We have always been at war with Erasure

[hirez]

[Poll #1789865]

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Two tales, but here: http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2566731.html

[bluekieran.livejournal.com]

I worked for one, briefly - it was my first job after dropping out of Uni. Bit of a shabby company, really, and I left with a total sales-career-score of -1: I accidentally sent a candidate's CV to his own company, and got him fired.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Good darts!

[steer.livejournal.com]

Outstanding work. What is the opposite of a head hunter?

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

That is a classic!

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

An ASS HUNTER. AWYEAH.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Well, sort of a series of tales.

For a while I had my resume on my personal web page, linked with the words "My Resume." At the top of it were, in giant type, the words "I AM NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB. DO NOT CONTACT ME IF YOU ARE A RECRUITER."

Inevitably, I received mail from VERY enthusiastic recruiters approximately every two weeks, wherein they told me how they KNOW I said not to contact me, but just maybe this job (pushing Windows at a giant corporation, night shifts running cables in a data center, the like) would be so much better than where I was working at the time (a job doing internal support and writing tools for an ISP founded by a friend of mine and mostly staffed by other friends, with a short commute, good benefits, and so on and so forth).

I eventually got tired of being polite and started telling them to learn to read. Being rude got boring quickly too, so after some VERY huffy recruiter spammer told me that he just was sent the list by an agency and hadn't seen my resume himself, and that the agency probably just did some kind of web-spidering to generate that list, I decided to get technical. I set up a random resume generator (http://www.gweep.net/~mute/resume.html), loaded it up with keywords that looked impressive at the time (if you didn't look too closely), and, whenever I got spammed by a recruiter with a form letter clearly generated by some kind of mail merge, I added the sender address to the list in the generator.

Oddly enough, hits to my resume dropped off fairly rapidly... I don't know if any resume spiders were fooled by my little script (which is clearly bogus if any human actually reads it), but I'd like to think a bunch of spammers spent a lot of time being confused about why they got mail from one another asking about their AIX and Windows 2000 expertise...

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

[beer]

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

I am a little puzzled as to why you posted your resume if you weren't looking for a job...

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

As reference? Because it had been up there since before I was looking for a job? It was linked from my personal web page and had a notice on the top saying that I wasn't looking for a job. It doesn't matter WHY I posted it-- it WASN'T because I wanted to be spammed by recruiters and explicitly said so.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Oh this is utter brilliance. I love the random resume generator.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

:D

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I got this:

Hardware Proficiencies
Amiga 1000
UNIX servers and workstations

Can't think who they meant...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Neddie Seagoon DJ, obviously...

[(Anonymous)]

I sent my CV to an agency called Syntax, back in 1999. (I think. Could have been earlier, but my brain has been addled by beer and python.) Was in a very unsatisfactory job which was almost certainly going to get worse.

Three days later, my manager came to see me, as he had been asked by said recruitment agency for a reference. It turns out that the monkey who had picked up my CV had worked out (clever monkey!) my manager's title from my job title, called the company, asked to speak to [job title], and then asked him to confirm that I was currently employed in the role that I claimed, and would he be prepared to give a verbal reference. Note that at this point, the agent had not actually started matching me with any of his vacancies - this was all preliminary. Fortunately, my manager was a contractor and very amused by the whole thing, and it went no further (actually I left the company two months after the incident, after a different agency had found me a job).

What I remember most clearly from the incident was how, when I phoned said agent and was Very Sarcastic at him, he simply could not comprehend why his action had been so foolish.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I spent my final year at my last place looking to get out of it.

The most promising job leads I had, for my rather esoteric skillset (Java development process re-engineering, rather than development itself) were two, from two different agencies.

Both for my job, to be my own replacement. One of them even got the town right, which is more than the other had.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Been there, done that (minus the random resume generator).

I used to get recruiters to read the first paragraph of my resume back to me (the bit saying "I am not looking for a job") and then asked if they understood it. Always pleasing to see how arsey they got, even more pleasing to cc them in on the mail to our mail admin wherein I asked them to be added to our blacklist on spamming grounds.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

I still get recruiters contacting me about SAP development jobs, because 11 years I briefly put the word SAP on my cv as in my first job I supported the consultants rolling out SAP across the blue chip company I was with and I was naive enough to think that looked like a professional thing to write on a cv after my first job.

That and ones with my current cv constantly bombarding me with first line support roles at about 1/3 of my current salary even though I know they have my current CV.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

What is it about IT recruiters? I've only ever had office-job recruiters ut me up for jobs I actually was interested in.

Of course, I've also never put my CV on the net in any way, but given that I don't want to go back to what I was doing but have no idea what I want to do, I'm thinking putting it out there and seeing what bites might be an idea.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

If nothing else, you'll get some good stories to tell when people pull out the idiot recruiter tales.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I think the thing with IT recruiters is that, often, they're not IT professionals and don't know much about what they're recruiting for. So you can put "Unix systems administration" on your resume and they see "Windows 2000 systems administration" on some job's requirements, and they say, hey, 2 words match, that must be the same thing, right? You get Unix vs. Windows less more skills that non-technical people would mistake for things that sound the same but are almost totally different, I'm sure.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. I would also suspect that since, as an industry, we're a bit poor at all that icky people business, bunging all the stuff you know on some paper and sending that off for someone else to worry about is easier that filling in some form that asks hard questions like 'Why do you want this job?' or 'What are your weaknesses?'

I dunno. "Make computers work more nice. Give plenty money. All happy."

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

What is it about IT recruiters?

IT is one of the few subject areas where the staff that they are recruiting will almost always earn more than the recruiters.

Ergo, if the recruiters actually knew anything about IT, they would be doing that, not being a recruiter.

[reddragdiva]

There's desperation in pimpland. I've been happily ensconced in the current salt mine for a couple of years now and I'm still getting calls. (They started when my Solaris experience hit five years, which appears to be a magic number.)

One thing I've noticed: a lot of the callers now, you can hear they're calling from a call centre.

[reddragdiva]

Oh, and the emails, I enjoy getting ones for 2/3 my present take-home. I always email back saying "In the circumstances, I would be most pleased to apply for this position at £TAKEHOME+10%. I'm sure with your expertise you can make that figure higher."