I am looking for a job. I got a phone message last week that was darn near incomprehensible. It probably isn't anything important, but there is a slim chance that it could be, so I thought I better try and unscramble it. After playing it back three or four times I was finally able to decipher the phone number. When I called, it turned out to be a head-hunting company. I told them about the message and they said "that was probably Bill, let me get him for you". Bill. Right. Bill gets on the phone and in his thickly accented English tells me that the position that he had for me has been filled. Oh, really? Well, okay, fine. It wasn't anything important after all.
Still, it left me a little puzzled. Why would a head hunting company hire someone whose English is so bad? And how did a position get filled in the four or five hours between when Bill called me and when I called back? Well head hunting is entirely a commission business, and maybe Bill is the only guy they could find who was willing to give it a go. And the position could have been filled in between the two phone calls. It's not likely, these positions are often open for months before the powers that be finally make up their minds to hire someone. It's not likely, but it's possible. Maybe Bill got in on the tail end of the deal and didn't know they were close to filling it. Or maybe he tried to talk to the customer and the customer got fed up trying to understand Bill and canceled the order. Who knows?
I was talking to Jack at lunch today about this odd little episode and we came up with a couple of pretty good conspiracy theories. I am pretty sure Bill's accent is Indian, so I am thinking Everest hired him because he would be better able to communicate with all the Indians who are over here looking for work. (These are Indians from the Indian subcontinent, South of the Himalaya mountains in Asia, not the Native American Indians). It wouldn't be because he could speak the same Indian language, given that there are a gazillion different languages in India, but because he speaks the same flavor of English that they all do. What sounds heavily accented to me may sound perfectly normal to most Indians.
Jack's theory is that they were trying to get work permits (H1B cards) for Indians. They put Bill on the phone and give him a list of a couple hundred people to call. No one calls back because they cannot understand him, so the employer can say that they tried to find someone, we hired an agency and they called hundreds of people and could not find anyone, so Immigration Service will give them an H1B card for their favorite Indian.
Now that I think about it, I can make it sound even worse. They are using Bill to locate Indians. Only Indians would be able to understand Bill well enough to decipher the message and call back. The agency wants Indians because they can pay them $20 an hour for the job that they are charging the employer $100 an hour for, which means they are making three thousand dollars a week off each person they manage to place.
While I am at it, let me just say that some contracting companies have gotten grief from mother Intel because they were paying the workers too large a percentage of the pay that Intel was shelling out.
Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment