9y
Dear Anonymous Interview Candidate.
I’m sorry that you felt compelled to write this review. I truly wish things had gone better between us.
However, there are some exaggerations and omissions of fact in your review, which I feel misrepresent the true nature of our interactions that I now feel obligated to address.
There is no doubt that you seemed to be a very bright and capable young woman when I interviewed you. However, you failed to mention in your review that you told me you were looking to leave your first job out of college because your employer had not assigned any work to you in the 6 months that you’d been employed there. So, quite frankly, you had no professional experience to speak of at the time. Nevertheless, we were willing to give you an opportunity to prove yourself as a junior developer, based solely on your ability to pass our programming exercise, your code presentation, and the math problem you solved, with ease. You crushed it, and we were impressed. We are a woman owned and run business and were excited to give a young woman like yourself an opportunity to grow and establish a career in web technology.
You claim I was negligent in getting back to you; however when you applied for the job I was very transparent about the fact that, at the time, we were up to 90 days out from being able to bring someone on board. Perhaps, that is why it took me 3-months to present the offer.
Also, throughout the interview process you told me that you were perfectly happy with our standard starting salary range and our 3,6,9, and 12-month performance reviews and salary adjustments. I was very clear about the reasons that this type of salary structure is our policy. You seemed to understand that and agree. So, you can imagine my surprise when after offering you the position, you wanted to re-negotiate salary. The appropriate time to negotiate this would have been prior to the offer being made, and frankly had you requested the starting salary and bonus you requested at that time from the get go, I wouldn’t have made the offer.
After I made the offer to hire you on the terms I thought we had agreed to, you told me you had a higher offer from another employer that included a signing bonus. Whether or not that was truly the case, it is not unheard of for candidates to bluff about having other offers and I had to go with my instincts on this one. My instincts led me to believe that this other offer you were describing to me was very unlikely given your lack of experience. This was one of the reasons that I didn’t agree to match it. I still believe my instincts were correct; especially since according to your LinkedIn profile you are still working at the same employer that you were with when you applied for the position in November of last year- the one that wasn’t giving you any work. If the other offer were truly there, I’d imagine you would have gladly accepted such an amazing offer, and would not now be having such negative feelings about not accepting the offer with Engagency.
Lastly, in your review you mention your displeasure with our office situation. I want to clarify that the office situation you described in your review was temporary and allowed us to keep our fees down for our customers while saving up enough money to acquire a beautiful new office. Our new office is in a brand new building in a very desirable part of South West Austin near Circle C. It's twice the size, it has 10 foot ceilings and large windows throughout– so everyone has tons of natural light. We bought new furniture, ergonomic chairs, adjustable height desks, and a sound masking system that will create a wonderful modern environment for everyone to work and collaborate.
I’m sorry you won’t get a chance to join us.
