Stupid Recruiters - Episode 2
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I've been getting that for years. It seems like a around the early 2000s someone had the brilliant idea to set up some kind of boiler room/call centers where they use dumb software to comb internet job sites looking for resumes and plucking key words, which they then vaguely match to similarly obtained requirements postings. The people who run these probably pay nothing or close to it per hour or per call, but if they manage to contact someone and it results in a job, they get some huge bonus (perhaps a dollar or more?). And these telephone drones are desperate. ANY match between your resume and the job posting will get you a call, often dozens...even from the same "recruiting company". Mostly they barely speak English, they have no technical knowledge and they have never seen a globe or a US map. And the words from your resume that they think match may have nothing to do with the job. If you're a C++ developer but you live on Ruby Rd or Java Dr, guess what kind of jobs you're going to be offered the most? They're almost guaranteed not to have actually read your resume, so even if you put in something like HIGHLY EXPERIENCED VETERAN DEVELOPER LOOKING FOR PERMANENT OR 1-YEAR MINIMUM CONTRACT POSITIONS IN NEW ENGLAND OR NEW YORK, you'll get calls for entry-level 2-month projects in Oklahoma or Oregon. I let most calls I don't recognize on my cell phone go to voice mail, and 90% of the time it's an Indian "recruiter". I call them back in direct proportion to how much they sound like they understand English and know what they're talking about. So I only call back about 1 in 20. I have actually terminated phone calls because I simply couldn't understand the person or even the "supervisor" they got on the line. Worst thing: For some reason some of these "telerecruiters" think that if the more they call you, the better the chance you will call back. Several times I've received 20+ voice messages within 2 or 3 hours from the same recruiter if I didn't pick up or return their call! What could be ruder? When I started doing contract work, 99% of the time from the initial contact to the actual start of the job was handled by local, US-born Americans. Now it seems like 90% of the time the initial contact is made by someone foreign-sounding calling me. X|
LOL, 100% totally true. The problem today is that is seems like many companies are going through these recruiters, so often times when you see a job posting, you have no idea what company it's for until AFTER you speak to Pragrash, or Sundeep, or Prat, or whoever the F@%#&*@ is calling, and you sit through 20 minutes of "WTH did you just say?"
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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- Just got this email from someone unknown: Hi, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any rock star developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak - "Am I interested in chatting with you???" - "Rock Star"??
- Had a pre-interview screening with a "recruiter" last week. When I got on the phone with her She sounded about 12 and first said "Oh my God I'm so excited!!!" in a little girls voice. I thought "You're sooo exited???" - about WHAT? doing your job?? She then proceeds to question me about C# & SQL. The questions she asked were bizarre to say the least. I thought, I've never heard some of this before" so I asked her to send me the questions so I could research. She says, "Well I made up this list based on conversations I've had with developers" - I said "So you have no clue what your asking, and I could probably lose the chance at a job because YOU made up some questions?". She said "Well I think the questions are right" - I hung up. 3) Another little gem.... this woman recruiter puts this line in EVERY job posting: "You need some serious technical chops for this position" Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
This is why I dread making myself visible on any job search site. The massive number of phishing emails from basement dwellers looking for a referral check.
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- Just got this email from someone unknown: Hi, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any rock star developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak - "Am I interested in chatting with you???" - "Rock Star"??
- Had a pre-interview screening with a "recruiter" last week. When I got on the phone with her She sounded about 12 and first said "Oh my God I'm so excited!!!" in a little girls voice. I thought "You're sooo exited???" - about WHAT? doing your job?? She then proceeds to question me about C# & SQL. The questions she asked were bizarre to say the least. I thought, I've never heard some of this before" so I asked her to send me the questions so I could research. She says, "Well I made up this list based on conversations I've had with developers" - I said "So you have no clue what your asking, and I could probably lose the chance at a job because YOU made up some questions?". She said "Well I think the questions are right" - I hung up. 3) Another little gem.... this woman recruiter puts this line in EVERY job posting: "You need some serious technical chops for this position" Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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One "technical interviewer" asked me (in horribly broken English) several questions like, What is the maximum number of fields you can have in an MS Access table? I told him I had no idea, although I could look it up, but anyone who would purposely build a database table with even 50 to 100 fields would be unlikely to know what they're doing. Apparently you're only a truly skilled programmer if you have memorized all the technical specs for an application. And this turned out to be for a short-term on-site contract position at about $30 per hour for a client 10 states away. :rolleyes:
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- Just got this email from someone unknown: Hi, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any rock star developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak - "Am I interested in chatting with you???" - "Rock Star"??
- Had a pre-interview screening with a "recruiter" last week. When I got on the phone with her She sounded about 12 and first said "Oh my God I'm so excited!!!" in a little girls voice. I thought "You're sooo exited???" - about WHAT? doing your job?? She then proceeds to question me about C# & SQL. The questions she asked were bizarre to say the least. I thought, I've never heard some of this before" so I asked her to send me the questions so I could research. She says, "Well I made up this list based on conversations I've had with developers" - I said "So you have no clue what your asking, and I could probably lose the chance at a job because YOU made up some questions?". She said "Well I think the questions are right" - I hung up. 3) Another little gem.... this woman recruiter puts this line in EVERY job posting: "You need some serious technical chops for this position" Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
Speaking of recruiters: When it rains, it pours. (http://howardleeharkness.com/2013/05/when-it-rains-it-pours/) That's happened often enough, I've come to expect it. I recently landed a local contract, and now I'm getting 3-5 calls per day and about 10 emails, up from 3-5 calls and 10 emails per *week* before I landed the contract. This time around, however, I'm seeing ads for contracts that are at least borderline fraudulent. For example: http://howardleeharkness.com/2015/03/strange-contract-posting/ I saw lots of these "H1-b qualifiers" back in the 80's & 90's, after which the people responsible for them started getting a little better at disguising them. But this one is in-your-face obvious. Volt is now on my short list of contract agencies to ignore.
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- Just got this email from someone unknown: Hi, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any rock star developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak - "Am I interested in chatting with you???" - "Rock Star"??
- Had a pre-interview screening with a "recruiter" last week. When I got on the phone with her She sounded about 12 and first said "Oh my God I'm so excited!!!" in a little girls voice. I thought "You're sooo exited???" - about WHAT? doing your job?? She then proceeds to question me about C# & SQL. The questions she asked were bizarre to say the least. I thought, I've never heard some of this before" so I asked her to send me the questions so I could research. She says, "Well I made up this list based on conversations I've had with developers" - I said "So you have no clue what your asking, and I could probably lose the chance at a job because YOU made up some questions?". She said "Well I think the questions are right" - I hung up. 3) Another little gem.... this woman recruiter puts this line in EVERY job posting: "You need some serious technical chops for this position" Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
Is more common than people think. It's getting worse due to outsourcing and the increase of Non I.T. Project Managers, whom does not perform good interviews, or does not check headhunters. I'm a developer that consider to study either Psychology or Human Resources, (also Psychology related), and went for Computer Science. I still read about it, on my spare time. You may see Factories been audited, Software Been audit, Accouting been audited, but, not Human Resources. Human Resources people is still considered as the "nice ladies", or "nice dude" who interview people. TLDR; Human Resources is broken.
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- Just got this email from someone unknown: Hi, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any rock star developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak - "Am I interested in chatting with you???" - "Rock Star"??
- Had a pre-interview screening with a "recruiter" last week. When I got on the phone with her She sounded about 12 and first said "Oh my God I'm so excited!!!" in a little girls voice. I thought "You're sooo exited???" - about WHAT? doing your job?? She then proceeds to question me about C# & SQL. The questions she asked were bizarre to say the least. I thought, I've never heard some of this before" so I asked her to send me the questions so I could research. She says, "Well I made up this list based on conversations I've had with developers" - I said "So you have no clue what your asking, and I could probably lose the chance at a job because YOU made up some questions?". She said "Well I think the questions are right" - I hung up. 3) Another little gem.... this woman recruiter puts this line in EVERY job posting: "You need some serious technical chops for this position" Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
Don't even get me started on stupid recruiters. When recruiters call my phone or send me email, I always try to be polite, on the grounds that sometimes they are offering me a six-figure job. But they make it so hard. Like the ones who got ahold of my resume because I made the serious mistake of posting it on CareerBuilder for ONE DAY! I get recruiter spam every day now for jobs tangentally related to developers in every city in the united states. No, I don't want to be a tester in Boca Ratan or a systems administrator in Fargo. Sheesh. And of course the unsubscribe link is broken. Actually the CareerBuilder experience was even worse than that. I also got half-a-dozen emails from multi-level marketing types wanting me to sell insurance I think. And their attitude was all "Are you good enough to do this job?" And package forwarding scams. Sigh. At any rate, never post your resume on CareerBuilder. Or the recruiters who say, "I found your resume on the web, and you are a perfect candidate for this job..." when the job is clearly not suited to my experience which the recruiter would have known if they'd actually ever seen my resume. Honestly, why waste their time and mine. Or the recruiters who call me on voice lines so noisy, and with accents so thick and english so poor that communication is impossible. How is such a person going to sell me to an employer? Maybe this is like spam, where they only have to make one sale out of 10,000 attempts in order to eat for a year in whatever country they're calling from. They would certainly starve to death if they were U.S. based. In 35 years of dev experience, I have had one single recruiter who ever actually found me a decent job, and one other who found me some decent interviews. I keep their business cards in a vault in a secret location, so don't ask. They are too precious to waste.
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he just emailed me AGAIN! "Hi Kevin, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any anwesome developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak Senior Technical Recruiter"
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite Its rare lea ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no Its letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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if he kuld spel he myte do bedder
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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he just emailed me AGAIN! "Hi Kevin, Curious if your interested in chatting with me or if you know any anwesome developers who would be interested to learn more about a consulting role? Cheers! Kon Kruglyak Senior Technical Recruiter"
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
I always LOL at those job titles followed by some unforgivable writing errors... like "Senior technical recruiter" it's like she is saying: "I have recruited like 100 people for many job positions, and I think I know how to do it. If they rotate a lot, that's not my problem."
