Beware the Doldrums. Swim! Swim! Swim! - Recruiter Sevenstep Employee Review

I recall one day sitting beneath the fluorescent lights of a windowless basement café, the go-to lunch spot for the dedicated Sevenstep employee, partaking in my daily airing of grievances with a co-conspiring colleague of mine. He stared down into his sauce-stained and microwave-warped Tupperware, and with a voice that seemed to be finally heeding the call of the void said, “I feel like this is the place they wrote Hotel California about.” Several years on and I’m still thinking about Sevenstep. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly 17% of Americans are prescribed antidepressants. That’s 1 in 6 Americans who need to take a pill every day to keep the wheels on the bus. And according to me, the poisoned wellspring of that psychiatric desolation is air-conditioned, carpeted holes like Sevenstep RPO. We grow up, encouraged by parents and neighbors, by teachers and coaches and professors, that we can have anything, that we can achieve whatever we want, that we can be anyone. Then, however many years it’s taken you to get there later, you look up from a PVC-laminate desk, and peer out at a sea of aerobic-ball desk-chairs, call-center headsets, Pop! figurines, and faces empty with apathy, complacency, and disinterested incompetence. The first inclination is to run, but maybe the vertigo begins to set in, so instead you say to yourself, “Where did I put that psychiatrist’s number?” Yes, heavy is the heinie that sits on the swiveling thrones of Sevenstep, a company that has a coffee machine in the kitchen but makes you bring the beans. That chooses to rotate its staff through front desk duty rather than hire somebody to just do the job. That warms up the team with such fun brain-benders as “If you had one extra hour in your work day, what would you do with it?” That has a team dinner and asks the waiter to split the bill 17 ways. That pays its employees pennies, then sends them over to Glassdoor to dilute the vitriol (“Cons: None that I can think of.” Please). That will have you surfing the web all day, and all week, and all month, to find candidates for a door-to-door printer sales position, or maybe a technical merchandising specialist (somebody who tightens the screws on the vending machine at the tractor plant). That loops employee headshots and fun facts on a giant screen over the front door (“Fact: I had back surgery.” Huh?). That is teeming with managers who have simply been coming to work long enough to be handed their titles, much like the tie-clipped manager who started on the register at the Dunkin Donuts across the street. The worst part of Sevenstep is that it is comprised of individuals who hold their job not because they feel some burning drive to pour gasoline on the fire of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (and really, does anybody?), but because they took the job once, and, well, they’re just still there. This was true among entry-level staff and senior management alike. I am not here to merely throw stones (although I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me), there were certainly shiners with Bound for Glory tattoos on their foreheads, but the tar of apathy that they were rising to the top of only made their exuberance all the more puzzling. What kind of place is it that causes you to doubt the sanity of its best employees?