My position hasn’t even started yet and already I’ve some poor interactions with both Vista Member Services and also the program manager. In short, my reference said he submitted a letter of recommendation; my PM said it didn’t go through and I should ask VMS about it. I called and they said they would get back to me in a day. A few days later I got an email from them (which, in hindsight, had conflicting messages: “recommendation not found” and “problem resolved”) I forwarded that to the PM last week.

Then yesterday PM said they still didn’t get the letter and I have until tomorrow to get a new one. I replied expressing my frustration, and the PM’s response was… less than sympathetic and contesting my claims. I’m not sure what good getting into a back and forth with them about who said what and when, so I’m resisting that so far. In the meantime, I found another reference… but really the whole thing is giving me a bad feeling. I’m making a huge sacrifice with this position -they have no other candidates and there’s a huge labor shortage in general and I’m passing up f/t positions with full benefits. So the PM pissing me off so I quit would only harm the org. Plus, you’d think they’d realize there’s a huge labor shortage and so it’s important not to further frustrate candidates willing to make this sacrifice…

/rant. Thanks for reading.

EDIT: just to clarify, the PM is not my direct supervisor, but rather oversees a number of VISTAs placed with a number (15??) of nonprofits across the state. I will not work with them directly, they just handle the paperwork on the VISTA side fo things.

EDIT2: to further clarify, I am a ‘non-traditional’ VISTA and my last position (pre-COVID) was actually the same as this PMs (though in a different state). I supervised a team of VISTAs working with a dozen agencies across the state, thus I’m very familiar with the paperwork, bureaucracy, etc. I just found the PM’s response to be very unsupportive and frustrating!