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Messing with recruiters

worth1000.com

30 pointsbearwithclaws20 comments

Never underestimate the stupidity of some recruitment companies.

Get a phone call one day, the usual "we have a great opportunity for you"....

Sounds great: it's in the same city I work already, same industry, same sort of work, same...... hang on a minute.

After stringing them along for a while, I finally ask them to compare my name, phone number and location to that of the person who submitted the job spec only an hour earlier.

I only wish I'd seen their face when they realised they were trying to offer me the job I had advertised with them. Especially considering they had grossly inflated the salary expectation.

I once responded to a tech recruiters question of if I was a JavaScript programmer with "so like, on a computer?". Conversation ended quickly.

I want to keep a list of recruiters who call me, then suggest each of them as possible hires

What, do recruiters just call you out of the blue like that in the US?

Happens in Australia quite a bit too. We use to get near daily calls at my last office from various recruiters asking to speak to anyone in technology pretending to be clients/partners then try to fish them for information on positions and people in the company who they would then follow up on directly.

It's fairly common in the UK - I get a few calls a month (largely because of big-ticket keywords on my CV that I've not got a huge amount of desire to work with again).

Sounds like that might run afoul of data protection acts. You should read up on your data protection laws and start quoting them to the recruiters who call, and possibly make complaints.

I used to get them at the office all the time; if my boss was in the room I would totally milk it. "No, I'm not available for work at the moment... Yes, it is a very rare skillset." Kept him on his toes!

Yes, this is quite common. For a while I was getting contacted almost exclusively through my Dice profile and even with a note that they should email me first, I'd still get called first extremely often.

Isn't it a good thing, though? 'Cause it means you are in demand.

Yes. They'll even cold-call you at the office.

Switzerland too, as soon as you open a Xing-account. I had to explicitly forbid recruiters calling me.

Crazy. In the EU there is law against cold calling for marketing purposes.

Yes

It's recruiters like this that remind me I'm fighting a losing battle.

Interestingly, I would be very surprised if 'Steve' and 'Tina' were in fact their real names. They obviously aren't native English speakers. Are recruiters that desperate in the US that they will go to the extent of adopting a more American sounding name simply to increase their chances of picking up business?

If these kinds of emails are the norm then it's no wonder the HN community despises our kind.

I've met exactly one recruiter out of literally hundreds that I've interacted with who was worth a crap. I looked him up and found out he had participated in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

The problem is that there is no barrier to entry to becoming a tech recruiter. Or maybe there is, but that barrier to entry is previously selling cell phones or something -- I'm not sure.

I don't talk to 3rd party recruiters basically ever anymore.

Briefly skimming your previous comments, it looks like you're a former developer and based in the UK, so those are things that I don't have a lot of experience with in recruiters.

The problem is that there is no barrier to entry to becoming a tech recruiter.

That's the issue, there is a barrier to entry but it's in the wrong place. The requirement is strong sales skills and a hunger to earn money. I've yet to come across an agency that hires people purely because they are former developers.

Unfortunately, unsolicited recruiters like this come in swarms. The worst one I've seen so far sent two separate emails and neglected to fill in the template fields in their form letter, e.g. "Hi $name, We have the perfect $desc candidate for you!".

I always wanted to add a section to the bottom of my CV titled "Technologies I know nothing about" listing everything I can think of, say .NET. Then wait for recruiters calling / e-mailing with messages like "I noticed you have experience working with .NET"...

You like being annoyed?

For similar reasons, I have removed all references to Sh*repoint from my CV.

I am very surprised that many of these recruiters can stay in business. Even if internal HR departments are lazy, how do they get candidates that actually pass interviews? Sometimes I wonder if it's a field with a low barrier to entry, that just weeds people out. It's relatively easy to be a stock broker, but hard to stay in it and make money. Similar with Real Estate.

The one caveat on this... Recruiters are also people working for a dollar. One day many of us will need them too. Burning bridges with anyone in the hiring process has limited upside, and potentially large downside. That said, if someone rejects both the polite "I'm not interested" and the less polite, "I mean I'm really really not interested" then it does become fair game.

In this case, it's hard to imagine they're much more than a quarter step up the food chain from the folks spamming me about viagra.

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