Dealing with incompetance:

What is it with some of us poo-flinging, pink monkeys out there? Sorry - apologies all around to the fellow prehensil tail-swingers, and primates in general - that's an unintential barb directed against them.

I'm referring to a certain Korean recruiter I've had the mispleasure of communicating with recently, during my wife's and my attempt to secure teaching work once again in Korea. I need to underscore a point here in that he's actually an AMERICAN recruiter, residing within Korea and helping expats find work there - so this miscreant doesn't even have an excuse of being from another culture, or playing the "lost in language translation" card.

Simply put, recruiters are not babysitters, nor are they working for you, the teacher. They are in a business, out to make money, and they are employed by various schools to find them employable and suitable teachers for the school. Once that is complete, they can, and do, move on. With this being said, however, there are good recruiters, and there are poor ones. The substandard ones often don't give a do-diddily crap about you (or the school, for that matter), and will simply match up any pulse-bearing meatbag with any hole-in-the-ground bunker that caters to the idea of being an "English establishment", then take their Steve Miller money and run. The good ones, then, naturally adhere to the opposite side of the spectrum, carefully researching both the schools they work with, and the potential teacher candidates, weeding out the less than scrupulous ones on both sides, and actually giving a damn about things such as integrity, honesty, and organization. Then there are the ineffectual doorknobs such as my guy.

The process started out promising, mind you. Mr. Knob has a very impressive website, with a plethora of information regarding his company's reseach process, strong capabilities in relation to the recruiting enterprise, and a myriad amount of helpful links regarding all manner of information for living and working in Korea; things were looking good. The process became even brighter when he appeared to secure for us a fairly tantalizing prospect: two positions in July at a school that appeared to hit all the marks on our "must have" list. Though the chain it belonged to has an abyssmal reputation, this particular campus seemed to have shielded itself from such negativity, and in fact, received high marks from four of the teachers there. We were admittedly cautious, but nonetheless our interest was piqued. And so, I shot off an email to the Knobster, stating fully that we were considering this school to be the front runner, but we need a few more weeks to hammer out some details (read: see if a better offer came along), and to make our decision. In the meantime, I asked him to see if he could talk to the school on our behalf (read: do his job), and ask for the best possible salary, as well as make sure they sent us a very specific contract to review.

What did Captain Moron do? Simply forward my very private email that I'd sent to him on to the director of the school. Well played! After shooting us directly in the foot, he came back to inform us that the school wasn't sure about hiring us anymore, because we had asked too many questions, and we weren't willing to trust them.

Well. There are enough red flags here to invoke the Second Coming of the South. A recruiter who doesn't understand the basic underpinnings of his job?! A school who becomes nervous over candidates that ASK QUESTIONS?! This whole thing was handled about as smoothly as five dollar bottle of whiskey, and smacks of potential danger. But, being ever the optimist, I wrote back to recruiter, mentioned that his actions were woefully unprofessional, and yet we were willing to look past that, receive some contracts for review, and press on. His reply? The school was no longer interested, because a line of trust needs to be drawn somewhere, and the fact that we already knew we would need to negotiate the initial contract offer simply wasn't going to fly, so they were passing on us. In other words then, they're looking for someone who'll buy ocean-front property in Arizona, not even bother to read anything in the contract besides "sign here", and haul their oh-so-trusting souls half-way around the world to begin work in what has become lovingly known throughout the subculture of ESL as "hagwon hell." That five-dollar booze might come in handy right about now, troops.

And so, I kindly thanked him for his incompetance, noted that any school who's looking for people to sign an initial contract are larger fools than we're willing to work for, and wished him luck. But this less-than-fuzzy ping-pong experience of starting off high and ending somewhere in the "Paris Hilton" range, well, it's left a poor taste in my mouth, not unlike rotten kimchi that's been fermented in cigarrette ash for a month.

I have a ten, if anyone has change and a bottle.