While I am certainly not opposed to young professionals interning for companies as I have reaped the benefits of being an intern, an HR intern should not be a company's first point of contact to a potential candidate. Especially when, as in this experience, the HR intern knew little about the industry, the competitors and gave out incorrect information.
The HR intern did not identify herself as an intern of course, but I couldn't help but notice how inexperienced and "green" she sounded so I decided to look up her Linkedin profile and discovered my first contact with a company which I originally thought very highly of was with an intern who had only been with 2tor about three months.
Needless to say I did not let this stop me from continuing through the interview process and even entertained this HR intern's wet dream of conducting my preliminary interview. She was nice enough and gave me the base salary range of 55K - 70K which is what I was looking for.
My next phone interview was with the VP of Operations who had the personality of a blank sheet of paper. I hung up the phone having no clue how to even gauge the conversation as he gave little feedback.
I was then granted an in person interview with the Director of Sales who has quite an impressive background outside of the organization, but knows little about the industry of the new program that is being launched. I felt that my interview was mostly a fact finding session for her to see exactly how much she didn't know since I work for a competing company who has 5 partnerships with various universities for the same program. She assured me that I would get a job offer and that I would hear something the following week. She also instructed me to hand the person in the HR office my official application which I did as instructed before I left their offices.
Fast forward to the following Monday, I am called by the corporate recruiter who I have never even spoken with throughout this entire process. She asks me to resend my application as they have misplaced it. I would understand the misplacement of my application if I had faxed or mailed it in, but I handed it directly to the person in the HR department who was sitting at her desk. Did my application grow legs and walk between Friday afternoon and Monday? Give me a break.
The corporate recruiter proceeded to ask me about my salary requirements. I was astonished when she came back with 47K, almost 10K less than the minimum range the HR intern had originally told me. She assured me that she would talk to the executives to see what she could do about increasing the offer. I have never heard back from this corporate recruiter or 2tor in spite of e-mails, voice mails, and Thank You cards to the Director of Sales. All in all, very disappointing.