I’ve worked in businesses that were building up and I’ve worked in businesses that were paring down, but the worst of all was working at a business that was desperately trying to hang on and keep going even though the management team could see the writing on the wall.

Yes, it sucks when you work for a company that you know is dying, but as bad as that is, there’s something a whole lot worse: recruiting and hiring new people to come work at the dying company without letting them clearly know what’s going on.

I was thinking about this while reading about the closing of Conde Nast’s Portfolio, a $100 million-plus investment in a new glossy business magazine that has now gone down the tubes. Sad as it may be when a business gets closed down—and it really bothers a longtime journalist like me seeing so many media properties dropping dead at a faster and faster clip—it’s even sadder to see that Portfolio was still hiring new employees and bringing them on board as recently as two weeks ago.

According to NPR’s Planet Money blog in a post titled “Guy Has Very Bad Luck,” new Portfolio blogger Ryan Avent is losing his position after just two weeks on the job. He had just joined the publication April 15, leaving a good job (presumably) as a blogger for The Economist’s Free Exchange to make the move to Portfolio.

What’s wrong with this picture? One Planet Money reader hit it squarely on the head: “[This] doesn’t sound like ‘bad luck’ so much as a corporation recruiting someone while not caring that they’re possibly going to damage his career. Conde Nast should have known better than to let Portfolio bring people on while they were working on shutting the magazine down.”

Amen to that, I say. As someone who toiled as an executive trying to keep things going while the company I was working for was slowly closing down, I know just how hard it is to keep up appearances that all is well with the organization even though you know that the day of reckoning is fast approaching. It’s a tough job, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the people at Conde Nast.

But I also know this: No one in their right mind continues to recruit and hire new staff and bring them on board into such an uncertain environment. I’m sure I’ll get a boatload of BS from some recruiting professionals who believe you need to continue the hiring process no matter what shape the company is in, but in my mind, doing that is just wrong, pure and simple.

In this situation, Conde Nast must clearly have known that time was running short for Portfolio. There were rumbles about the publication going under in the relative good times of last fall, when the magazine cut back to 10 issues a year and gutted its online staff. Anyone who follows media with half a brain knew that Portfolio’s financial situation was dire, so why was the company still hiring new editorial staffers and encouraging them to give up good jobs somewhere else to come on board the ship right before it went down?

In other words, why would you ever want to hire people away from a stable job situation into one as precarious as that at Portfolio? Some will argue that blogger Avent was a big boy who made his own decision and should have known better, but I don’t buy it.

Conde Nast is one of those companies that people in the magazine and journalism profession long to work for, and it is very possible that blogger Avent was blinded by Conde Nast’s past success and blue-chip persona.

In my book, departing managers don’t hire people when they know they’re leaving without clearly disclosing to the potential employee EXACTLY what the situation is, and companies that clearly have one foot in the grave don’t lure new employees away from good jobs to board the Titanic for a short, scenic cruise.

I’d love to hear what recruiters have to say about this, but I fear that I’ll get the predictable response—that you must keep recruiting and hiring until the day a company closes its doors, blah, blah, blah. Anybody who believes that may find they succeed at recruiting, but in my book, they ultimately fail in the larger, and much more important, game of life.

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