Simple question: Rep has over 20 plus years salesexperience in different medical fields. Was let go and took buy out from pharma company 4 years ago. Mutual agreement between both parties. Six months benefits and pay out. All experienced reps know or heard this drill. Rep had great sales record and put many products on hospital formulary. Former Supervisor was pric, and wanted to hire his people. Question? How do companies blackball former reps from getting hired who take buyouts. Do they do it, ami I being sensative and how do you know when being blackballed is happening?
Probably not any formal "blackballing," but my guess is that unless you have a friend on the inside of the hiring company, so many of these folks have quadzillions of resumes, recruiters, and applicants for every opening ... plus with "automated" application culling programs, any applicant/resume that doesn't fit the hiring company's perfect specifications quickly finds their way into the electronic file 13. Also (and this I learned several years after leaving my pharma employer), old employers really can mess up records of past employees and have dates of hire/separation far different than those which really occured. If I was to go back to this again, I would have hired a third-party service to verify that my former employer had correct data; I'm not sure how many times that could have eliminated me from a possible interview or offer (see culling software above).
At Touchpoint Publicis they have a 'do not rehire' list that they circulate twice a year to their recruiters and hiring managers.
I can tell you two recent experiences: I went to an interview set up by a recruiter. It was a cattle call situation. After talking to many of the candidates, the older experienced reps realized that the young and inexperienced non-pharma people had all had full telephone interviews with the hiring manager before they arrived at the interview. The older reps had not. It made a big difference in the face to face interviews. I went to a second interview set up by a recruiter. I asked the question, "What other questions do you have about my background and experience?" The hiring manager read from his notes from what the recruiter had said about me. OMG. Really? So, I knew that I was just at the interview to satisfy the requirement that they interview some very experienced older reps. The person who was hired had little to no experience and no high level hospital or specialty experience.
The other question folks like to ask are "Don't you feel overqualified for this job?" Yeah, I've answered it lots of bright and insightful ways, but I am really, really tempted to say, "In other words, you don't want to hire older workers for this job." I'm sure they would say no, but right now, I really don't care.
