As far as the miss-communication about salary and bi-lingual and crap, I've noticed that many companies have become very "Hands Off" with a lot of stuff that they do now. What happens is they hire a "talent acquisition consultant," and that person goes through all the resumes, picks people they think fit, schedules all the interviews, and just tells the managers when the interviews will be held. This means that the person doing the interview has no clue who you are, and probably just realized that they were going to interview you earlier that week. I've seen, and experienced first hand, how easily this can screw up all kinds of communication. With that middle man in there, hardly anyone has a 100% idea of what is going on.

At the last place I worked, they got rid of the in office HR representatives, and now all HR complaints go to the "home office" half way across the country. I guess the idea is that no one knows anyone, so it's easier to avoid picking sides. Personally, I think it'd be better to have someone in the office all the time to be familiar with the people who might make potential complaints. Anyone who has problems "picking sides" should be relieved of duty.

Combine those two elements of "hands off" and this is what recently happened at the company I used to work for.

There was a job opening in the commercial lines department, and several people from the personal lines department applied. The job was posted both to the public and for internal promotions. Everyone submitted their applications and started waiting. After a while, one girl got an email saying that her interview was scheduled for that Friday. The problem was that the commercial managers had not yet spoken to her manager, as per usual. On Tuesday, this girl went directly to the commercial lines department to confirm with the commercial managers about the interview. They had no idea what she was talking about and told her that they would see what was going on. Turns out, the "talent acquisition consultant" had scheduled the interview, but neglected to tell the commercial department. In the mean time some one else decided to close the position altogether, so by the time the commercial department found out about the interview for Friday, there was no longer a position. So what did they do? They went and grabbed the guy who USED to be the HR guy (he no longer does anything related to HR) and told him to go explain to the girl who had been told that her interview was Friday, that "they" changed their mind altogether about the position, and now no one was getting any interviews. This girl went back to her desk crying, and then told the rest of the applicants from the department that everyone wasted their time because the opening was closed. Who knows if they even bothered to tell the people who were applying from the general public. I feel the worst for the HR guy. I'm sure he wanted to remind him that he isn't HR anymore and to clean up their own mess.

Soooooooooo, all these attempts to "stream line" office flow can lead to some MAJOR fuck ups. Don't even get me started on the new method of customer service surveys (that are outsourced to a call center in another country) and are 50% of employee's performance review.


Any way, you guys have had some good input and I would love to see a few more tonight before I manage to derail the thread any further.

Thanks for the input so far.