Allegis is actually delivering EPIC Talent. Sadly they have set the bar so low it's a sobering and scary wake-up call. What is more concerning is the requirement to not raise the bar with good talent as "we don't want our clients to start expecting this all the time, as its not sustainable" ?! Even more sadly is Allegis has convinced some of the largest clients that the market is so tuff, that their expectations are out of alignment with reality. Wow! Shocked to see incompetence waterfall on to customers at this level. I decided to leave Allegis after realizing my hands were being tied, despite being the highest performer consecutively. In mid stream of turning around North American Sales Recruitment for their largest Technology Client, I was told I needed to attend "Team Building all hands meetings" twice in one month for a week each in Islandia NY. This is effectively 2 entire weeks away from my desk - "shutting down my desk". So I figured this must be a very important meeting! After arriving I was notified that I would be sharing a hotel room with a stranger, that I must power off my computer and cell phone, completely zip them up in my tote and dedicate all of my attention on the meeting for the entire day 7:30am until 6:00pm with 15min break from 6:00pm to 6:15pm and board a but to go bowling with the Team until 1:00am and use my time to get to know the Team. Questionable but I could kinda see the point - However.... what about my 40 open requisitions and Hiring Managers? Abandon them? What about the 6 offers this week I need to attend to and 14 Interviews occurring? Completely and entirely inaccessible to anything with no backup as everyone from Allegis for Ca is at Islandia! Maybe I'm mistaking here... But isn't the entire purpose to fill positions, find great candidates and help Ca Tech grow? Apparently I was mistaken. Here was the most concerning part.
We were instructed to take a MB personality test our first day. Okay... I wonder what we will be using this for? See maybe how we match up with co-workers? Hiring Teams? Maybe the company is going to invest in some professional grooming training for us? Here is the outcome. All 80 people took the test, received a mostly generic useless narrative that is questionable on accuracy, and.... and... wait for it.... {dead air} {nothing} {nada}. That's all folks! Take the test, and nothing? We spend an entire morning take a test for no purpose, no application and it was just bizarre. I had thought maybe at the end of the week they must have some surprise where they would unveil in a graph model usability factors derived from the test? Nope. Okay so I can call Clients, tend to offers, recruiter great people, and tend to interviews because I'm testing myself?
Wow!!! nice! waste of time and energy. So next up they had everyone ask questions about "How can we make things better, and be more effective to our Hiring Managers"? I almost had to stand up and say on a public level that this is ridiculous, please let me get back to my desk so I can get some real work done!. But out of fear of retaliation I bit my tongue. One poor soul how is a peer, brought up the pain point that while we have a CRM for Recruiting or (ATS). Allegis chose not to deploy interview central in success factors. Also chose not to deploy Resume Parsing. So every candidate has to be typed in, and your bones is based on this, You have no ability to schedule, track, interviews or comments from the debriefs. Okay I inherited 72 Requisitions with no recruiting support other than a lady that hardly spoke english and was cleaning hotels or something in her last job. Pretty much on my own. 70 Reqs x 30 Candidates x 2 Interviews (conservative) is 420 distance interactions that I have no way to track? Except email which is not the right tool and not designed for that purpose. So when my peer ask why don't have a ATS to help manage all the activity.. He was berated in front of all 80 Allegis employees by the Client Talent Acquisition Head, which is wrong Britain and clearly had no idea what he was talking about! He dug into my peer and it was painful to watch. The response was you are not here to use an ATS! Let me tell you what your job is (telling my peer who has been in Talent Acquisition for 25 years) Your job is to build Relationship! Do you understand that? If not we have a serious problem. Your job is not to work with an ATS it is to build relationships! I'm concerned that you don't know that! In from of all 80 people humiliating him for asking a question? But this knucklehead chartered with running CA Tech recruiting for Allegis failed to understand that Recruiting CRM with emphasis on the R is a Relationship Management Tool. Maybe since he keeps using the term ATS he doesn't understand this and stuck in a time warp of the "Resumix or Restrac" days! CRM was invented specifically to better manager relationships and all aspects of the Talent acquisition cycle. This is representative of the type of person you will find at Allegis. The other days were spent with directives for us to gather as teams and define our goals for the Quarter! This sounded useful. But the problem here is that The head of talent acquisition was asking us to do this exercise only to play the "leader" and try and tear apart everyones presentation. The real motivation is that he was too lazy to create the MBR's and this allowed him to escape doing any work. Sadly we were already 2 months into the quarter operating without any definition of our Goals which makes it impossible to know if your going to attain bonus. This is despicable, and a horrible way to run the business. You need to have the professional courtesy of letting people know how they are being measure. Someone who does this should not be in management let alone in leadership.
If you have read all of these (I don't have the time to grammatically correct it or address typos) this is a stream from my brain to paper to communicate one thing.
Why would someone take this much time to share this? Simply out of resentment of the company for mis-representing the opportunity. Wasting my time which is precious. I resent that someone with no skill could mis-represent themselves in a leadership position. Mostly - I believe the word needs to get out so people do not have to suffer this mindless, subpar approach to business. I really wish I had known that they are not interested what is between your ears, and will try to stifle it. They care about appearances, CYA, long pointless meetings. Looking busy, playing office, and always saying "How can I help? You know I'm here to help!" Yet when I asked for help with a Recruiting Coordinator that spoke English and knew how to turn on a computer "no help". When I asked for any system to help manage the workload... "no help". when I asked if we could purchase a sourcing book for a new recruiter that would be joining my team for $70 "no help".
Every single thing anyone asked for help on was - "well you know. Would love to do that - but we don't have the budget, as we bought the team in NY ice cream last week, or some nonsense".
This is such an absurd place to work - it motivated me to spend this much time. I could go on and it is amusing. I will summarize the entire post by saying "Too many clowns & Not enough Circus!"
