this job to be 2x my current salary, it means that the company will probably be paying 3x to the recruiting agency who will in turn pay me my 2x, net of payroll taxes. I keep using the word "contract" but it's basically just a temp job that happens to pay a lot of money.

The lack of interview by the employer used to be standard, at least with lower-paying temp jobs that I have worked in the past. The lack of interview by the agency is unusual, but is due to a combination of two factors. First, the company is anxious to get somebody started on the job next week, probably due to a calendar year-end close coming up fast. Second, I am too busy at my current job to get away during the work day for a meeting. Accepting this contract job would mean that I couldn't give two weeks notice to my current employer.

mutagen wrote: More importantly, there will never be a good time to have children. They are totally worth it though. Just sayin.

Not to derail but I don't totally agree with this. Definitely agree with the second part, but I would not recommend having children if you can't financially support them properly. If the case is that your girlfriend/wife may be too old if you wait, well then that is kind of a different story and I wouldn't hold it against you.

People having kids and not being able to afford to take care of them is a problem and I commend Shell for at least thinking about that. I have a cousin who has two kids and they are planning on having another, despite the fact that they're on wellfare and can't afford to put up a fence to keep their dog from running away or being hit by a car. Meanwhile, my wife and I had to pay more than their house is worth to adopt our daughter while continuing to pay taxes so that my cousin can stay home and not work and have more children.

Having a kid is a tough call at this stage. At age 49, I am worried about the increased odds of birth defects, and I know that we are too broke at the moment. My girlfriend is 34, so she may have a few more good years in terms of fertility, but she is trying to start a new career in marketing right now. We have been together for over 11 years now.

That is part of the pressure in the current situation. If I knew for sure that this new opportunity would lead to a better career track, the improved cash flow would pave the way to a better life. We could have a kid, pay off our debts, and save for whatever the future might hold. But if I lose the steady job and then this new thing doesn't work out, I could potentially lose everything by the end of 2015.

It would help a lot if my girlfriend could land a full-time marketing job. Cash flows would be more tolerable and I could start paying down debt and saving for the future again. But hiring tends to be slow around the holidays, so I don't expect her to find anything until maybe late January at the soonest.

No one seems to have pointed out the obvious. If you take the contract gig, at the end, you *will have become the 'purple squirrel'." There wasn't one in the Metro area before...and there will be one in the next 6 months. Assuming they DON'T just hire you outright, there will be some instability when the contract is over. Get an updated resume up on LinkedIn [aka "Facebook for recruiters"], check the box that says you're willing to take recruiter calls, and buy a new suit or two.

As someone who basically qualifies as a purple squirrel in my particular field, it has led to a number of serious job opportunities in a tight market. Finally, after 15 years in the same gig, I took advantage of that to get out of a company that sure as hell ain't what it used to be and into a new gig (starting next month).

The money is just frosting on that particular cake.

1) Take the job. Seriously. The job market is turning around and even if this sucks--if that contract is real you get paaaaid. You don't sound happy in your current position, so think of this at worst as that job with more money.
2) I get calls from recruiters all the time. Is this just a pharma thing? They are constantly poaching everyone all day. It's kind of a pain in the ass.
2) There's a lot of bullshit out there about age-related fertility. A lot of the data underpinning those findings originates in French birth records from 200 to 400 years ago. I am not kidding .

i didn't even know age made a difference when it came to men? I thought that as long as you can make the guck, you're in luck!

Listen to Uba. Then, if everything checks out, go for it. Change can be difficult but is usually rewarding.

Most of the chains that keep us from success are ones we put on ourselves. Fear of risk, fear of change, and most of all attachments to a location. I only wish I had broken mine 20 years ago rather than 4 months ago.

The interview is as much for you as the hiring manager. A manager that can't be bothered to give one just raises all kinds of red flags with me. Not saying there isn't opportunity in chaos, because there surely is, but there is also, you know, chaos.

And be careful about that purple squirrel analogy. A purple squirrel is somebody who has a very specialized skill set, somebody who has gone down the rabbit hole for one reason or another. The natural habitat of the purple squirrel is a big company, because they can afford such rare/specialized creatures. The jack-of-all-trades however has a natural habitat of the small company, because they can't afford to hire three specialists where one guy will do. If a jack-of-all-trades gets hired by a big company, there is a very real possibility that he will get fired in six months, and replaced with two kids from college. So are you the jack-of-all-trades, or the purple squirrel? It might make a difference.

Total scam alert. "Found your resume online" is a HUGE tipoff here. As is the fact that they are offering you a job pretty much sight unseen. So is the huge pay increase And that they "don't want" the people that you would be directly working for to talk to you. WTF?

Not sure what the angle is here, but something is up with this. Remember "too good to be true" usually is.

When I had a profile/resume up at Monster and Careerbuilder I used to get these emails all the time- "found your resume online, contract position, a bunch of money, no need for an interview, need somebody right away, etc."

This is just not how businesses hire people. And OF COURSE you are the purple squirrel.

Yeah, what Michael said. I haven't called it a scam because I just can't figure out the angle, but even at the height of the dot-com boom, when claiming to have seen somebody code was enough to get you hired, there was still an interview. Hiring w/o an interview from the hiring manager simply isn't done.

There are a couple of possible angles. One could be as simple as it being a scam to collect personal information- after all, you'd have to give them W4 information to get paid, right? I've heard that there are a lot of job ripoffs that are of this character. It could also be an actual temp agency, recruiter or headhunter that gets a commission for filling a position...which you may or may not actually be able to fill once you get in there. Not wanting you to talk to the people BEFORE you're hired...hmm.

It could be a company that actually does want you to come to work for what they say...but then there could be shadiness with the contract or getting paid ("we'll wire you your paycheck"/"we'll pay via cashier's check"). Or you could be hired for a position that does not actually exist ("Oops! That contract isn't being funded, sorry, no job!")

The main thing here to remember is that you're vulnerable. You're in a job that you want out of. So you see what could be a way out. But don't let your guard down.

I'm certainly not an HR expert, but from what I know about HR departments (and small businesses) work is that they generally NEVER just randomly reach out to resumes found online. I would say to exercise extreme caution in ANY communication with these people moving forward, and go out with the assumption from square one that this is a scam. It may (miraculously) not be...but just remember that random emails from strangers offering you ANYTHING are generally ones you ought to toss.

I spoke with a lot of recruiters during the last twelve months. Half of them were ones that I contacted, either directly or through answering a job ad that they were running. The other half came looking for me, especially when the job market really heated up in May and June. Given that I also posted my resume on several job boards, I find it unremarkable that somebody found my resume online. It's a full two-page resume loaded with keywords, so it's likely to pop up in a variety of searches.

At one point last spring, I stumbled across an interesting stat: while the unemployment rate in Minnesota had fallen to less than 6%, the unemployment rate for accountants was at 2%. It blew me away that the unemployment rate was so low and yet I couldn't get a job. By July, I had discovered the reason: 90% of my competition was coming from accountants that already had a job but wanted a better one.

Anyway, based on my discussions with all these recruiters, I think that the angle is this: recruiters are getting desperate. Employers are less interested in training employees, and more interested in just hiring exactly what they want. They blame the schools for not producing quality candidates, but colleges are not supposed to be teaching crap like one company's overly customized Enterprise Resource Planning software. And then these job openings stay open because they can't find purple squirrels that fit all the requirements. They think they are saving money, but the work isn't getting done either.

So companies try and fail to locate purple squirrels. Then they hire agencies to locate purple squirrels, and the agencies can't find them either. Or even when an agency somehow manages to locate a purple squirrel, they are required to submit at least three people for the job so that the company can feel like they are making a real choice.

I am not the purple squirrel for this job, and the agency knows it. So that leaves two likely possibilities: they already have one or two good candidates, but they need me to fill out the quota for potential candidates. Instead of a purple squirrel, I would be a dark horse candidate. Or maybe they have actually persuaded the company to take somebody with a broad background and turn him into a purple squirrel. But the part that just doesn't make sense is the underlying purple squirrel position. Why not hire two less experienced guys to cover the different responsibilities? An accounting guy to do regular accounting, and a financial analyst who can do analysis and more readily learn the investment stuff.

In the old days ('90s), a company would use a single agency and then let that agency just send somebody in to do the job. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me because the temp jobs that I worked back then were often lower level jobs or else with small companies. These days, it's more normal for a company to get multiple agencies searching and screening for candidates, and then sending them in to get interviewed by the company too. On two different occasions last summer, I had two different recruiters trying to send me in for the same temp job. This situation feels like an odd throwback to the '90s method of getting a temp.

As for the high pay, it might make sense if the agency is offering me up as a "Veblen good." A Veblen good gets increased demand as the price goes up, because it is perceived as being worth the money. Think luxury car or fancy wine. The agency is going to tell this company that I have over 25 years of experience and a CPA license, but I won't leave my current job for anything less than six figures. A sane employer might say no, but a big, successful company with money to spend might see this as a special opportunity to acquire some talent.

Why six months? Or a year, or whatever? Why do they need a purple squirrel so badly and yet for just six months? The only clue might be the nature of the derivatives that this job will focus on: energy. They want somebody who can help them manage their risk with respect to investments in natural gas and/or oil, at time when those prices are sharply down. So what happens if Saudi Arabia stops fucking over the rest of OPEC and cuts production, sending prices back to normal? Does the job abruptly end? If they offer this contract job to me, I will push for a termination clause that guarantees that I will get at least 3 months worth of pay or something like that. That way, I could at least get paid what I would have earned at my current job over the next six months.