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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The only way to stop this madness is to go on strike against it, as you did.

I work very hard to never mention online that I've had anything to do with SharePoint or ColdFusion because it will bring recruiters with a job that will kill you.

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Dear %prospect_name%;

I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you.

Sincerely,

%recruiter_sig%

Dear %recruiter_sig%

Thank you for your interest. I am currently accepting ColdFusion contracts at a base rate of $385/hr.

Thanks, %prospect_name%

(That should cover my therapy bills.)

You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

I'm now contemplating some kind of Markov-chain CV/resume generator that uses feedback from recruiters to evolve new versions of its output....

This sounds like an interesting exercise. I'd love to see your results. Getting meaningful negative feedback from recruiters might be a neat trick.

And some HNers say that the right to be forgotten isn't justifiable.

I legally changed my name over a year ago, and I still get calls from recruiters once a week or so asking for my old name.

Why? Because they have an old copy of my resume from before my name change. This also leads to me explaining that I don't work at my previous employer anymore and that I've found a new job that I love. They just don't give a shit about having up-to-date records.

My entire name was changed: first, middle, and last, and my new name doesn't resemble my old one in the slightest. It's very awkward having to explain to them that the name they asked for isn't my legal name anymore (and I'm half-tempted to be glib and say "he's dead", but I won't because that could get me in big trouble if they believe it and it gets back to the authorities that I've been using my name change to fake my death).

It's especially awkward, because it forces me to out myself to them as transgender, since my old name was unmistakeably male, and my new name is unmistakeably female. Hell, I'm very much out and proud, but it's just plain awkward to have to tell a recruiter over the phone when they're not expecting it and when it's my very first communication with them.

Where is the national do-not-call list for clueless tech recruiters?

I maintain one at http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt

My resume has a "note to recruiters" attached. It is very clear if a recruiter has made any effort to read any of that. The clueless ones end up in the list above. http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html

Priceless. That ought to be a thing like the 'GPL' or other licenses, a 'license to contact'. Consider making it available under CC so others can use it too and maybe the cumulative effect would be enough to make some real changes.

I might add pierpoint.com to that list. A few hours ago, I got an email from them asking me if I was interested in a job with my immediate previous employer (which is kind of a mu question to ask, as I'm so interested in that idea that I've actually secured a start date there in less than 2 weeks--let's just say that I really liked it there and regret leaving).

If the guy there had done anything more than scrape LinkedIn for .NET stuff (which I can do and have done), he'd know that I would not need assistance in returning to $FORMER_EMPLOYER.

Oof, I recognize one of those, from an email today. I'd thought I was talking to an internal recruiter... Incidentally, you have some duplicates.

Sometimes they are so egregious I have to add them twice!

I'm guessing it occurred due to doing a batch update, and having multiple emails from the same spammer.

> Incidentally, you have some duplicates.

Nice catch. I guess that either he doesn't check for duplicates or he is doubly irritated by the duplicate ones :P

I don't know. And half of appear to be operating out of India anyway, judging by the noise in the background on the lines.

>You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

The first time I read that, I thought it said "emails like they were from a six-year-old". Which is probably also true.

The six-year-olds I know have a better grasp of grammar.

I still get occasional emails like this about a ten-year-old, straight EE version of my resume. Someone out there really wants to hire me as a facilities engineer. :P

People that want to avoid recruiters should just move to Brazil.

I am in Brazil, and I accept any tech job that people offer, even if someone offered me to work with MUMPS I would accept (it is better than going hungry at least...)

But I get one or two recruiter calls (as in, phone calls! not e-mail) per year, and usually it is useless (the last one they told me some bullshit about their process needing adjustment and that they would call me later and they never did... another one before that complained I was not experienced enough, but wanted something that is almost impossible to find anyway...)

OWH. OWH. OWH.

Since I'm anon, I'll say that I did a few ivy league SharePoint implementations. Thankfully, their IT/IS shops had to inherit the content and provisioning responsibilities.

Btw, anyone needing Exchange or similar implementations should use http://www.coyotecrk.com/. They did Cisco's and Stanford's implementations. They'll charge arms/legs, but they'll deliver something production supportable for real shops.

Man, you are not joking. I still get the occasional ping from someone looking for me to work on TIBCO. I did a tiny bit of work on that in ~2001. It was on my resume for about a year. I'm still getting pinged for it 13 years later.

Ironically (or perhaps predictably) I've avoided adding the same two technologies you mentioned to my own resume.

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list.

I never even actually worked with Crystal Reports. A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates. The Crystal Reports variant produced a deluge of the worst-sounding jobs touted by the most clueless recruiters. And that was back when I still put my phone number on my resume, so I imagine the unlucky guy in area code 773 that got my old number is still getting calls about it.

And that is why when I got a job with a company that actually used Crystal Reports, I was very careful to not work on those portions of the code, on the off chance that some recruiter would smell some whiff of it on me, chase me down, and sit on me until I coughed up a resume in Word format.

> A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates.

Holy crap. A/B testing résumés? :D

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list.

And RPG/400. I took two semesters of that in college, but (thankfully) never got roped into programming in it professionally. I'm honestly not sure you could pay me enough to write RPG code, even if you were Bill Gates. Just thinking about using SEU (Source Entry Utility, IIRC) to program in that column oriented nightmare gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Somebody should create a CV with years of experience in all the worst technologies and circulate it through all the worst recruiters and see what happens.

Aha, a CV honeypot! You could harvest the names of all the recruiters that take an interest, then publish a blacklist for legitimate job seekers so they would know who not to talk to. :)

It seems like everyone wants resumes in Word format. The one time I tried to send a PDF the recruiter nearly treated it like it was some unknown format and asked me to resend as Word.

Maybe it is just the recruiter. I saw a printed copy of my CV with their header on in one interview, so I assume they want to edit it to do that.

That's exactly why they want it as a Word document. That's what they use to produce their in-house resumes for distribution, and they don't want to waste ten seconds on opening an HTML or PDF resume in Word and selecting "Save As... Word document". They want to create their own resume, with your name on it, that is loosely based on your actual resume, so they can send it out to hiring managers.

It's very safe to say that if you don't know how to open and edit a PDF document, you have no business being a tech recruiter. Anyone foolish enough to be represented by such a person while looking for software jobs is going to have a bad time.

If you're seeing a demand for it in Word format, they're a recruiter and a lazy one at that.

Most in-house guys accept PDF. I explicitly tell recruiters that my resume is typset, so they have a choice: a PDF or a LaTeX file that nobody will ever make heads or tails out of. I do not even know if LaTeX has a .doc plugin.

If you're seeing a demand for it in Word format, they're a recruiter and a lazy one at that.

Most in-house guys accept PDF. I explicitly tell recruiters that my resume is typset, so they have a choice: a PDF or a LaTeX file that nobody will ever make heads or tails out of.

Don't do it! Shady recruiters ask this so they can edit your resume without telling you. Only send PDFs to recruiters, the shady ones won't bother with those.

If what I have heard is correct, it is because some resumes scanning softwares have trouble with PDFs. They often default to asking for Word because they know it works.

I assume it's so they can modify it and re-send it out to other companies.

The same with Clearcase for me

Having it in the job description is bad, having it in the actual job is a complete no-no for me

Or any other IBM software: DOORS, Jazz...

Heh, such... memories from my CQ/CC days. So lucrative, though.

I know the feeling... I mentioned that i had built NodeJS and Perl integrations between Sharepoint, our monitoring platforms, Graphite and our ticketing system on LinkedIn and had 3 or 4 new recruiters in a month talking about Sharepoint consultancies.

You get this with Autonomy/Interwoven/HP Teamsite experience too. I just want to write back, "IT WAS MY FIRST JOB NO NO NO 1000x NO"

Not hard enough, apparently.

Outsource!?

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