Sincro — Local services in Seattle

Job Seekers Beware: I had the single most unprofessional experience of my career while going through the month long hiring process with Cobalt. After weeks of interviews and technical proficiency testing for a mid-level marketing management position which all went very well, I came in for one final battery of interviews at their corporate office in Seattle's SODO district. The first several interviews went fine but the last was with the head of SEO named Dana Melick. He was new, having just moved over from Razorfish. I asked him how he had liked working for them and he bad-mouthed them for lack of vision and planning.

After a brief conversation about banner ads, he asked me one question about my management experience. During my answer I told him that it had been a few years since the last time I had managed a team. He then abruptly asked me if I needed to plug the parking meter since I had been there for a while. I went down to do it but when I returned, I was met by a subordinate who told me that he had been told to cut me loose due to my lack of management experience. Take a moment and enjoy the irony of the guy who deemed my management skills to be inadequate dispatching a flunky to do his dirty work after sending me to dump $5 into a parking meter. I politely but firmly voiced my displeasure to the subordinate and left.

A year later Cobalt contacted me again for a different position. I went through several interviews and the technical testing which took several hours again. Up to this point they apparently did not realize that I had gone through the interview process previously but when they realized I already had a login for the testing In the system they put it together. They had already sent me an email telling me that I had done well in the testing and was a great match for the position. They followed up asking me if I was the same person who had gone through the process a year earlier. When I responded that I was, I didn't hear from them for several days. I finally emailed them asking when the next interview would be and they responded with an email saying that they had decided to move forward with another candidate who was lower on the salary range scale. We had discussed this in depth in an earlier interview and they were fine with where I fell in that scale.

Cobalt has a very flawed corporate culture. Their banner ads are intrusive and they have no respect for people who spend time and money to navigate their hiring process. Don't...

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